Early next year, Cornerhouse relocates and is
reborn as HOME on First Street. As I sat down to continue my research for Humberto Velez’s project ‘The Storming’ – the immersive large-scale installation that
will be the final staged event at Cornerhouse in April – I saw a story tweeted
from the Manchester Evening News revealing that the two Cornerhouse buildings (the
main building and Screen 1 over the road) are likely to be torn down by the
Council at some point in the future when the site is ‘redeveloped’. I’d already
heard a rumour two years ago that Oxford Road station would one day be expanded
to encompass this entire site, but my hopes of a reprieve had been quietly
raised by the lovely Scandinavian-style bike park that’s since been erected outside
Java coffee shop. I don’t want to lose that lovely bike park. I don’t want to
lose Java either, or the magnificently squalid ‘Exorcist’ steps that barrel
down towards Caley Street. And while it would be impossible to justify the existence
of a stand-alone cinema screen with no managing body, it will be sad to see
Screen 1 vanish too (there’s been a cinema there in one form or another for 103 years), but why the ‘corner house’ building itself, the old
Shaw’s furniture store which has become so iconic?
From my frustrated doldrums I tweeted this:
Gutted. 'Cornerhouse set for
redevelopment as flats, offices, shops, leisure and a hotel.' YEAH MORE
HOTELS PLEASE. http://t.co/0iZf8IrCuJ
—
Greg Thorpe (@TheGregling) August
7, 2014
…and this:
I'm in a lot pain this morning so I am
very opinionated and I love Manchester and I hate seeing it carved into ugly
money-shaped pieces.
— Greg Thorpe (@TheGregling) August
7, 2014
The ‘pain’ in question actually referred to my clavicle surgery, but fellow tweeters seemed to sense something like the pain of alienation, and a hearty discussion ensued. Investigations
were made into the mysteriously disappeared Grade II listed status of the two Cornerhouse
buildings (I know I didn’t dream it, they were
listed) and passionate back-and-forths were had about
City Council building projects and neglected bits of Manchester architecture. A
few hours later one of the tweeters started a petition which at the time of
writing has 700 signatures.
Reading back over the original Evening News story it was the word ‘hotel’ that was my main trigger. It’s safe to say that
word is my red rag. I lived on Whitworth Street for six years and every day I
would pass the abandoned development at the corner of Whitworth and Princess Streets
with its contrived yuppie imagery and condescending tone of entitlement and its
empty useless scar across the only gay neighbourhood in the city. The hotel and
apartments intended to go there have never materialised. Why not build something
on it? Legends, the place I partied endlessly in my Whitworth Street years, was
bulldozed with meagre resistance in order to build a hotel that has yet to
appear (as if its presence could salve the wound anyway). Clubbing in the city
hasn’t recovered. London Road Fire
Station continues to frustrate and upset anyone who passes by and gives a
damn about architecture. Why not do something with that? The old BBC site is a
permanent open car park and an uglier space than even the reviled Piccadilly Gardens. Why not build your office/h*t*l complex there?
Let’s be clear. This is not about nostalgia for
times past; it’s about demanding an interesting and beautiful future without the
need for a scorched earth policy. Nostalgia is a pejorative if it consists only
of the endless romanticisation of a thing. When Legends was set for demolition I published a zine named after
my clubnight ‘Drunk At Vogue’, featuring articles
and artwork protesting the closure. I took a classic Mancunian Situationist
approach and wrote, somewhat hysterically:
‘LEGENDS is the
mental labyrinth of your DESIRE….!
LEGENDS is one of the
ONLY gay/queer spaces that survives outside the GATED COMMUNITY OF GAY PRIDE….!
Mainstream media
vouch for the Twisted Wheel as A HISTORICAL MONUMENT and we DOFF OUR CAPS to
the dance floor pioneers and the faithful who still believe… But what about ME
AND YOU…!
WE ARE NOT ARCHIVES…!
WE ARE NOT HISTORY…! WE ARE NOT CRUMBS…!
Every inch of queer
Mancunian dance floor is a monument to NOW…!
WE WANT OUR HERITAGE
TODAY…!
NOSTALGIA DID NOT
SAVE THE HACIENDA…!
HOMOELECTRIC, NOT
HOTELS…!
SAVE LEGENDS….!
This is what ‘nostalgia’ ought to be; a kind of anger,
and an insistence in a future worth living in. Be ‘nostalgic’ for what you did yesterday,
last week, this morning, so that you can keep on living and improving.
You may have heard about ‘The Storming’ already,
again in the Manchester Evening News, where it was loosely conceived of as a ‘rave’ style event. This is
only one part of the final picture. As we piece together the myriad components
of ‘The Storming’, we actively draw on Manchester’s numerous identities, the
complexity and diversity of its cultural past and present – clubs and music
venues included – in order to celebrate, pay homage and energise the
future; and yes, to party hard like Mancunians. As Sarah Perks from Cornerhouse
says in the Evening News article:
‘Of course we all feel nostalgic about Cornerhouse
closing its doors, but nostalgia only deals with the past and never with the
future.’
‘The Storming’ will do things
differently. The inspiration point for Humberto’s piece is ‘The Storming Of The Winter Palace’, a
choreographed mass action that was staged in Petrograd in 1920 as a piece of ritual
theatre which re-played the 1917 revolution in order to sanctify
and celebrate its achievements. It wasn’t nostalgia, but a celebratory
re-enactment of the recent victorious past that would invigorate a brilliant future
for Russia; and the Council didn’t bulldoze the Winter Palace afterwards.
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