"The more you read this site, the more you remember places."
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Memory is inscribed within a built environment. Throughout the urban renewal programs and failed housing projects of the 1970s and 1980s, the physical spaces of entire neighborhoods were razed. the loss that these communities endured was difficult to articulate under the discourses of urban expansion and rational modernist planning, discourses that treat place as a variable of the here-and-now rather than an enduring, deeply specific site of identification. With the destruction of the neighborhood that grandparents came to as soon as they got off the train, or the public housing high-rise that was the setting for an entire childhood, the roots that ground these identities are also destroyed. We use spaces as annexes of our social histories, archives of our biographies of self. When spaces disappear, the contents of the archive can disappear as well.
HULME CRESCENTS, MANCHESTER
The Hulme Crescents housing project was built in 1972, four curved buildings sandwiched between Royce Road and Rolls Way in a working-class neighborhood of Manchester. This miniature city could house up to 13,000 people. Although the designs for the project initially recieved architecture awards, soon after its occupation, it was declared a failure and unfit for families. The low balconies were a hazard to children who might climb on them, and the modernist "streets in the sky" plan -- linking together the buildings through long outdoor walkways and elevated bridges -- made residents vulnerable to violence and muggings. The cutting-edge underfloor heating system proved impossibly expensive to use with the oil crises of the 1970s, and bad construction and maintenance left the buildings infested with insects and pests.
Hulme Crescents were tacitly given over to a community of rowdy young students, artists, and musicians who squatted there and created a thriving punk and rave scene, nicknamed "Madchester" by its members. Within the Crescents was a legendary all-night club called The Kitchen. The club was three stories tall, the result of squatters with sledgehammers breaking down the walls and ceilings between adjacent, abandoned flats to construct (or deconstruct) one mega-flat. The Crescents were the central place for this subculture until the buildings were demolished in 1994 due to their clear failure to provide stable and safe housing for the people of Manchester. The area where they once stood was redeveloped into a commercial street, and the largest bridge built as part of the "streets in the sky" plan was redesigned and named the Hulme Arch Bridge, giving Manchester a contemporary landmark that was more in keeping with its project of rebranding as a second-tier global city. The "Madchester" punks were all evicted or moved away.
Hulme Crescents were tacitly given over to a community of rowdy young students, artists, and musicians who squatted there and created a thriving punk and rave scene, nicknamed "Madchester" by its members. Within the Crescents was a legendary all-night club called The Kitchen. The club was three stories tall, the result of squatters with sledgehammers breaking down the walls and ceilings between adjacent, abandoned flats to construct (or deconstruct) one mega-flat. The Crescents were the central place for this subculture until the buildings were demolished in 1994 due to their clear failure to provide stable and safe housing for the people of Manchester. The area where they once stood was redeveloped into a commercial street, and the largest bridge built as part of the "streets in the sky" plan was redesigned and named the Hulme Arch Bridge, giving Manchester a contemporary landmark that was more in keeping with its project of rebranding as a second-tier global city. The "Madchester" punks were all evicted or moved away.
EXHULME.Co.UK & DIGITAL MEMORY
If memory is tied to the materiality of space, what happens when that space is destroyed? In the case of Hulme Crescents, the archive of community memories that collect within places found another home in digital space. A former resident of Hulme Crescents created the website exhulme.co.uk, a play on the word "exhume," to dig something buried out of the ground. (The 'l' in Hulme is silent.) The site gathers together snapshots of graffiti, parties, everyday activities, amateur videos, and first-hand accounts of the raves and political protests that took place at the Crescents. This is an informal, immaterial memorial: the website, precariously situated between the physical and the virtual, is where memories of place are kept alive.
If eXHuLME is a memorial, where a codified history of the glory of the Crescents' punk days is presented unilaterally, it is also something more: an ongoing site of sharing and contesting anecdotal memories of place, some of which contradict the account of the website's main author. The text of the website romanticizes the all-night raves, graffiti, and drug culture of Hulme Crescents, especially at The Kitchen, while in the guestbook, other residents offer different accounts of a space that was not just significant to its punks and musicians. Descendants of several generations of Hulme residents swap email addresses, looking for photographs and memories of family members. A responder named Carol is searching for images of her sister, who was crowned Rose Queen at Saint George's Church in Hulme in 1948, and thinks someone here might be able to help. And one resident who lived in the Crescents during the 1980s and 90s expresses a different take than the website's author on Hulme's nightlife culture:
"I lived in Charles Barry [one of the Crescents] from 85 to 93 and for every happy sod telling me how wonderful the Kitchen was I have a months lost sleep. Seriously I didn't sleep in the night for the entire time that abhorrent place was open.( just over a year, to my memory). The police didn't want to know, and if I took my dogs out for a walk, I practically had to get permission from the unnoficial "security" hanging around.
I know it's gonna make me unpopular, but I am fed up of bloody tourists telling me how great the place was when they could sod off and sleep the next day and not have to make a living. It was misery. I will bet that most of the people who went didn't live anywhere near it. Up until that place opened I actually loved Hulme, and then it seemed that even though I had lived there for some time I was no longer welcome, while noise hammered through my flat and brain every night. Bloody vile." |
HULME, MICK CONEFREY, PT II: 1985-1986
It is this kind of ongoing contestation over what a place used to mean that makes eXHuLME a vernacular memorial: vernacular in the sense of bottom-up, unofficial, making use of the inexpensive materials at hand (here, a computer and a collection of digitized snapshots), but also vernacular in the sense of language, of an ongoing discussion in a common tongue. This digital memorial is vernacular because it does not overstate its own authority, or present the website author's account as a false totality of what Hulme meant to its residents. It does not foreclose possibilities of other ways of remembering. Instead, the website is an accessible, free site where the accumulation of different, occasionally contradictory memories is an ongoing process.
In her book "The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History," feminist geographer Dolores Hayden makes an argument for preserving the memories of urban spaces significant to women, marginalized ethnic groups, and the working class. She writes:
“Places make memories cohere in complex ways. People’s experiences of the urban landscape intertwine the sense of place and the politics of space. If people’s attachments to place are material, social, and imaginative, then these are necessary dimensions of new projects to extend public history in the urban landscape.”
-- Hayden, page 43 |
Hayden's analysis of public sites of memory is grounded exclusively in physical space. But online sites of memory also serve to sustain the attachment of people to long-gone places that are "material, social, and imaginative." Sites like eXHuLME are generative, living archives where social memories of space are shared and contested, and the creation of these sites should be facilitated in projects of preserving urban history.