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Environmentally-themed walking tours of Manchester | A material and elemental focus: earth, air, fire | think beyond the human
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22/08/2024

Collyhurst quarry gave Manchester much of its red sandstone for buildings like the Castlefield's Roman fort and the 18th century St Ann's Church. It is also exposed & visible in its natural form next to the Grocer's Warehouse in Castlefield.

It is a beautiful material, but it does not withstand city life very well! Erosion from weathering and pollution soon eats away at this soft stone. This is why Manchester has turned to other materials & the old quarry is now the aptly named Sandhills Park.

21/08/2024

Interested in learning more about the material environment? A reading in material culture:

Concrete and Culture: A Material History by Adrian Forty (2012)

With delightful chapter titles such as “Mud & Modernity” and “Memory or Oblivion,” Forty explores the history of “the most widely used material on earth apart from water”: concrete.

Forty spends some time talking about the engineering of concrete and how the substance is used in certain types of construction. But, for the most part, he talks about the meaning that concrete holds in different parts of the world and at different times in the 19th and 20th centuries. In other words, concrete’s culture.

One of the most interesting aspects of this cultural exploration is how many contradictions concrete can hold. Some people see it as an international substance ,while others look at national or local traditions. Architects often talk about concrete as an ultra-modern building substance, and yet it requires hands on, craft labor to be poured and erected. It is a human-made substance but can also occur through natural processes.

Forty dives into all these contradictions with detailed narratives and lots of black and white photography of concrete structures from around the world.

20/08/2024

Britain has a long-standing love affair with ruins. In the 18th and 19th centuries wealthy landowners even went so far to erect NEW RUINS on their property. These structures are also known as follies and are equal parts madness and delight. Wimpole’s Folly in Cambridgeshire (pictured here) was constructed in 1769, even though it is supposed to look like the ruins of a medieval Gothic castle.

Photo: Cmglee via Wikipedia

19/08/2024

Brutalist architecture was most popular between the 1950s and 70s. Its buildings celebrate 'raw concrete' as a prized material--that's where the architectural style got its name: from béton brut. Between their relative youth & their concrete few Brutalist buildings have Grade II listed status.

Why is this? As author Cyrille Simonnet speculates, “Concrete presents an unexpected difficulty with regard to our traditional aesthetic categories: it does not go to ruin.”

Perception is important for preservation. An old stone building is 'romantic.' An old concrete building is usually called decrepit or unsafe.

18/08/2024

The Renold Building is an example of Brutalist—or raw concrete—architecture that was popular during the mid-20th century (the term comes from the French “béton brut” and not the English “brutal”). When this building was completed in 1962, it was considered to be both modern and innovative, particularly because of its iconic zig-zag curtain wall. However, in 2008 it lost its bid to be awarded listed status (which would have ensured its preservation for decades to come). Now, The Guardian has named the Renold Building as one of Britain’s Brutalist building most at risk of demolition.

16/08/2024

Even though concrete is typically considered to be a “modern” building material—in comparison to wood or brick—it resists the standardization of the modern factory. Concrete has to be mixed at the construction site and requires hands-on, craft labour.

As French engineer François Hennebique said, “Reinforced concrete is the art of doing large things with small means.”

15/08/2024

Love it or hate it, Piccadilly Plaza dominates Manchester’s city centre. Its proximity to the railway station means it’s one of the first sights to greet visitors of the city. Built in the 1960s, it’s a classic example of Brutalist architecture. This style, popular in the mid-20th century, gets its name from its primary building material: béton brut or raw concrete.

Photo by design education via Flickr

14/08/2024

From where does Manchester get its water?

Between 1838 and 1913 Manchester expanded to 5x its original size. The local rivers and wells could not keep up with demand, so in the 1880s construction began on the Thirlmere reservoir. By the time the initial scheme was completed in 1894, a 96-mile aqueduct brought water from the Lake District into Manchester’s Cottonopolis.

Opponents of the reservoir and dam claimed that the rising waters obscured Thirlmere’s picturesque landscape and destroyed the wild beauty of this Cumbrian lake. What do you think? The first painting is from 1867—before the reservoir—and the second photo was taken in 2011.

Painting courtesy of the V&A
Photograph courtesy of Lake Guides

13/08/2024

How did Claude Monet achieve this dream-like haze in his painting of London? Recent research by climate scientists suggest that Monet’s paintings capture the air pollution blanketing London at the turn of the 20th century. Impressionist painters, like Monet, are interested in capturing the effects of light with paint. It makes sense then that his work would illustrate the way coal smoke and other industrial pollution changed the quality of sunlight.

Anna Lea Albright, one of the scientists in the study, said that over time, “the contours of [Monet’s] paintings became hazier, the palette appeared whiter and the style changed from more figurative to more impressionistic: Those changes accord with physical expectations of how air pollution influences light.”

Image 1: Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight Effect by Claude Monet (1903)
Image 2: Charing Cross Bridge, London by Claude Monet (1901)
Both images on display at the Art Institute of Chicago

12/08/2024

The 3rd Duke of Bridgewater underwrote construction of the Bridgewater Canal—opening in 1761, it was Britain’s first “true” canal (don’t listen to those Sankey Brook Navigation fans). The 8 km canal ran narrowboats from the duke’s coal mines at Worsley to Manchester and significantly reduced the price of coal in the city, all the while lining Bridgewater’s pockets. In the language of the day, canals were “improved” rivers, meaning they were relatively straight, had clearly defined banks, little to no current, and followed the rise and fall of the landscape with controlled locks rather than dangerous rapids and cataracts. These features meant canals were an economical choice for long-distance haulage. In actuality, “improvement” meant “something that turns a profit.”

In this drawing Bridgewater is pointing to the Barton Aqueduct, a masonry structure that allowed the canal boats to cross above the River Irwell and into Manchester. It was the first navigable aqueduct built in Britain and many an 18th century writer gushed over this technological marvel.

Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery (NPG D1100). Creative Commons license.

11/08/2024

The Mark Addy pub on the banks of the River Irwell is now permanently shuttered. As you can see from the photo, the banks of the Irwell are built up with stone; they are hard and essentially impermeable. This means that when heavy rains hit Manchester in 2015 and again in 2021, the water could not seep into the soil at a gradual rate, but quickly grew into torrents that flooded the Mark Addy.

The pub's storied history begins in the 1780s, when this prime bit of riverside real estate was the quay for the New Bailey Prison. When the prison closed in 1868, the pub-to-be continued to serve as a quay for the busy warehouses and manufactories that lined Manchester’s waterways well into the 20th century. Entrepreneur Jim Ramsbottom bought the property in 1981 and turned it into The Mark Addy pub, a trendy spot for burgers and brews that, surprisingly, only occasionally smelled like damp. In 2009, chef Robert Owen Brown bought the property and introduced his “tail-to-nose” menu of low-waste cuisine, but the upkeep on the property was too much and the Mark Addy closed in 2014, one year before the first of the catastrophic floods. There are currently no plans to reopen a venue quite so close to the River Irwell.

10/08/2024

Cities are full of 'ordinary' objects that contain decades of history. This is one of Portland, Oregon's 52 four bowled Benson Bubblers. These iconic bronze fountains are named after businessman and philanthropist Simon Benson who donated them to the city to keep the workforce out of the saloons at lunchtime! (an alternative account says he saw a little girl crying because she couldn’t get a drink at an Independence Day parade and felt compelled to help). All 52 were in place by 1917.

They are still in use today and Portland Water Bureau has introduced water saving measures. These include narrowing the feed lines to the Bubblers in 1995, cutting their water use in half, installing timers in 2000 to shut them off at low use times, and in 2005 installing flow restricting devices. The Bubblers now use less than 1/10th of 1% of Portland’s daily water usage, but still provide clean and fresh drinking water to everyone in the city.

09/08/2024

Looking at the world in new ways and on new scales is part of material environmental history. Stones, generically speaking, are used as building materials around the world. But when we take a closer look at an individual stone this common material has uncommon features.

Take this boundary wall in Silver Falls State Park. The stone hosts a biofilm—lichens and moss—that will eventually break down this particular stone in a unique way as water and roots move through the basalt over many decades.

08/08/2024

Lock 88 on the Rochdale Canal in Manchester (1795-1799). Locks are a bit like a watery elevator. They work in pairs to take in or drain out water so that the boat inside the lock can either raise or sink to the level of the next section of the canal. Miter locks like this one prompt us to question the supposed divide between nature and technology because its operation relies on the material properties of water to function.

Water weighs one ton per cubic meter. When it presses on one side of the angled gates of the miter lock, the weight of the water keeps them closed. It is only when the water level is even on either side of the lock that a human boat lock operator can push on the lever (painted white in the photo) and open the lock, thus allowing the boat to float through.

Miter locks like this one were invented in 1497 by none other than Leonardo da Vinci.

07/08/2024

What makes a river a river? The River Tib, shown here on William Green’s 1794 map of Manchester and Salford, is one of Manchester’s “lost rivers.” It likely provided drinking water to the Roman settlement of Mancunium. In the late eighteenth century, it was one of several sources that powered the water wheel at Arkwright’s cotton mill. However, by the nineteenth century all of the River Tib had been culverted and covered—essentially moving it underground like sewer tunnel.

So is the Tib is a sewer or a river? Today, one of the few visible remnants of the River Tib is this arrow carved into the coping stone at the edge of the Rochdale Canal. It points to a 1’ x 1’ wooden plug at the bottom of the canal. Pull it up and the canal water will drain down into the culverted River Tib. The last time the Canal & River Trust drained the Rochdale was in 2019.

06/08/2024

“The more devices we invent for dominating nature, the more we must serve them if we are to survive.”

Eclipse of Reason by Max Horkheimer (1947)

05/08/2024

Weeds are just plants humans have decided are growing in the wrong place.

In the 19th century, one person's weeds could be another's business opportunity. There was money to be made in urban areas collecting groundsel (pictured) from the gardens of the wealthy, bundling it up, and selling it back to those same wealthy folks as food for their pet songbirds.

Image courtesy of Carol Spears

04/08/2024

There are populations mosquitoes that spend their whole lives in the London Underground (or other underground habitats around the globe). They are genetically distinct enough to warrant their own species: Culex molestus.

Furthermore, within the London Underground, the populations don't mix. That means scientists can differentiate between a Central Line mosquito and a Bakerloo Line one.

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