Hulme: A Changing Cityscape 1990-2015

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• published: 30 Oct 2015
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A 4 min lo-fi film showing the changing buildings and skylines of Hulme over 25 years using new and old snaps of mine... Here's my spiel: 'Everything is in motion all the time. We adjust to new landscapes and the environment we live in as well as help shape it. Sometimes it's nice to see what things were like. - it is so easy to forget - and it makes our appreciation of now all the better. I've always had an affinity with Hulme, once my home for 7 years and once home to my grandparents and great grandparents. It is a place that has undergone so many changes from being a Victorian back-to-back, red brick terrace, working class suburb of Manchester - the world's first industrial city. There were once 800 pubs in that Hulme, very built up claustrophobic and polluted that it was. Hulme's first regeneration saw all those terraces being demolished giving way to perhaps the worst examples of brutalist concrete buildings built with the best of intentions to house the post war generation in a brighter, optimistic, more hopeful world. That didn't happen. Second generation Hulme became as bad if not worse than the last days of the first (although, with some obvious exceptions, the housing was a considerable improvement). Then came the second regeneration from the early 1990s which is still being completed today and has seen a major new campus for Manchester Metropolitan University being built near it's heart along Bonsall Street. I lived in one of the notorious deck-access concrete crescents ironically named after famous architects. Ours was Charles Barry Crescent (one of the aforementioned ‘obvious exceptions’). Then I moved to the Hulme end of Bonsall Street where there now stands one of many buildings that comprise the on-campus student accommodation. They were happy days on the whole. I started taking snaps of the surroundings just so I can remember how things looked at a certain moment in time. This film has many of those shots – many taken from of similar places with similar angles. I thought it would be good to eventually share this collection with others so I have superimposed a lot of them in a series of 'wipes'. So, twenty-odd years on here it is. I have edited it to fit in with sections of the music I have written which is called ‘Spag Junk’ (the name of my old band’s tangled-up leads case). The first sections are in taken from Hornchurch Court in ‘Hulme 3’ (east Hulme) looking west over Princess Road to ‘Hulme 4’ which is now dominated by the Manchester Metropolitan University new campus building. There is a section along Bonsall Street within Hulme 4 and our old flat at the end of Bonsall Street in the final section. During the middle section of the song the pictures concentrate on ‘Hulme 5’ where the Crescents were located which is the centre of Hulme. The grey early ‘70s built library (I’m guessing here) with it’s impressive mural of Hulme’s history (end section included near the end of the film) and the red brick Zion building are one of just a few buildings that remain. Stretford Road – a very busy street and once a favourite for shopping in the 1950s which was blocked off for the 30 years to make way for 60’s Hulme (and pedestrianised to become Hulme Walk) has now been reintroduced and with it a lot of the life and vibrancy of Hulme has returned. (You could draw a parallel with the effect the Berlin Wall had on Berlin.) Where I lived on Charles Barry Crescent is now Hulme Park. It was once the site of the first Rolls Royce factory.' Boz/Bert Weill Productions x (The musicians on the bozchestra track are: Rick Burrows on trumpet, Phil Robinson on guitarron bass, Rob Haynes on drums, Dan Bridgwood-Hill (dbh) on violin and and myself on guitar.)