Pedestrian In A Car Park Again

Posted on by modernmoocher

Having visited Heaton Lane yesterday, today I set my sights high above Primark on Merseyway.

I have been here before, primarily to record Alan Boyson’s screen wall.

Walking the stairwells, ramps and interlocking tiers, the curious pedestrian becomes aware of the ambition and complexity of the scheme. Often identified on local social media groups as an anachronistic eyesore, I feel that it is a thing of rare and precious beauty.

Knock most of the precinct down, free the river, but keep this wall and what is within.

Anon

Some are slaughtering imaginary white elephants, whilst others are riding white swans.

Currently under the ownership of Stockport Borough Council, changes are afoot.

Work to redevelop Adlington Walk in Stockport starts this week, as the first stage in the regeneration of the 55-year-old Merseyway shopping centre.

Place North West

As of today work is still in Covid induced abeyance, it is still possible to walk the old revamped Adlington Walk. The future of retail in particular and town centres in general is in the balance, the best of the past and the finest of the new should be the watchword.

The scheme and car park redevelopment, is managed by CBRE of Manchester.

The future shopper is looking for more than just a simple buying transaction, they want an experience, entertainment and excitement.

This is where Merseyway Shopping Centre’s future lies.

CBRE Group Inc. is an American commercial real estate services and investment firm. The abbreviation CBRE stands for Coldwell Banker Richard Ellis. It is the largest commercial real estate services company in the world.

Their net worth as of January 28th 2021 is $21.18 Billion.

It is to be hoped that these dreams of entertainment and excitement, may be realised in the not too distant future.

In the meanest of mean times, in the mean time let’s have a look around.

The future moocher is looking for more than just a simple buying transaction, they want an experience, entertainment and excitement.

Pedestrian In A Car Park

Posted on by modernmoocher

One of the great glories of cinema is that it has the power to take the mundane and make it magical. To most of us, car parks signify a world of pain, where fearsome red-and-white crash barriers dictate our fate and where finding a space is often like finding meaning in the collective works of Martin Lawrence. To others, they meant lost Saturday afternoons spent waiting for your mum to finally come out of Woolworths so you could rush home to catch Terrahawks.

Either way, car parks are grey and dull. In the movies, however, they are fantastic places, filled with high-level espionage, and high-octane chases. 

According to The Guardian

I beg to differ, the cinema and TV has helped to define our perception and misconception of the car park.

The modern day pedestrian may reclaim, redefine and realise, that far from mundane each actual exemplar is different, in so many ways. The time of day, weather, light, usage, abusage, condition, personal demeanour and mood all shape our experience of this particular, modern urban space.

To walk the wide open spaces of the upper tier, almost touching the sky.

Is a far cry from the constrained space of the lower levels.

To walk the ramps with a degree of trepidation, visceral and fun.

This is an inversion of the car-centric culture, walking the concrete kingdom with a carbon-free footprint.

I was inspired by a recent viewing of All The Presidents Men to revisit my local multi-storey on Heaton Lane Stockport.

Cinematographer Gordon Hugh Willis Jr constructs a shadow world where informer and informed meet to exchange deep secrets, ever watchful, moving in and out of artificial light, tense and alert.

Look over your shoulder- there’s nobody there, and they’re watching you.

But they have been here.

To party.

To tag.

To live.

Pay here, your time is time limited, your presence measured.

Let’s explore this demimonde together, wet underfoot, lit laterally by limited daylight, walking through the interspersed pools of glacial artificial glow.

Time’s up, check out and move on – tomorrow is another day, another car park; in a different town.

Cinema and car parks wedded forever in the collective popular cultural unconscious.

Derby Day 2013 – Etihad Stadium

Posted on by modernmoocher

This is my first visit to a match day at the Etihad – having last watched City at Maine Road, from that uncovered corner enclave, the Kippax Paddock – the so called Gene Kelly Stand

Singing in the Rain

It all ended in ruins.

Demolished, the last ball kicked in anger Sunday 11th May 2003.

To the other side of the city and rebranded Eastlands, occupying the former Commonwealth Games Stadium.

Owners John Wardle and Thaksin Shinawatra came and went.

Since 4 August 2008, the club has been owned by Sheikh Mansour, one of football’s wealthiest owners, with an estimated individual net worth of at least £17 billion and a family fortune of at least $1 trillion.

A far cry from Peter Swales and his TV Repair shop on Washway Road.

The game has changed, money is in motion, fans travel from every corner of the globe, fuelled by the Murdoch Dollar and the insatiable thirst for televised football.

So it’s the 22nd September 2013 – I though I’d take a look around town first.

Kits and colours in abundance – though some of these colours can and will run.

Off then to the Etihad and its the Pellegrini squad versus Moyes’ boys.

This is a world within a world as the Middle East seeks to lighten its carbon footprint, and put its size nines all over east Manchester.

Corporate greeting on Joe Mercer Way, executive sweeteners, in the form of earthbound airline hostesses.

Groups from the Antipodes happy to embrace the jumbo blue letters – no boots, no hustling, no barging through swelling crowds, no menacing looks from beneath feather cut fringes.

No none of that any more.

I made my excuses and left.

Manchester City ensured David Moyes’ first derby as Manchester United manager ended in abject humiliation with a crushing victory at the Etihad Stadium.

In contrast to the despair of his opposite number, it was a day of delight for new City boss Manuel Pellegrini as he watched the rampant Blues make a powerful statement about their Premier League ambitions.

Sergio Aguero and Yaya Toure gave City a commanding half-time lead and any slim hopes of a United recovery were snuffed out by further goals from Aguero and Samir Nasri within five minutes of the restart.

BBC

Telephone Exchange – Stockport

Posted on by modernmoocher

Typically, as with timid police officers, telephone exchanges seem to travel in pairs.

An inter-war brick building, of a utilitarian brick Classicism, restrained in nature, along with a post-war concrete construction.

These are pragmatic architectural forms, constrained within a typology, and responding to the nature of the technology contained within.

Here is the building of 1934 – BT Archives

In 1961 – when Exchange Street was but a rough track, the area was also known as Blueshop Yard.

Stockport Image Archive

The concrete cousin constructed in 1971.

So here we are in 2021 taking a close look at these BT beauties, without further ado.

Tony’s Barbers – Manchester

Posted on by modernmoocher

913 Stockport Rd Levenshulme Manchester M19 3PG 

I passed by almost every day, cycling back and to, to work.

One day I stopped, popped in, asked to chat and snap – Tony obliged.

Cypriot George in the city centre had already give me salon time.

These photographs were taken in March 2104 – Tony’s still there, cutting hair.

Since 1971, presiding over his empire of mainly masculine ephemera, rival football clubs fight it out for space on the crowded walls. Motorcycles race around the dado rail, stood stock still, gathering another dusting of dust. A slow accretion of memories and memorabilia, tracing a lengthy short back and sides life, of short back and sides, as stylists’ style snaps come in and out of style and back again.

Let’s take a look.

Thanks again Tony a privilege to spend some time in your world.

George’s Barbers – Manchester

Posted on by modernmoocher

7 Paton Street M1 2BA

I came here on February 25th 2014, arrived early the shop was still closed, I’ll pop back.

Walked around the block and found that true to his word, he had re-opened.

I explained my intentions, asking to spend some time in the salon, chat and take some snaps as he worked away.

He was more than happy to accommodate my needs, he worked, we chatted, I snapped. This was some seven years ago now, typically, I forgot to make any written notes. Suffice to say he had been there some 48 years finally retiring on Christmas Eve 2014.

As city centre Manchester changes for good or for bad, the likelihood of a neighbourhood barber appearing is negligible. It was a privilege to spend some time with George, one of many Cypriot immigrants who found work here between and after the wars, we were more than happy to welcome him here.

Let’s take a look around.

A companion to Marilyn and Sheila.

Abbey Hey FC – Manchester

Posted on by modernmoocher

Abbey Stadium Goredale Avenue Gorton Manchester M18 7HD.

Abbey Hey FC was formed in 1902 in the Abbey Hey district of Gorton, some three miles away from the centre of Manchester. During their formative years and through the two World Wars, the club was disbanded and reformed on a number of occasions. Starting in the Church Sunday Leagues, they progressed through the Manchester Amateur Leagues during the intervening years but the club really came into it’s own in the 1960s after it took in the players of the Admiralty Gunning Engineering Department following it’s closure.

In 1978 with the club decided to apply for a position in the Manchester League, this meant that the club had to find an enclosed ground suitable for playing their home games. The nearest ground available at the time was in Chorlton at Werburghs Road.

In 1984 the club at last had their own home, improvements to the ground could only have been achieved by the hard work and dedication of the committee, who not only raised the money to carry out the improvements but also carried out 90% of the work themselves.

Promotion to the 1st Division meant that the club had to install floodlights. True to form, they designed, ordered, erected and wired them within a couple of months. The biggest job during the ground improvements was the building of the new clubhouse and dressing rooms. Planning permission was given with the majority of work once again being carried out by the club’s own members.

Abbey Hey FC History

This is a story of persistence and commitment from members, managers and players – keeping a viable non-league football team alive at the centre of a Community.

I have cycled by here for years, along the Fallowfield Loop – and worked down here in the Seventies when the rail link was still extant.

Photo – Neil Ferguson-Lee via Robert Todd and Levy Boy.

So today seeing the gates open, I decided to take a look around the ground – many thanks to groundsman Simon for taking the time to stop and chat.

Everything is spick and span, the playing surface in excellent nick, and all the stands seat and fences standing smartly to attention, having had a fresh coat of paint.

So let’s take a look around:

I’ll be back to watch a match, just as soon as the rules and regulations allow!

Torn Poster – Georges Road Stockport

Posted on by modernmoocher

Mimmo Rotella Best known for his works of décollage and psychogeographics, made from torn advertising posters. He was associated to the Ultra-Lettrists an offshoot of Lettrism and later was a member of the Nouveau Réalisme, founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany.

Inspiration to all lovers of the torn poster, The Society of the Spectacle reduced to the exasperating Esperanto of the inexplicable.

Working towards the demise of the – autocratic reign of the market economy.

Hannah Höch 

I wish to blur the firm boundaries which we self-certain people tend to delineate around all we can achieve.

My name is Kurt Schwitters – I am an artist and I nail my pictures together.

New things had to be made out of fragments.

Together they begin to define the realm of cut and paste collage technology, the chance encounter, the hastily arranged marriage and the jarring clash of culture and counter-culture.

They are my guiding lights – by which to live, look and learn, to loop the Möbius loop into an expanding geometry of new meanings.

The lines curve toward each other and intersect.

JCDecaux was founded in 1964 in Lyonby Jean-Claude Decaux. Over the years it has expanded aggressively, partly through acquisitions of smaller advertising companies in several countries. They currently employ more than 13,030 people worldwide and maintain a presence in over 75 countries.

Outdoor advertising, reaches more than 410 million people on the planet every day.

Some days everything falls apart.