Meadows and Bridges (…Looking back on a very busy few weeks…)

Posted on July 14, 2015 by Steve Bottoms

The Multi-Story Water team have had an extremely busy few weeks, so this blog has got a little behind with updates… We’ve had two big weekends — this last one, July 11th-12th (of which more shortly), and a fortnight before that, June 26th-28th, we were involved with two simultaneous water-themed festivals — in Shipley and downstream in Leeds.

The Shipley Street Arts Festival, co-ordinated by our friends at Q20 Theatre on Dockfield Road, was an ambitious attempt to combine traditional street entertainments in Shipley’s town square (jugglers, stiltwalkers, and the like) with a thematic emphasis on the town’s rivers and canal… So a second ‘hub site’ for the festival was down on the canal towpath beside the Ibis Hotel. Here’s what it looked like with the big letters SHIPLEY on display…

Multi-Story Water was involved in various aspects of the festival — for example, there was a successful screening of our short film Wading to Shipley at the Ibis on the Sunday, and we’d also arranged with JBA Trust (based at Salts Mill) to display their water flume in the town square… It demonstrates different forms of water flow, when you place different kinds of constructions or obstacles in a channel. On one level quite technical, it’s actually really interesting to watch, and there was a lot of curiuos interest from passers-by…

Our main contribution to the festival, though, was an interactive performance piece called Seven Bridges, which used the Ibis as its starting point. Spectators (participants, is probably a better word) toured themselves east along the canal towpath towards Dockfields in groups of 4 or 5, and along the way they were given some game-like challenges to complete. They also would encounter various performers. Here’s David Smith, for example, as a heritage tour guide from three hundred years in the future (2315), dressed as an ordinary canal buff from 2015 (geddit?), and pontificating about the significance of the “art” (aka graffiti) on Otley Road Bridge:

And here’s Lynsey Jones, as a Victorian lock-keeper’s wife (who did all the work opening the locks…), talking to spectators on Junction Bridge…

Participants would make their way as far as the old Bradford Canal pumphouse, on Dock Lane, where they would share what they had gathered en route, before returning the way they had come, accompanied by the performers…

There’s more pictures and documentation of Seven Bridges (Shipley) if you look under the “Performances” tab on our menu bar… But for now, let’s turn our attention to its partner piece, Seven Bridges (Leeds), which we presented on the same dates at the Leeds Waterfront Festival. The idea was to “bridge” the two festival locations, upstream and downstream, if only conceptually… Obviously the Leeds version was on a bigger scale, with bigger bridges, and this one took the form of a guided tour rather than a self-led journey… Here’s musician Eddie Lawler (on a day out from his home in Saltaire) kicking the piece off at Clarence Dock (with Crown Point Bridge in the background) with an old canal song about the founding of the Aire and Calder Navigation, which turned Leeds into a “seaport town” in 1700…

But Eddie was just the “local colour” wheeled in to warm the crowd up by Don Freshwater (played by Steve Bottoms, below in the suit)… Don is a both little sinister and a little nuts… he claims to be the CEO of something called the “Leeds Re-Development Corporation”… As Don explains below (in front of Knights Way Bridge and Clarence Dock on the far side) the audience has been gathered as “consultants” to help decide how to redevelop the waterfront… The “ordinary people of Leeds” were never consulted in the past about these matters, so Don wants to consult them now… except that he doesn’t really, because he likes the sound of his own voice too much.

Again, there’s more photos and more detail on this slightly barmy performance (with a serious edge to it) if you look under the “Performances” tab above. Both versions of Seven Bridges were very well received, and pointed us in some interesting directions for future work.

But in the interests of catching up with ourselves, let’s turn our attention now to this last weekend, spent in the flood plain meadow between the River Aire and the Higher Coach Road estate, west of Roberts Park (is it Saltaire, Shipley, Baildon..? you decide – there’s a case for all three). Preparations for the weekend began, in fact, a week earlier, when we sledgehammered a series of fence posts into the field in a rectangular pattern…

Three fenceposts in a row… that’s Steve’s hand in the foreground, Pat Gledhill with the second one, and Matt Blakeley with the third, obscured by Pat because our line was so straight! (well…)

Notice how much longer the grass is than even last month (see previous post, “Meadow Madness”, where it’s much shorter and greener, with more buttercups visible). Basically Bradford Council have said that – with austerity cuts and the resulting loss of manpower and mowers – they will not cut the grass in this field as often as they used to. They did, however, oblige us by at least sparing the time to cut a swathe around our staked-out rectangle, so that by this last weekend, it looked like this:

On Saturday afternoon (July 11th), in the cleared area on the outside of the staked-out rectangle, we held a community barbecue for residents on the estate – with conversation, games for the kids, etc…

This was part of our ongoing engagement with residents here, as we (and our colleagues at Kirkgate Centre) work with them on developing some plans for this riverside field… People would like to see a proper footpath, for instance, and other improvements, but the main focus today was the grass… Some residents, understandably, think it’s a disgrace that the grass has been left to grow this long — they feel it looks scruffy, and embarrasses the neighbourhood, and want us to pass on their anger about this to the Council. Others, though (perhaps a majority of those we spoke to this weekend?) seem to think that, if this is to be a meadow in future, then perhaps something more could be made of it — by planting colourful wildflowers, for example, and cutting at least some areas so that it all looks a bit more intentional and a bit less scruffy…

In an attempt to help focus this discussion, by drawing attention to what long grass is actually composed of up close, we created “A Meadow Meander” within the fenced off area. This is a mazy walk created by treading the grass down into a carefully planned set of looping pathways… So for example, in the picture below, you can make out a “Y” junction, where the “lie” of the grass could take you in one of two directions.

As this picture also starts to suggest, left to their own devices, there are a LOT of different kinds of grasses and other plants growing in the field, and they merit some close up attention… “A Meadow Meander” is the creation of artist Baz Kershaw, and his Earthrise Repair Shop. Baz has created similar installations in various other UK locations, and for this one he had placed a series of jars on small plinths, to be discovered as you move around the maze…

Each of the jars contains a secret to be puzzled out — just as the winding paths in the grass also follow a particular pattern that visitors are invited to guess at… Baz calls it an “open secret”, because if you’ve done the meander, he’ll happily tell you what the pattern represents… but sorry, if you’re just reading this blog, we’re not going to tell you! The only clue we’ll share is that it might have something to do with the way that long grass looks a little like waves when it is played with by the wind. The River Aire, alongside this meadow, is not the only reason why the meander was appropriate for “Multi-Story Water”…

A Meadow Meander was presented both on the Saturday, along with the barbecue, and on the Sunday, when we put the entrance on the other side of the rectangle, right next to the riverside path. This meant that, where on Saturday it was mainly residents in the meander, on Sunday it was mainly passers-by — walking between Roberts Park and Hirst Wood. We wanted to get their ideas too, on the great meadow debate…

A big thankyou to everyone who made the events described happen… and especially — on the Higher Coach Road estate — a huge thanks to Sarah Muller and to Stewart and Pat Gledhill for so enthusiastically helping to create (and indeed dismantle) the meadow meander… The fence posts are at Stewart and Pat’s as I write, and we have some future plans in store for them…

Pat Gledhill, with her Troutbeck Avenue neighbour Eric — who kindly donated alcohol to the cause!

Don’t miss Shipley Street Arts Festival!

Posted on June 15, 2015 by Steve Bottoms

The weekend of June 26-28th is the Shipley Street Arts Festival, co-ordinated by our good friends over at Q20 Theatre. There’s lots of activities and performances for all tastes and ages, many of them taking the river and canal as a watery theme… We’ve got a hand in various events including the water flume demonstration near Shipley Library (from noon on Saturday 27th), and the duck race from Baildon Woodbottom Working Men’s Club (1pm, same day), and on Sunday 28th there’s a special screening of our short film Wading to Shipley at the Ibis Hotel. Multi-Story Water‘s main contribution to proceedings, though, will be this:

This new, interactive promenade performance will be directed by Simon Brewis, and performed by David Smith and Lynsey Jones. All three were part of our original, 2012 Multi-Story Water performances, and we’re delighted to have them back for this project. The Seven Bridges include some obvious ones and some less obvious ones, so do come along and discover the trail… (it’ll end up not very far from where it starts, you’ll be reassured to know!)

Meanwhile, on the very same weekend, just a few miles downstream, the Leeds Waterfront Festival is taking place. So to create a bit of a conceptual “bridge” between the two festivals — and between Shipley and Leeds — we are also presenting this:

Now that’s actually a photograph from Shipley (Amber Wharf flats viewed from under Junction Bridge, at Dockfield) but the designer liked the picture, and it sort of works for Leeds too… where there’s a whole lot of new build flats by the water!

Anyway, the Leeds piece will be performed by Steve Bottoms, who will be supported musically by the very wonderful Eddie Lawler (the Steve and Eddie partnership is now a recurring one, and also dates back to our 2012 MSW performances). In theory, it’s possible to see both Seven Bridges pieces in the same day, if you do Shipley at 11.30am and Leeds at 3.30pm. Or you can do them different days. You don’t have to do both, of course, but they will, we hope, complement each other in interesting ways… And it is all free, so you can’t go wrong!

Talking and Walking (on Water)

Posted on April 25, 2015 by Steve Bottoms

We’ve had a busy couple of weekends, doing a lot of talking and a fair bit of walking, not necessarily at the same time. This photo was taken just this morning…

The location is Dockfield Terrace, and that’s my colleague Lyze (pronounced “Lizzie”, not “Lies” as one person mistakenly assumed — as Lyze says, “it’s my own fault for being pretentious”) standing with David, who kindly agreed to be photographed for this blog. David has lived in the Dockfields area since 1947 (that’s 68 years and counting), and is currently 500 pages into writing his life story — some of which we heard recounted as anecdotes! He’s one of the people who turned up to a community meeting that we organised this morning for local residents, at Q20 Theatre on Dockfield Road (thanks Q20! we are collaborating with them to deliver a river- and canal-themed version of their Shipley Street Arts Festival in June… more on that another time).

At the meeting we heard quite a few local concerns… everything from the need for speed controls on the main road (used as a rat run to avoid Foxes Corner) to very genuine concern about the wellbeing of this family of swans…

The swans have recently taken up residence on the canal bank above, having abandoned their previous nest — pictured below, on the track between Dockfield Road and the canal towpath…

… there was some debate among the residents who attended the meeting about what had happened here, but general agreement that at least one and possibly all of the swans’ eggs had been stolen by someone unscrupulous, and that the swans had been driven away from this spot in fear… Whatever the correct story, it was striking how much the residents concerns were with the canal, and its resident wildlife, as well as with the roads, traffic, etc. Even though Dockfields is a very industrialised area with little obvious green space, the river and especially the canal give the area something special that people clearly value… (For more on swans at this time of year, see Canal and River Trust’s page about caring for them.)

We’re working, in connection with Kirkgate Centre, to try to build community connections in the Dockfield area, with a view to ensuring that people’s concerns are listened to and acted upon. This includes understanding how their sense of connection with the local waterways might be a positive asset that can be built upon communally. We’re also working on the same process in the Higher Coach Road area, on the Baildon side of the River Aire. Last Saturday morning we had a parallel community meeting, this time kindly hosted by the Bradford Rowing Club…

What is Maggie Roe saying to Paul Barrett? Caption suggestions please…

Here’s Kirkgate Centre’s Paul Barrett, pictured outside the club after the meeting (on a gorgeous, crystal clear day!), talking to landscape specialist Maggie Roe — who is very struck by the distinctive layout of the Higher Coach Road estate (see other blogs on that!). And here’s a shot from inside the club, showing the aftermath of a very positive and productive discussion with residents… I love the fact that Paul and Sara are both checking their just-taken photographs of the post-it notes!

Sara Penrhyn Jones is a filmmaker who was visiting us for the weekend from Aberystwyth, in Wales (like Maggie, she is part of the wider “Hydro-Citizenship” research project that Multi-Story Water is now a part of). Maybe she’ll have some film footage for us to share on this blog soon. Here she is armed with cameras again the following day — Sunday 19th April — on the canal towpath in Saltaire with Lyze…

… the other people in shot are some of the people who had gathered to go for a guided walk with me from this spot. As part of Saltaire’s “World Heritage Weekend” celebrations, I led a version of our Salt’s Waters walk — which will soon be available as a downloadable audio guide, for anyone to undertake whenever they like… although on this occasion we went with the low-tech, interactive option. The walk goes from the bottom of Victoria Road in Saltaire, and then heads west along the Aire, via Roberts Park and the Higher Coach Road estate, before turning uphill – alongside Loadpit Beck – on the way towards what little remains of Titus Salt Junior’s Milner Field mansion.

A key feature of the audio mix will be Eddie Lawler’s beautiful song, The Ballad of Little Beck – written in honour of the unassuming stream that goes runs down through the grounds of Milner Field, and was once dammed as a boating lake. Eddie came along on the walk last Sunday and performed the song live, standing on the earthworked banking that takes Titus Jr’s coach road right across Little Beck (which trickles through at the base). It was a “shivers down the spine” moment, for me at least…

I don’t have other pictures of the walk, because for the most part I was too busy conducting it — talking and walking — to be taking photographs. But the merry band of travellers who came along on the journey were a great bunch to spend a couple of hours with. As I’d hoped, moreover, they had a good few suggestions (and one or two corrections!) to feed back into our work on the audio narrative…

So a big thanks to all those who contributed to a very enjoyable afternoon. Here are a few of you, enjoying Eddie’s music…

Dockfield Memories

Posted on April 5, 2015 by Steve Bottoms

This is Chris Uttley, who grew up on Dockfield Road. He’s holding up a 1970s photo showing himself (the little one), his brother, and his grandmother, standing in front of Junction Bridge on the Leeds-Liverpool canal — where it intersects with the now filled-in Bradford Canal. This photo is taken from the opposite bank to the one Chris is holding, since there are new-build flats occupying the space in that photo now. But you can still clearly see the bridge, and Junction House to its left, in both pictures. It’s disheartening to realise that the sorry state of disrepair into which Junction House has fallen has been within Chris’s lifetime. (And those trees now in front of it are clearly younger than him.)

Chris lives in Stroud now, in Gloucestershire, and works professionally in water and environmental management. He says that this has everything to do with having grown up on Dockfield Road — sandwiched between the canal and the river. With Bradford Beck to the west and fields to the east, residents used to think of the area as an “island”. Chris came across our project accidentally, online, and we arranged to meet up with him recently when he came back up north to visit his parents. Chris combined walking his dog and talking with us…

As it happens, this coincided with a day of knocking on doors in Dockfield Road and Dockfield Terrace that we (my colleague Lyze and I) were doing as part of our research — and in conjunction with Kirkgate Centre’s community development initiatives. So we got the perfect start when Chris ran into his old neighbour Sue, hanging out washing in the yard, and we were invited in for a cup of tea and a trip down memory lane. Sue’s a little older than Chris, so they weren’t quite remembering the same generation of childhood antics in the area — but their memories were very similar. All kinds of malarkey got up to along the canal and, to a lesser extent, the river… “We were poor economically,” Sue remarked, “but we were rich in every other way.”

Sue feels now that the sense of community in the area is not what it used to be, which is perhaps inevitable when you have strong memories of what it was like when everyone living around you was also working in the local mills and factories (rather than commuting into Leeds, etc., as happens now). Still, the impression Lyze and I had from our initial round of doorknocking was of a friendly, engaging community of residents who often knew each other well. More on this to follow.

Meanwhile… this graffiti patch on the wall beside the canal, on the approach to Junction Bridge and Dockfields, has become a bit of a local battlefield. You can see from the paintwork that the more political statements have been painted over — presumably by the Council (?) — and then RE-stencilled again by the activists. What’s interesting here is that nobody attempted to just erase the whole thing… It’s a nice patch of colour on a nasty grey wall, after all, with pretty butterfly pictures on it… So if we just take away the complaints about capitalism, maybe it’ll all be OK? The yellow has of course been chosen, though, because of it’s connection to the yellow livery of Bradford-based retail chain Morrisons… who are planning to build a big old supermarket next to Bradford Beck only a couple of hundred yards from this spot…

Multi-Story Water

Celebrating Shipley and its waterways

Category Archives: Dockfields

Meadows and Bridges (…Looking back on a very busy few weeks…)

Don’t miss Shipley Street Arts Festival!

Talking and Walking (on Water)

Dockfield Memories