The Modernist Magazine was established as a quarterly, print only publication, dedicated to twentieth century architecture and design in 2011.

We invited contributors to submit articles based losely around a different theme for each issue.

The Modernist was initially designed by Des Lloyd Behari, followed by Thomas Ulrik Madsen, Jonathan Hitchen, Dan James with Jacob Critchley. The magazine is currently designed by Trevor Johnson, Craig Johnson and Lily Platt. The magazine has been edited by the founding editors Jack Hale and Maureen Ward followed by Emily Gee and currently Ashiya Eastwood. From 2019 a series of occasional guest editors have been invited to edit the magazine.

The Modernist has featured articles by many many writers and photographers, all of whom have given their time freely. 

The Modernist is available to buy on line and is also sold widely at independent and art gallery shops including MagCulture, Village, HOME and Fruitmarket Gallery.

The issue themes have included:M

#50 NORTH

#49 NEGLECTED

#48 MUSIC

#47 MACHINE

#46 MASSIVE

#45 MUNICIPAL

#44 LAYOUT

#43 LIBRARY

#42 LIGHT

#41 LANDSCAPE

#40 KUDOS

#39 KILLER

#38 KITCHEN

#37 KINO

#36 JUSTICE

#35 JOURNEY

#34 JUXTAPOSITION

#33 JUNCTION

#32 INVISIBLE

#31 IN-BETWEEN

#30 INVENTORY

#29 INFRASTRUCTURE

#28 HOLIDAY

#27 HIGH

#26 HEALTH

#25 HABITAT

#24 GONE

#23 GAMES

#22 GIGANTIC

#21 GOVERNMENT

#20 FAR OUT

#19 FAITH

#18 FORGOTTEN

#17 FACTORY

#16 EXPERIMENT

#15 ENTERTAINMENT

#14 ENGINEER

#13 EXPO

#12 DEPARTED

#11 DOMESTIC

#10 DICTATOR

#9 DINKY

#8 CARRIED AWAY

#7 CAPITAL

#6 CUPPA

#5 CAMPUS

#4 BRUTAL

#3 BOOM & BUST

#2 BRILLIANT

#1 BOLD

Architectural City Guide - Manchester

You would expect that a group based in Manchester, interested in modernist buildings, would have a pocket guide to its best modernist buildings wouldn't you?

Well up until now, much to our chagrin, we didn't have one. It seems like an obvious thing for us to do and yet we had never made one. That is until now!

We present the first in a series of Architectural City Guides - Sheffield and Birmingham are planned for later this year.

Manchester is our home town so we are starting here. There are 41 sites to visit, each with a short description, photograph and factual information. We have included a handy map if you are not familiar with the city.

Spanning 100 years of architecture this is perfect for those who want to get to know the Modern architectural heritage of Manchester - be you a visitor from afar, or a local who wants to refamiliarise yourself with the city.

Perfectly sized - small enough to fit in your anorak pocket but bigger than your mobile phone screen.

Compiled and edited: Jack Hale and Eddy Rhead

Text and original photographs: Eddy Rhead

Design: Bradley Young

Softcover, 86 pages with fold out map

Perfect bound

Colour

210mm x 99mm

ISBN 978-1-9164718-9-4

London, UK, September 2023 - the modernist, a quarterly magazine dedicated to modernist architecture and design, is proud to present The Modernist Book Fair, a two-day event featuring some of the best independent publishers in the field.

22.09.23 & 23.09.23

The book fair will take place on Friday 22nd and Saturday 23rd of September, as part of the London Design Festival 2023, at the Vitsœ store in Marylebone, where visitors can browse and buy books, magazines, maps, zines and more, all celebrating the legacy and diversity of modernism.

The Modernist Book Fair is a unique opportunity to discover and support the work of independent publishers who are passionate about modernist architecture and design. Whether you are a fan of Bauhaus, brutalism or anything in between, you will find something to inspire and delight you at this event.

The Modernist Book Fair will also host a special panel discussion on Friday 22nd at 7.00pm (arrivals from 6.30pm), moderated by Helen Barrett. The panel will share their insights and experiences on publishing about modernist architecture. Places are limited and must be reserved in advance here.

Helen Barrett is a journalist who writes for the FT, the Telegraph, the Spectator, the Critic and other publications on art, design, architecture, fashion, music, travel, books, modern life and popular culture.

Alongside the modernist, confirmed participants include representatives from Blue Crow Maps, publisher of a range of architectural maps; photographer Martin Dust, publisher of Brutal Yorkshire; Simon Phipps, photographer with books including Brutal North, Brutal London and Concrete Poetry; designer and author Stefi Orazi of Modernist Estates and the popular Perambulations series; The Twentieth Century Society who campaign to save outstanding modernist architecture and UHM Zines who feature a variety of photographers that focus their lenses on Brutalist architecture.

The Modernist Book Fair will take place at Vitsœ, 21 Marylebone Lane, London W1U 2NG.

GMC21 : Twenty-first Century Architecture in Manchester and Salford

Since the year 2000, Manchester’s built environment has been utterly transformed and yet the last architectural guide to contemporary architecture in Manchester was published over 20 years ago. With this in mind, the Modernist Society has decided to produce a guide to 21st-century architecture in Manchester and Salford titled GMC21.

This is not necessarily a ‘Best of’ but is more of a subjective list, selected by the Modernist team, with the aim to show a wide variety of Manchester and Salford’s architecture from the last 23 years.

‘GMC21: Twenty-first Century Architecture in Manchester and Salford’ is now available. The book features over 100 examples of new architecture covering all types of buildings - from skyscrapers to substations, apartment blocks to tram stops, bridges to the B of The Bang and from AHMM to Zaha Hadid.

This book is for all who have an interest in modern architecture and the shape and look of our modern cities. It is hoped that the collection will encapsulate the seemingly relentless building boom that has been ongoing in the city since 2000.

The information for each building has been collected with the help of the architectural firms involved, with a huge amount of support and goodwill from all of them and from the architectural photographers that have worked with them. Each entry includes factual information, a short contextual description and high-quality photographs.

Compiled and edited: Bryony Aitchison, Richard Brook, Jack Hale and Eddy Rhead

Text by Eddy Rhead

Original photographs: with kind permission of many excellent photographers

Design: Hayley Shaw

Softcover, 134 pages,

Colour

220mm x 120mm

ISBN 978-1-9164718-8-7

Exhibition and book

Photographs by Tom Hicks, taken between 2017 and 2023, the images in Black Country Type document the post-industrial landscape of the Black Country.

08.09.23 - 28.10.23

The images within the exhibition and accompanying new book published by the modernist, explore the cultural history of the Black Country region and reflect the impact of industrial decline. Tom’s work moves seamlessly between images of derelict factories, underpasses and 21st century warehousing facilities.

Tom says: “The Black Country is where I’m from and where I still live. It’s a largely unknown place - a place that outsiders may have glimpsed from the motorway or passed through on a train to somewhere else. Black Country Type takes the viewer on a freeform journey through the post-industrial landscape of the region.”

Known for his trademark compositional style, Hicks relies on direct sunlight to illuminate his subject matter, often with the result that landmarks in the West Midlands could be mistaken for scenery in Mediterranean – a humorous juxtaposition that isn’t lost on his audience.

Tom applies a fine art sensibility to his representation of the urban environment. Photography for him is “a medium that allows me to synthesise a wide range of interests, including architecture, design, typography, art, popular culture and history.”

The photographs will be accompanied by three paintings by Mandy Payne who's work is inspired by urban landscape, issues of gentrification, inequality, social housing and the flux of city environments, and in finding beauty in the ordinary and overlooked.

The book Black Country Type features over 100 images, many of which are being published for the first time in this work. The book features a foreword by the acclaimed artist and photographer John Myers, whose books including Looking at the Overlooked and The End of Industry.

This exhibition..

at The Modernist

58 Port Street, Manchester M1 2EQ

Modernist Swansea / Abertawe Fodernaidd

by Catrin James

An introduction to Swansea Modernism

Cyflwyniad i adeiladau Fodernaidd Abertawe

Growing up in 1980s & 90s Swansea, Catrin found beauty in the post war municipal and civic buildings of the town. Shop front fonts, graphic-coloured tiles, repetitious railings, clean lines, forgotten door handles, concrete flowerpots, mid-century clocks and colourful Formica tables. These details were observed at a young age on the bus into town as she frequented the many cafes and milk bars with her mother for egg and chips on a Saturday.

Naeth Catrin tyfu i fyny yn Abertawe’r 1980au a 90gau, a ddaeth i hyd i harddwch yr adeiladau dinesig y dref. Ffontiau y siopau, teils lliwgar graffig, rheiliau ailadroddus, llinellau clir, dolenni drysiau anghofiedig, potiau blodau concrit, clociau mawr a bwrddau Formica. Gwelwyd y manylion yma i gyd ar y bws i’r dref wrth iddi fynd i’r cafis niferis gydai’i fam i gael bwyd ar Ddydd Sadwrn.

In this volume Catrin gives us an introduction to Swansea Modernism / Cyflwyniad i adeiladau Fodernaidd Abertawe.

Launched at Galerie Simpson Artists 217 High Street Swansea on 2nd of march 2023.

Words and pictures by / Lluniau a testun gan

Catrin James @swanseamodernist

Design and layout / Dylunio gan

Lisa Brown @lisa_in_leeds

Softcover, 56 pages,

Colour and B+W

Pop up exhibition

at New Glasgow Society, 1307 Argyle St, Glasgow

05.11.22

To celebrate the launch of our latest book Braw Concrete by Peter Halliday and Alan Stewart, we hosted a pop up exhibition at the New Glasgow Society gallery. The exhibition highlights some of the photographs of post war Glasgow architecture featured in the book.

A walking your led by Lex Lamb also took place from Central Station to the West End.

Braw Concrete : Post-war architecture in Glasgow

Our latest book invites a reappraisal of Glasgow’s post war architecture

November 2022 - if you were to wander down any Glasgow street and pick a few people at random, it is unlikely that any of them would hold much affection for the city’s post-war concrete buildings. Yet Glasgow is home to some of the most audacious and courageous architecture of the mid-century era.

In those ideologically infused years, the city played host to a cadre of young architects who clearly regarded their work as a noble endeavour. Perhaps naïve, perhaps misguided, perhaps with an improbable point-of-view on what was best for the Glasgow and its citizens. But they plainly believed that, through their work, they were putting in place the institutions and infrastructure that would befit a modern, progressive city. It was all about building a better world – quite literally.'

Braw Concrete, published by The Modernist Society, is a new book that encourages people to look afresh at Glasgow’s mid-century architecture and the spirit of optimism that gave birth to them. Coming hot on the heels of the UN Climate Change Conference, COP 26, which Glasgow played host to a year ago, it also questions the environmental consequences of sweeping away perfectly serviceable buildings which could otherwise last for thousands of years.

The book, by Peter Halliday and Alan Stewart, is an unlikely collaboration.

Alan Stewart is an architect who studied at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, lives and works in Glasgow, and has spent many years walking, cycling, and taking photographs of the city’s streetscapes. Peter Halliday is a writer who visited for the first time in 2021 and was immediately beguiled by what he saw. The two of them decided to capture and share their respective views of the city – the brash observations of the wide-eyed visitor, set side-by-side with the more considered gaze of the long-term resident.

Over 144 pages, the book takes a meandering, east-to-west journey through central-Glasgow, dropping off along the way to appraise some of the most emblematic concrete buildings. The collection of photographs, snapped over the course of a year, seeks to capture their spirit, their current condition, and the way the everyday life of the city goes on around them. And the accompanying text gives an insight into their creation, their significance, and the cast of characters behind them.

Whatever you may think of the buildings, you would have to agree that the book itself is a thing of beauty, with more than 120 lush colour photographs, reproduced on sumptuous matt art paper, hard-backed, and bound in tactile linen.

Words and pictures by

Peter Halliday @p.halliday

Alan Stewart @_moody_al_

Design and artwork support Lizzie Biggs

Hardcover, 144 pages,

Colour and B+W

210x148mm

ISBN 978-1-9164718-4-9

Talks

Between October 2022 and March 2023 we initiated a series of evening talks, facilitated with the generous provision of a venue by BDP (Manchester).

Speakers and topics included:

Gavin Elliot (BDP) - three listed buildings designed in the 1960s by BDP. [Preston Bus Station, Halifax Building Society HQ, Leeds Bank of England].

Caterina Benincasa-Sharman (University of Huddersfield) - the Festival of Britain in York and Liverpool.

Elain Harwood (Historic England) - Brutalist architecture in Britain and her book Brutal Britain.

Owen Hatherley (Author) in conversation with Phil Griffin - on his book Modern Buildings in Britain.

Esther Johnson and Christopher Marsden - the public sculpture of Alan Boyson.

Ewan Harrison (University of Liverpool) - Kingsway Stores and the Ends of Empire in West Africa

München '72 - an exhibition of items from the 1972 Olympic Games : from the collection of Ian McLaren

Exhibition

15.09.22 - 05.11.22

September 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. 2022 also marks 100 years since the birth of graphic designer Otl Aicher, who led the team - named Dept XI - that created the graphic identity for the entire games and in doing so set a benchmark for graphic design and visual communication. the modernist celebrates these anniversaries with a new exhibition 'Munchen '72' - an exhibition of items from the collection of Ian McLaren.

Ian McLaren was one of the members of Dept XI and worked extensively on the visual output for Munich '72 and he has kindly lent us some items from his personal collection of posters and ephemera.

The exhibition - running at the modernist 58 Port Street Manchester M1 2EQ from 15th September will show a small collection of posters, some designed by Ian, and various artefacts such as catalogues, programmes, badges and even some of the resources used by the design team.

Ian McLaren attended the influential Ulm School of Design and in the 1960s designed material for CND, The National Theatre and The Arts Council. He also designed many book covers for Penguin and Puffin before joining the Munich team in 1970. After Munich he moved Paris and his practise designed visual identities for UNESCO, Lyon Metro and Centre Culturelle Georges Pompidou. He later went on to teach at various universities including The Glasgow School of Art and De Montfort Universities.

Birmingham: The Brutiful Years

By Mary Keating, Jenny Marris and John Bell.

"A beautifully designed book that gives Birmingham brutalism a distinctive identity that I hadn’t really appreciated until I saw it all together."

Elain Harwood, Historic England

Our latest book celebrates Birmingham’s urban history and documents the city’s Brutalist past as never before.

Birmingham: The Brutiful Years puts the spotlight on the city’s often under-appreciated post-war architecture, with striking images alongside essays on some of Birmingham’s most iconic locations, as well as some of its lesser-known modernist gems.

Spaghetti Junction, the Ringway Centre, The Rotunda and Corporation Square all feature, alongside Brutalist buildings such Birmingham Repertory Theatre, the Ashley and Strathcona Buildings at Birmingham University, and Neville House on Harborne Road.

The book also highlights some of the city’s modernist public art, such as the Hockley Circus ‘Climbing Wall’, designed by sculptor William Mitchell, and John Piper's Mosaic in the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce.

Some of Birmingham’s lesser-known post-war churches are also featured, including St. Thomas More Church in Sheldon, St. Matthews Church Perry Beeches, and Our Lady Help of Christians in Tile Cross.

Birmingham: The Brutiful Years highlights three home-grown architects in particular whose cutting-edge designs helped to reshape post-war Birmingham: John Madin, who designed the majority of Birmingham’s finest Brutalist buildings; Graham Winteringham, best known for the Birmingham Repertory theatre, and James Roberts, whose work included The Rotunda.

The book is made up of a collection of 22 articles written for The Birmingham Post by The Brutiful Action Group, founded by Birmingham residents Mary Keating, Jenny Marris and John Bell.

The group came together when Birmingham's Central Library - considered an icon of British Brutalism - was about to be demolished. They began writing for The Birmingham Post six years ago, highlighting the plight of the Ringway Centre, and have since written over 60 articles discussing the architectural merit and the heritage value of Birmingham’s Brutalist buildings, and raising awareness of those that are under threat of demolition.

Designed by Birmingham based designer Sharonjit Sutton, the book launches in September to coincide with Birmingham Heritage Week (9th-18th September) and is now being made available for pre-sale.

This publication is a fitting tribute to some true masterpieces of modernist design, with a real sense of history and nostalgia. We hope that it helps people to appreciate the value of this period of Birmingham’s architectural history.

Published by the modernist society

Written and edited: Mary Keating, Jenny Marris, John Bell

Original photographs: John Bell with Mary Keating and Jenny Marris

Design: Sharonjit Sutton designsloading.co.uk

Softcover, 160 pages,

Colour and B+W

200mm x 200mm

ISBN 978-1-9164718-3-2

Exhibition

21.05.22 - 02.07.22

#OutofDate2022 - discordant glimpses and glitches from the past..

22 photographers from the UK and Europe agreed to collaborate in #OutOfDate2022, accepting a brief to capture modernist buildings and scenes using a cache of old slide films from the 1970s found discarded in long bankrupt haberdashery shop in Timperley.

The photographers taking part included Steve Marland (Manchester), Sapphire Goss (Folkstone) and Zoe Gruber (Dunfermline) along with international photographers including Carlos Baselga from Spain and Horia Brebeneanu from Romania.

The results were...mixed...

As might be expected, some of the slide film – four batches in total – showed nothing at all. Other slides - developed from film now almost 50 years old – offered just a few strange hints of their subject including cooling towers and balconies.

The successfully developed images range from bakelite switches to Manchester modernist landmarks such as the curvy Gateway House outside Piccadilly Station. Perhaps the most haunting are those images which when developed were all turquoise or with strange orange spots and evocatively grainy black and white images of tower blocks in Salford and cooling towers in Derbyshire.

The developed slides will be on display in the Modernist Society’s Port Street shop from 21st May to 2nd July and at Stretford Public Hall later in the year.

Long time friend of the Modernist Society Bill Mather devised the project: “Sometimes you go looking for one thing and you find another. I found these slide films in a bag under some polyester material in the corner of an abandoned shop which was owned by a friend of mine, who passed away last year. I thought it would be a nice tribute to him to see what we could do with them.”

“With slide film there’s only one chance to get it right so we thought it would be interesting to see what we get back. With the colours interfering and cross polarising we got some mixed results, but it was also interesting to see what the photographers decided to go and shoot. And in some cases, it looks like we may never know.”

participating photographers:

Natalie Ainscough, Bill Ayres, Shirley Bainbridge, Carlos Baselga, Cinthia Baseler, Horia Brebeneanu, Annabel Cohen, Emily DeFelice, Ashiya Eastwood, John Ellis, Sapphire Goss, Zoe Gruber, Jack Hale, Susan Hallsworth, Simon Hadfield/Lisa Brown, Christopher Hopes, Stephen Marland, Lauren Mcintyre, Cal McNab, Alex Nelu, Matt Simpson and Micheal Walsh.

Exhibition dates : 01.07.21 - 28.08.21

Part of Manchester’s urban history is being celebrated with a new book featuring images of local independent shops in the 1980s, which already look like a bygone age.

The series of rarely seen black and white photographs, taken by self-taught photographer Brian Lomas in his native North Manchester, have been brought together for the carefully curated exhibition and book, titled Small Shops.

Greengrocers, butchers, barbers, chip shops and florists, many adorned with old signage, are just some of the independent businesses featured. Not only have most of these businesses since disappeared, but many of the buildings that housed them have also now gone.

Amateur photographer Brian, who was at the time in his mid-twenties and working as a health service administrator, took the photographs on his Rolleiflex camera mostly in and around Moston, as well Blackley, Newton Heath and Harpurhey.

While some of the original prints were initially shown in 1983 at Uppermill Photography Gallery (now Saddleworth Museum and Gallery), and exhibited at Liverpool’s Open Eye gallery in 1986, these images have gone mostly unseen until now.

Brian, 65, has lived in North Manchester all of his life, and now resides in Failsworth. He comments: “Even then, many of these shops seemed out of their time, with their quirky and characteristic details - shopfronts with old signage, old fashioned style shop tills and traditional weighing scales.

“Many of these independent businesses were under threat at the time, particularly with large supermarkets coming into Manchester, but also with shopkeepers coming up to retirement age and not having anyone to pass the business on to. So, I was keen to document these local small shops before they were gone.

“I’ve been taking photographs for over 40 years and in that time, things have changed dramatically across the city. Many of these buildings are now gone completely, so I’m very glad that I captured that part of history while I could.”

“These photographs capture a time and place that, despite being within many of our own lifetimes, now seems like a lost age."

A series of one minute long films focusing on the architecture of our five chapter cities of Manchester. Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds and Birmingham.

During 2020, our face to face activities were curtailed by the Covid19 crisis, however thanks to the National Lottery Heritage Fund we were able to get out and about and produce a series of twenty, minute long films featuring some of our favourite buildings.

You can view the films here

Leeds Modernists’ Windows on a Modern World: Leeds in the 1970s launches on Friday 4th December 2020!

We are taking over 6 poster drums across the city centre for two weeks to showcase 6 incredible photographs of Leeds in the 1970s.

These rare, reportage images were captured by David Hick, Lecturer in 'Traffic Engineering' at Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Beckett University) and long-standing member of Leeds Civic Trust Planning Committee. His impressive private collection has been gifted to and curated by local artist, Clifford Stead. A unique piece of Cliff's work will occupy the sixth drum, depicting the former site of the sadly lost, Leeds International Pool.

Each poster drum has been carefully selected to mirror a historic photograph and scene. The trail will be amongst the city, plastered onto its existing infrastructure. The city will act as a contextualised gallery, where each location is intrinsic to the image presented.

Head into our city centre from Friday 4th December – Thursday 17th December and wander through the 6 following locations:

1. WELLINGTON STREET

2. CITY SQUARE

3. EASTGATE

4. BRIGGATE

5. THE HEADROW

6. WESTGATE

To see previews of the posters head over to our Instagram! #Leeds1970s

A big thank to all of our sponsors, who have made this project possible.

THE MODERNIST SHOP (2091 - PRESENT)

On May 1st 2019, at 58 Port Street, Manchester we opened a new

officeshopgallerystudio

neuethinktankdesighhaus

lightishdutyactivityunit

teasmadeandcoffemates

giftmerchfulfilmentcentre

slashstoragefacility*

*whatever

despite a global pandemic.. it’s still going.

visit our shop

A remarkable set of photographs illustrating the transformation of Manchester in the 60s and 70s rediscovered by the Modernist Society in the archives of Chethams Library.

The full collection of the second set of our From The Archives series presented in a special limited edition box set.

From The Archives 2 : Deconstruction/Construction, is a collaboration with Manchester’s historic Chethams Library, presenting images from their slide collection.

Together with Richard Brook we have curated a series of 6 photo books each focussing on the demolition and rebuilding of Manchester. The majority of these images are rarely seen and have never been in print before. The images are historical, from the 1960s and 70s, and were scanned from the original slides.

The individual books are beautifully litho printed in full colour and are themselves limited edition.

Get all six books before everyone else by buying this lovely box set - hand numbered and limited to 100. 

The individual titles are:

Progress

Housing

M62

Market Place

Piccadilly

Wythenshawe

Cost of Limited Edition Box Set : £40 plus p&p

From The Archives 2 : Deconstruction/Construction

Full Colour Litho Print on Munken Smooth

Curated by Richard Brook, Eddy Rhead and Jack Hale

Designed by Birthday

Printed by JUMP

6 x 32pp

148 x 210 mmm A5

Stretford House

Two Hundred & Forty Feet High

Twenty Three Floors

Eighty Eight Two Bedroom Flats

Forty Four One Bedroom Flats

Two Lifts Odd & Even Floors

One Stairwell

Standing as a single solitary obelisk of hard concrete surrounded by softer sediments, the 23 storey high-rise residential block Stretford House has for fifty years acted as Stretford’s very own security guard. Scanning the busy skyline for planes at Ringway Airport, gazing over the ever meandering River Mersey flood plain, manning the historical border post between Lancashire and Cheshire, surveying the scene with its feet firmly planted in Triassic Sandstone as it watches for invaders from space with the help of Bernard Lovell’s radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, which is visible on the horizon.

Stretford House 50 is an exhibition and publication conceived and curated by Bill Mather and the Modernist Society.

Publication design by Wayne Fearnley.

All original photographs were taken by Derek Whitehead the former Borough of Stretford Engineer & Surveyor. They form part of the Stretford Local History Society’s Photographic Archive.

These and other artefacts will be on display alongside a limited number of very special items for sale from the modernist shop. 

Publication available here.

the modernist

58 Port Street, Manchester, M1 2EQ

Hours: Wednesday - Saturday, 11am to 5pm

From Our Archives is the first exhibition in The Modernist Society’s new dedicated exhibition space at 58, Port Street. As 2019 is the 10th anniversary of the formation of the society, this exhibition features some of the team’s favourite items from the organisation’s project archive.

A residency at Manchester’s ‘Toastrack’ unearthed original blueprints as well as photographs of staff and students dating back to its early days as the ‘Domestic and Trades College’ with fashion shoots on the roof and butchering courses in the kitchens.

A long standing love affair with the UMIST Campus led the Society to unilaterally declare it as a Conservation Area in 2012. The Society became ‘uninvited artists in residence’ at the Campus and after awarding ‘degrees’ from their own Modernist University they designed and planted plaques and created a map to honour the very best cluster of 1960s architecture in the city.

In 2011 the team came up with a daft idea of publishing a magazine. Thirty issues, five designers and hundreds of contributors later, all the issues of the modernist magazine will be on display but please don’t ask to buy issue number one. 

Conceived and curated by Jack Hale, Eddy Rhead, Ashiya Eastwood, Matt Retallick

Published December 2018.

A guide to Birmingham’s best twentieth century buildings.

Initial research and concept by Michael Dring with students of the Birmingham School of Architecture & Design as part of Co.Lab 2017-18.

Text by Michael Dring

Images by Michael Dring unless otherwise stated

Archival material courtesy of Birmingham & Five Counties Architectural Association

16 pages A5 with foldouts.

[Now sold out.]

Special Thanks to:

minima & d line eisenware

In October 2018 we worked alongside Our Favourite Places to present Sheffield Modern.

Faded social housing utopias and fortress-like electricity substations. Iconic theatres and university tower blocks, all concrete and breeze blocks and glass. Pioneering post-war civic buildings, long-since demolished and to many sorely missed. Sheffield's experiments in modern architecture have played a significant role in defining the skyline and character of the city. This October, the first Sheffield Modern will celebrate this heritage of post-war architecture with a programme of talks, walks, film screenings, exhibitions, workshops and more.

Taking place over 26-28 October, the weekender aims to open up conversations about modern architecture in Sheffield – its merits as well as its minefields. It'll look at the past and present of the city's public realm, and get people thinking about the shape of Sheffield in new ways.

Following a very special launch event (details coming soon) there'll be an evening bike ride to modernist landmarks, talks hosted by the Sheffield Modernist Society held within the beautiful 1950s interior of Victoria Hall, tours behind the scenes at the Crucible, workshops for kids (big and small) to create their own cityscapes from cardboard or Lego, and much more.

Come back in early September for full details of the programme.

#SheffieldModern

Sheffield Modern - organised by Our Favourite Places.

In June 2018, working in partnership with the Twenrieth Century Society NW Group, we celebrated the 100th anniverary of the birth of sculptor Mitzi Cunliffe by dedicating a plaque on her former home in Didsbury, Manchester.

This was follwed by a talk and conversation to commemorate the centenary of the ‘Sculptor for Architecture’ with Professor Ann Sumner and Antonia Cunliffe Davis

Ann Sumner will introduce the work of Mitzi Cunliffe, designer of the iconic BAFTA trophy mask, created while the artist was living in Manchester in the 1950s. She will trace her career from her early years in New York, through to her commissions for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and her art works for Liverpool and Leeds universities. 

The city is fortunate to have a number of important works by her including Threshold at Manchester High School for Girls, the Heaton Park Pumping Station relief (Grade II listed), Man and Technics: Fire and the Wheel for Wythenshawe West Secondary Technical School (now Manchester Health Academy) and the dramatic fibreglass Cosmos I wall sculptures at Owens Park, Universityof Manchester. 

The talk coincides with the installation of a commemorative plaque on the house in Didsbury which was her home and studio (located in the former garage). It was here that she made a remarkable series of sculptures and also designed textiles and ceramics. There has recently been an increased interest in Mitzi Cunliffe’s work, culminating in the inclusion of her work in exhibitions this year in Leeds and Newcastle and the inaugural exhibitor in BAFTA’s Female Firsts. 

The lecture will be followed by an informal discussion between Ann Sumner and the artist’s daughter Antonia, who recalls life while in Manchester and offers a personal perspective on her mother’s achievements as a sculptor.

Professor Ann Sumner is currently researching Cunliffe’s life and work and curated the exhibition on her in Leeds in 2016. Antonia Cunliffe Davis studied architecture and has worked as curator, designer and consultant in the visual arts and design.

Organised bythe Twentieth Century Society, Northwest in collaboration with the Modernist Society. Funded by generous support via Crowdfunder.

(images © Estate of the Artist)

Venue: The Whitworth Art Gallery, Oxford Road, Manchester, M15 6ER

From The Archives, published by The Modernist Society in March 2018,  is a collaboration with the MMU Special Collections presenting images from their Visual Resources Library slide collection.

Together with Dr Richard Brook of the Manchester School of Architecture, we have curated a series of 6 photobooks each focussing on post war new towns and social housing. The majority of these images are rarely seen and have never been in print before. The images are historical, from the 1960s and 70s, and were scanned from the original slides.

The individual books are beautifully litho printed in full colour and are themselves limited edition.

We will release one book a month between April and September 2018 and also all six books in a box set - hand numbered and limited to 100.

The individual titles are:

Cwmbran

Peterlee

Hulme

Hyde Park Sheffield

Runcorn

Skelmersdale

These photobooks were curated from slides that are part of Manchester Metropolitan University’s Special Collections. They were housed in the Visual Resources Centre that was created from a number of distinct image collections, the largest of which was the Manchester School of Art’s former slide library. Begun in the mid 1960s and built-up in direct response to the visual needs of lecturers and students in the pre-digital art school, the collection comprises over 275,000 analogue slides covering most of the subject areas then taught within the School, including large sections on architecture and urban planning.  Whilst many of the slides in the collection were made by copying images in various printed sources, a significant proportion are unique and original photographs taken by members of staff or, occasionally, by students. Among these original slides there are thousands of images of buildings, streets and spaces. Usually, as with the images presented here, the photographers were intent on recording new and emerging features in the built environment - the redevelopment of towns and cities, the construction of new towns, suburbs and major housing projects.  In doing so, they created a quirky but compelling visual archive of physical, infrastructural and social change in the last four decades of the twentieth century.

Collectively the images we have curated have an amateur feel that at times verges on the banal and, regularly, the seemingly mundane. It is these very qualities that make them interesting. Though perceptibly boring, there is a utility in the specialism of the subjects captured. They are from an era of new development when Britain was at the vanguard of planning and devising new ways of living for the motor age and the rise of the consumer. Whether streets-in-the-sky or Radburn inspired cul-de-sacs, reports about the state sponsored mass housing schemes were published in a multitude of languages, which allowed others to learn from Britain’s experiments. These photographs served a purpose; they were learning aids used by lecturers - some were captured by lecturers and others by staff photographers. As such, the apparently banal images of corridors, garages, bin bags, estate pubs, playgrounds, gantries, bridges and repetitive housing clusters all had a reason attached to their production. Alone, any single image in this extended series may be so dull as to call to question its inclusion, together they offer a curated view of the operation of a town: its refuse collection; its circulation; its security; its vistas; its leisure; its space. In drawing together these sets and curating the images presented here we aim to celebrate the quotidian nature of the slides themselves and the mainstream production of housing in post-war Britain. The series asks what the everyday has to reveal about the society that produced both the space and the record of the space. These photographs offer a view of normality that has at its heart politics, a social agenda and a spatial ideology enshrined in lived experience.

We have made every attempt to preserve the qualities of the original photos. The images haven’t had marks removed and haven’t been cropped or straightened. There has been some colour balancing and a little tonal adjustment for print, especially on those shots that were under or overexposed. The honesty of film as a medium that reacts to light and time is core to our passion for this series.

Full Colour Litho Print on Munken Smooth supplied by G F Smith

Curated by Dr Richard Brook and The Modernist Society

Designed by Birthday

Printed by Evolution Print

32pp

148 x 210 mmm A5

Images © MMU Special Collections and not to be reproduced without permission

Adventures in the Land of Modernism

We're off on a new adventure with issue 1 of our worldwide tour of Modernist hot spots.

Take a trip around the world from east to west and back again. Stop off at various locations where you can find interesting pockets of Modernism.

Sixteen correspondents share personal experiences of their travels.

1. Gdynia - Jameson Kergozou
2. Belgium - Connely/Steele
3. Salgótarján - Dr Luca Csepely-Knorr
4. Viewmasters - Jon Riley
5. Belgrade - Richard Brook
6. E1027 - Sarah Hyde
7. Munich - Eddy Rhead
8. Viet Nam - Mel Schenk
9. Basel - Sarah Feeney
10. Melbourne - Aly Stevenson
11. Vancouver - Nicole Sylvia
12. Barcelona - Monk Kollektiv
13. Chandigarh - David Quinn
14. Tallinn - Aidan Turner Bishop
15. Toronto - Gerard Barry
16. Poznan - Peter Halliday

So take a trip to magical Modernist lands - be inspired and pack your swimming trunks - we are off on our Adventures in Land of Modernism.

Beautifully designed by Jonathan Hitchen in Manchester

Paper kindly supplied by G F Smith in Hull

Printed by Evolution in Sheffield

Colour

123 pages

240 x 175mm

Litho Print

ISSN: 2516-3469

£15.00

Available now..  Adventures in Land of Modernism.

Imagine being able to encounter a building on a street where the building no longer exists, but once stood. Imagine being able to enter that building and to walk through its spaces and hear the stories hidden in its walls. A 3D virtual model could contain surviving architectural drawings of the buildings, digitised from archive sources – a viewer could walk at a scale of 1:1 through the architectural drawings; it could host still images embedded within the model; it could carry oral histories literally within its walls. This project imagines the creation of a model that can recreate a rich and layered version of a building and bring it to life through the collation of social, cultural, technical and visual archival sources. A building that becomes more than the sum of its parts and has more to impart than it ever did when it was alive.

In 2017 the modernist society was a partner in ‘The Life of Buildings’ a project to enable people to ‘encounter virtual buildings, which no longer exist, in the space where they used to stand.’

This project looked at the Manchester Reform Synagogue on Jacksons Row in Manchester city centre.

Despite being a remarkably well preserved and very early example of post-war reconstruction, this 1950’s synagogue was turned down for listing by Historic England and is scheduled for demolition.

The project was led by Dr Richard Brook and initiated by Manchester School of Architecture and funded by the AHRC.

Dr. Richard Brook, Dr. Kevin Tan, a computer scientist and Dr. Ben Edwards, an archaeologist led the project from Manchester Metropolitan University. The funding allowed them to work with Oxford Archaeology North, who have considerable experience in drone based photography and its conversion into three-dimensional models, using a technique called photogrammetry.

“We asked if the synagogue would be part of this research for two main reasons, the first being that the whole area is subject to development speculation. If development proceeds, the synagogue will be demolished, so in that sense it was a good case study. The Principal Investigator, Dr. Richard Brook, Manchester School of Architecture, and The Modernist Society were both interested from a historical perspective – Richard is a specialist in post-war British architecture. The synagogue was the first new building in Manchester city centre after the Second World War. It replaced a much earlier building (1858) at Park Place to the north of Victoria Station that was destroyed by an enemy bomb in 1941. This added to the historical interest and strengthened the argument for the synagogue as a case study.

The digital output of the project is twofold – this website, which will continue to act as a way to share its onward development, and a VR experience, best encountered in a headset, but accessible via web platforms. Both the website and the VR are intended as repositories for digital and digitised information from a range of sources. Of course, making digital copies of maps, photos, plans, audio and film and presenting them online is not new, the site is intended as a record of this activity. What is new however, is the idea of hosting digital material within the same 3D space as the building.

the life of buildings can be experienced here

In Manchester Modern we present 111 buildings of the twentieth and early twenty first century lovingly photographed and researched by Richard Brook. It is conceived as a field guide, small enough to fit in your pocket, but weighty enough to know its merit. The book's designer Vaseem Bhatti is an artist of pedigree defining the distinctive visual identity of Warp Records’ Lex Records, and Manchester’s Skam Records.

Manchester Modern is a labour of love. Richard Brook began the project in 1996 with a Samsung compact camera, bought from the Argos catalogue – it had the most features and the most extensive zoom range for the cheapest price. He is honest when he states ‘I had no idea what I was doing’; fortunately, he continued. He knew that his fascination with things others found ugly would be worthwhile one day.

This publication has been promised and considered for a long time and has regularly stalled due to lack of funds and an unwillingness on his part, and that of Vaseem Bhatti (the designer), to compromise over the design and manufacture of this guidebook. It is conceived as a field guide, small enough to fit in your pocket, but weighty enough to know its merit. Times have caught up with Richard and what he once considered obscure and rare groove is now (as you know) populist and media friendly. Regardless, the honesty and integrity of this project as a printed and published object is retained and this single opportunity to buy into 20 years of work by one of the leading thinkers and researchers of mainstream modern architecture is presented here.

Steadily, Richard has built a reputation in academic circles and amongst aficionados as a passionate and informed expert in the architecture of the region and of the provinces. That isn’t to say he doesn’t like London, but there’s an established and ready focus upon the architectural narratives of the capital and a distinct sense that the provinces have long been understudied and underexposed. In Manchester Modern we present 111 buildings of the twentieth and early twenty first century, lovingly photographed and researched over, as stated, the last twenty years.

Vaseem is an artist of pedigree and defined the distinctive visual identity of Warp Records’ hip-hop off shoot, Lex Records, as well as being instrumental in the definition of Manchester’s Skam Records and their aesthetic presence in virtual and printed media. He founded EHQuestionmark and has worked with Richard in one form or another for the best part of fifteen years. This coming together of academic and artist has been made possible by the Modernist Society and we are proud to be able to aid Richard and Vaseem in finally delivering this publication, that is long overdue.

The buildings contained in this catalogue have each been visited at least three times by Richard to attain the correct light conditions for his photography. The retrieval of contemporary journal articles in relation to each has meant numerous trips to the RIBA Library in London to access material no longer held in Manchester. The working hours attached to the delivery of the content, let alone the post-editing and design, run into the thousands and in honesty Richard is unable to quantify just what proportion of his life this has consumed.

Three editions were published with a carboard, PVC and concrete covers.

Published by The Modernist Society with the support of 261 crowd fund backers, Fielden Clegg Bradley Studios, Johnny Marr and the Heritage Lottery Fund.

10 Buildings

10 Boroughs

20th century Architecture in Greater Manchester

We challenged the public to seek out their top ten 20th century buildings in Greater Manchester, one from each Borough.

We posted suggestions on a dedicated website, adding a new borough to our site each week.

And in May and June of 2017 we took two bus trips to visit ten buildings across Greater Manchester, hurtling through five boroughs on each trip. Some are in fine fettle and in productive use, others are neglected and empty.

GM10 was a Modernist Society project and part of the Manchester Metropolitan University Humanities in Public Festival 2016/17

We visited: Turnpike Gallery, Leigh, Wigan; Lancaster Halls, Swinton, Salford; The Octagon Theatre, Bolton; Civic Centre / Queen Elizabeth Hall, Oldham; Hopwood Hall Chapel, Rochdale; St.Raphael the Archangel, Tameside; Stopford House, Stockport; Essoldo Cinema, Trafford; St. Nicholas Burnage, Manchester.

Greater Manchester is a metropolitan county in North West England, with a population of 2.8 million.It encompasses one of the largest metropolitan areas in the United Kingdom and comprises ten metropolitan boroughs: Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford, Wigan, and the cities of Manchester and Salford. Greater Manchester was created on 1 April 1974 as a result of the Local Government Act 1972; and designated a City Region on 1 April 2011.

Thanks to:

Manchester Metropolitan University - Humanities in Public

Jacob Critchley

Helen Darby

Jack Hale

Eddy Rhead

¶ this is a journey through the years that transformed victorian industrial manchester into the modern european city that stands today. through a series of prominent buildings we will travel from the emergence of the welfare state in the 1950s; through the optimistic white heat of technology in the 60s; the rise of services and finance over manufacturing in the 70s; arriving at the 1980s consumer culture that brings us to the present day.

¶ the story told by the buildings on this haphazard ramble through the city is clearly mancunian but the themes would no doubt be the same in provincial cities across the united kingdom. some of the buildings would even share the same names. the story is one of enforced devastation by war, followed by the planned devastation of redevelopment. optimistic and visionary masterplans becoming watered-down with piecemeal making-do and mending. well-intentioned investments in the future becoming rapidly obsolete, technically and politically. global shifts in capital reflected in the urban fabric and inflicted upon the lives of ordinary citizens. the upshot is that this recent history can be told, but better still experienced and seen, on a daily basis. the fundamental influences of the past century can be read from the edifices around us, reminding us of both the mistakes of the past and the continual human endeavour to create something better than what went before . . .

In a nod to iconic Manchester band Joy Division, ‘Decades’ tells the story of Manchester’s architectural evolution using track names from the bands seminal albums, ‘Unknown Pleasures’ and ‘Closer’. Like a soundtrack accompanying the publication, track names ‘Isolation’, ‘An ideal for living’ and ‘She’s lost control’ act as headings that capture poignant moments in the city’s redevelopment.

This is a limited edition publication celebrating the architecture of Manchester's post war decades. A collaboration between writer James Thorp, photographer Emily Marshall and designer Jonathan Hitchen

Published by the Modernist Society, this is the second of three publications to be produced in 2016/17 celebrating and investigating twentieth century architecture in Manchester with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund. With special thanks to G.F.Smith Papers.

Limited edition of 300 available here

200x 120mm

36 pages with fold out timelines and photographs

ISBN: 978--9955481--38

April 4 - May 31, 2017,  Central Library, Manchester

Cheadle, Stockport, Greater Manchester 1962 – and the grey post-war fug of austerity is blown away, almost forever. Though very much a local enterprise their toys, games and puzzles display a strong European influence and were distributed globally.

Educational in nature, non-gender specific, simple, bold, well constructed, collaborative not competitive – employing sound modernist principles and design, they were at that time almost unique in the UK toy industry.

James Galt & Co Ltd. were established in Manchester in 1836 as a manufacturer and publisher of educational books and toys, relocating to Cheadle in 1956.

Ken Garland had worked for the influential Abbatt Toys, formed in 1931 by Paul and Marjorie Abbatt. Paul and Marjorie had collaborated with Modernist architects Oliver Hill and Ernő Goldfinger – committed to designing and producing educational childrens’ toys influenced by the new European movements in art and design.

Paul emphasised the importance of play, described as:

‘A force which can be used for development and valuable experience, a force which, if it is not thwarted by the wrong choice of playthings, develops into the power behind the successful architect or engineer.’ 

In 1955 Edward Newmark, who had established the Astu Studios toy company, was taken on as a junior partner by Paul and Marjorie. He remained only five years, leaving in 1960 to go to James Galt and Co. Ltd. He was joined the designer Ken Garland, who, between 1958 and 1961 had designed the Abbatts’ catalogues and advertisements, creating their distinctive house style.  His practice Ken Garland & Associates, formed in 1962, employed a small rotating group of designers over its 47-year period. Prior to forming the studio, Garland worked with editor Michael Farr at Design magazine, where he held the position of art editor from 1956 to 1962.

Ken set about smartening up the Cheadle based company, hauling it into the heart of the Modernist Sixties, the company name shortened to GALT TOYS and a sharp new Swiss style typography was adopted. Together they created flexible corporate identity, which as Ken says: they were determined not to let the Galt Toys logo become a sacred cow, not to be mucked about with.

‘It would, indeed, be mucked around with, but only by us.’

The style was maintained consistently for 20 years. The letterforms chosen for GALT TOYS were from a very recently issued typeface, Folio Medium Extended. The Folio type family was the creation of the Bauer Type Foundry, Frankfurt, then a close rival to the Helvetica and Univers type families.

The product line which encompassed a whole range of educational toys, games, school fixtures and fittings henceforth embraced a Scandinavian ethic of clean functionality and truth to materials. Though central to the reshaping of the brand, Ken is keen to emphasise that this was a collaborative process, involving several other designers within a flexible team.

The toys and games were modern in very sense, child-centred, none gender-specific, simple bright and colourful – employing simple graphic shapes, illustration and type, attractive and durable. The newly designed shop in Carnaby Street, with Verity & Beverley as architects, and a retail/factory/café in Cheadle were equally forward thinking in design and layout, purposely encouraging children to play with the stock, prior to possibly purchasing.

His ancillary work on the design of packaging, catalogues and in-store graphics was similarly ground-breaking, mixing image and text, very much in the mid European manner, pioneered by the likes of Max Bill and Richard Paul Lohse.

Connect exemplifies the best of Garland and Galt, twelve squares of card each with a simple linear motif, which can then be combined in a succession of seemingly infinite permutations – following a simple set of rules, the players can then produce a carpet covered in exciting abstraction. The connection to Harry Beck’s London Underground map is clear, Ken wrote and published Mr. Beck’s Underground Map in 1994, a tribute to the clarity, functionality and modernity of good design. This imaginative use of a single unitwhich continually unfolds from limited graphic means to limitless possibilities, was further developed in Ken’s Trap Snap and Anymals.

‘Bob Chapman and I spent a lot of time developing Connect, based very loosely on dominoes, which turned out to be a best-seller, and still is, in a modified form now produced by Ravensburger Spieleverlag of Germany.  Another associate, Daria Gan, found a most satisfying outlet for her drawing skills in the card games Anymals and Upside-Down Jigsaws.’

Octons was designed by William Edward David Ryan, he was educated at Preston Grammar School and Harris Technical College/School of Art pursuing architecture. He became a member of Royal Institute of British Architects in 1965 and a partner in Derby Fazackerley Wood & Ryan Architects, Preston from 1965-1993. It is an eight sided modular construction toy manufactured in clear, coloured plastic, a slot cut into each face, permitting their interconnection in a mind boggling array of three dimensional forms. Further exemplifying the principles of simplicity and inherent stimulation of the child’s fertile imagination and explorative creativity. It is one of the few Galt games which has remained in production until the present day.

Fizzog remains a firm favourite, a fabulous name, a fabulous game of many faces. Pairing pairs of halved fizzogs, the better to produce ever more inventive and laughter inducing visages.

Kenneth Townsend was based in Hastings and worked as a freelance designer for Galt along with Hornsea Pottery, Chance Brothers, Cuckoo Bird Productions and Merit. His lively and stylised illustrative style enlivens both Super Snap and Remember Remember – these were produced, alongside several other matching games in the golden age of Galt. Employing yet again the use of strong graphic shapes, bold colour and a happy go lucky playfulness that were central to the company’s output. Developing shape recognition, numeracy, colour identification and a simple love of the visual world through play and fun.

So for some twenty years Galt and Garland et al injected some much needed life into an otherwise moribund world of play, their catalogues and products finding a way into the majority of Britain’s schools and homes, from Bauhaus to your house.

Many thanks for the loan and/or sourcing of exhibits to Wayne Astbury, Dawn Bunnell, Gemma Burgess, Paul Burnett, Sue Cook, Gail Eagle, Alison Heffernan, Sarah Moss and Alex Stone

Conceived and curated by: Stephen Marland & Natalie Ainscough

If you would like to see more images from this exhibition see Stephen Marland's blog page MODERN MOOCH

"Some buildings lie empty. Some are still busily in use.

UMIST the institution is no more but the physical campus is still pretty much intact. For now.”

Knowledge and Work is a photobook celebrating the UMIST campus at a time when its future is uncertain. Photographer Bill Ayres has collaborated with designers Jacob Critchley and Jack Glover to produce a book of photographs that celebrates the architecture and landscape of the University of Manchester North Campus formerly known as UMIST.

Published by the Modernist Society, this is the first of three publications to be produced in 2016 celebrating and investigating twentieth century architecture in Manchester with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund. With special thanks to G.F.Smith Papers.

128 x 175 mm

Printed on Munken Polar Smooth

120gsm text/300gsm cover

ISBN: 978--9955481--7

Edition of 300

Available now

Five distinct development areas of 1960s central Manchester, researched and recreated in a 3D environment and brought to life using a digital gaming engine to explore how the city would have looked if these proposals would have been built.

This is a research project produced by the Masters students of Manchester School of Architecture in collaboration with the Manchester Modernist Society. The project explores an epoch in Manchester's recent history and focuses on five distinct areas in Manchester. Research on the historical developments in each district has been undertaken, and design visions from the 1960’s have been recreated.

The information is presented in a flowing time-line, allowing the user to explore the history from the beginning to the end in a chronological order, point by point.

The project is a unique insight into the Manchester’s alternative identity and an opportunity to discuss the possible benefits or downfalls from these schemes if they were to exist today.

June 6-24th 2016, Oxford House, Oxford Road, Manchester:

View Catalogue.

View Website.

We think we are familiar with Manchester’s skyline and city centre landmarks. But what about the alternative Manchester that might have been?

During the 1960s a vision of Manchester was being drawn up by property developers and town hall planners that only existed in architects drawings and consultant’s reports and was never realized in concrete and steel.

Manchester was booming and vast swaths of the city centre were scheduled for redevelopment for entertainment, shopping, education, office complexes and transportation. But as with many master plans, only portions of what was designed were actually built.

“The scale of development was overwhelming, almost the entire city centre was re planned”, says curator Richard Brook, Principal Lecturer at Manchester School of Architecture, noting that “six comprehensive development areas allowed developers to forget the piecemeal approach of the past, and to think big!”

In this exhibition, for the first time, visitors will be able to encounter the ‘unmade city’ – the master plans as they were intended to be. With guidance from the curators, five teams of Masters students from the Manchester School of Architecture have drawn from detailed maps, plans, sketches and archival sources to design and build 3D models of parts of the city that can be navigated using game controllers.

The original visions included wide areas of elevated pedestrian landscapes and sunken dual carriageways carving through the city, heliports, moving pavements and new transport infrastructure. Visitors to the exhibition will be able to walk, run and jump around these recreated visions and imagine the city as it never became.

“It was widely believed that the helicopter would make a big change to commuting in the 1960s”, according to University of Manchester geographer Dr Martin Dodge, “but they proved to be too expensive and too noisy to fly passengers into rooftop helipads.”

According to University of Manchester computer scientist Kevin Tan: “Game environments are becoming more versatile and this project pre-empts the forthcoming explosion of virtual reality and its wider application in all sorts of areas. Architecture is just one of the subject areas that we are working in.”

The five sites are the Cathedral area shopping zone, Central Station, Lower Mosley Street, the Education Precinct down Oxford Rd to the University and a proposed entertainment district between St Peters Square and Piccadilly.

There will be a free walking tour on Saturday, June 11. Also on display will be a website that explains the detailed history of each site, what was there before the 1960s, what was planned and what was eventually built. Images of archival material will also be shown to reveal the leading edge urban design of the period in all of its utopian optimism.

“The streets in the sky proposed for all over central Manchester were intended as new, clean and traffic free spaces for the future citizens” says Jack Hale, director of the Modernist Society "but our walking tour will be down on the ground."

The exhibition has been conceived and curated by Richard Brook, Kevin Tan and Martin Dodge in collaboration with The Modernist Society. Richard is a Principal Lecturer at Manchester School of Architecture, Manchester Metropolitan University, Kevin is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Game Design and Development and Martin is a Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Manchester School of Environment, Education and Development. The exhibition will be presented as part of the Manchester Histories Festival 2016.

The exhibition is generously supported by Bruntwood and will be presented as part of the Manchester Histories Festival 2016.

The exhibition has also been supported by the Manchester Metropolitan University, The University of Manchester, The Manchester School of Architecture, Hawkins Brown and BDP.

Press:

The Guardian

Manchester Evening News

An exhibition of archive and contemporary photographs of Manchester’s 20th century urban fabric selected from a year long programme of volunteer led activities by the Manchester Modernist Society. The exhibition is divided into four parts: Hulme; Manchester 60s & 70s; Sacred Suburbs and Mooch.

Hulme: When the Crescents were new – photographs of 1970s Hulme from the Manchester Metropolitan University Visual Resource Centre Manchester: 60s & 70s: Archive photographs selected from the Manchester Metropolitan University Visual Resource Centre. Sacred Suburbs: Archive images of Manchester‘s post war places of worship, selected by Angela Connelly and Matthew Steele from their ongoing research and blog ‘Sacred Suburbs’ and Mooch: Contemporary photographs taken by Stephen Marland whilst mooching around Greater Manchester, on a mission to photograph the vernacular and the unspectacular.

For more information click here.

Conceived and curated by Jack Hale & Eddy Rhead, with Angela Connelly, Matthew Steele, Stephen Marland, John Davies and Hannah Neate.

Souplesse, a one off publication celebrating the history and visual culture of cycling.

32 pages
Full colour
Printed on 55gsm newsprint via www.newspaperclub.com so you can stuff it up your jersey after you have read it should you find yourself on a long and cold descent.
Mini tabloid size - 180mm x 260mm

Conceived and edited by Eddy Rhead

Contents:

David Dunnico - The t'fosi - a photographic celebration of the British bike fan - less passionate but no less dedicated than their Italian counterparts

Trevor Ward - Death or Glory - looking at the roadside memorials to fallen cycling heroes

Eddy Rhead - 333.3 - an architectural history of the Olympic velodrome

Rik Moran - In The Shadow of Olympia - photographer Rik Moran visits the faded glory of Athens Olympic velodrome

Matthew Steele - Utility, Durability and Beauty - Matthew takes in the Krylatskoye Sports Complex Velodrome and its adjacent purpose built road race course

Jonathan Hardman - Call of the Clarion - a photographic study of the root and branches of cycle racing with Stockport Clarion CC

Rob Hyde - 'Where Are We Even Going?' - a cycle ride out east through London's bleak edgelands

Neil Grunshaw - Smooth as Silk - why on earth do amateur cyclists shave their legs?

Steve Marland - A Trip into Dreamland - a photographic journey along the south east coast from Hastings to Cleethorpes

Bill Mather - The Fastest Legs You Ever Saw Move - a history of Reg Harris ,and the stadium that was named after him, told through assorted memorabilia

See what The Newspaper Club say here.

Sacred Suburbs is celebration of post-war places of worship in the hinterlands of Manchester.

If you were to think of post-war churches in Manchester, you might think of the magnificent William Temple Memorial Church in Wythenshawe or St Raphael the Archangel in Stalybridge.  Our aim is to unearth examples by lesser known architects and artisans. Our  journey will take us from from Langley to Longsight possibly via Chadderton, and perhaps with a brief detour to Chorlton-cum-Hardy.

Whilst we admit that there is a certain amount of “churches we like” governing the selection criteria, we will focus on those which offer architectural interest. Otherwise, it may just tell an interesting story. Demolished churches may be included.

We’ve tried to be inclusive but, given religious trends at the time, the list will be dominated by Roman Catholic and Church of England examples.

The project is a collaboration between the Manchester Modernist Society and researchers Angela Connelly and Matthew Steele.

Sacred Suburbs publication available here.

Sacred Suburbs

Ever had a little faith?

Sacred Suburbs a one-day event celebrating and debating the architecture of Manchester’s post-war places of worship (1945-1975).

Along with new estates and inner city high-rise developments, the post-war period witnessed an unprecedented increase in the provision of places of worship as the main faiths competed for attendance from newly-established communities. The period also coincided with a major shift in liturgical thinking, and saw some of the country’s most renowned architects engaged in church design. In Manchester alone, examples can be found by architects such Basil Spence, George Pace, and Adrian Gilbert Scott.

The day will begin with talks from our invited speakers including Robert Proctor (author of Building the Modern Church: Roman Catholic Church Architecture in Britain, 1955 to 1975); Anthony Grimshaw (of the architectural practice Anthony Grimshaw Associates); and Phil Griffin (well-known broadcaster and author of Manchester). This will be followed by an afternoon bus tour visiting some of Manchester’s finest post-war churches.

At St.Peter’s Chaplaincy, Oxford Road on 11th April 2015, the crowd was captivated by talks from Angela Connelly, Robert Proctor, Anthony Grimshaw and Phil Griffin.

Sacred Suburbs publication available here.

Sci-Eng50: an exhibition celebrating 50 years of sciences at John Dalton.

Opened by Harold Wilson in December 1964, the John Dalton Building heralded the dawning of a new age of UK technology. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of this landmark event, Manchester Metropolitan University, together with the Manchester Modernist Society and the North West Film Archive, collaborated on Sci-Eng50 – a public exhibition and programme of walking tours and film shows documenting the history of the people who helped to transform John Dalton College into a new university for the city of Manchester.

The exhibition featured architectural models and plans of what was to become the Manchester Metropolitan University campus alongside some curious ephemera discovered in the MMU’s archives, nooks and crannies.

SciEng50 was concieved and delivered by Dr.Steve Millington, Richard Brook, Jonathan Hitchen, Jack Hale and was a collaboration between the Manchester Modernist Society and Manchester Metropolitan University.

The exhibition took place at the Holden Gallery Cafe space 24.10.14 – 21.11.14.

Between July and December 2014, the Modernist Society presented six guest talks at Manchester Central Library.

These included:

Homes for Chenge - Phil Griffin:

From the garden suburbs of Wythenshawe and the mighty modernist ship of Kennet House, through to the prefabs of Tin Town and concrete of Hulme, Manchester has built it, pulled it down, and built it again. This event will explore the Homes for Heroes scheme, early 20th century settlements like Burnage Garden Village (once described by George Bernard Shaw as “the prettiest village in Manchester”) architects Joe Sunlight and Edgar Wood, 1970s Council Housing, Frazer Crane & George Best and social housing cooperative Homes For Change.

Twelve Views of Kensal House: The Film (shot on 16mm)

“Wyeth’s documentary investigates Maxwell Fry’s ideas when he designed one of Britain’s first modern flat complexes in London’s Ladbroke Grove. Fry’s views were basically well-founded, if a little blinkered and paternalistic, determined to create a better environment for working-class tenants. But what in the late ’30s was something of an idyllic community project, has become an archetypal North Ken wasteland, semi-derelict, under-funded, and devoid of any sense of purpose or friendship.

A fascinating look at the aims and effects of social architecture which is warmly human and sharply analytical, and which offers insights, by implication, on the changes in postwar British society.”

From the North - TV in Manchester:

Our very own Eddy Rhead co founder and co-director of The Manchester Modernist Society hosts our third Library Live event. This talk will not focus so much on the creative output of the television companies based in Manchester namely the BBC, ABC and Granada but more a narrative relating to the places these television companies inhabited and how their development in the second half of the 20th century symbolised and mirrored Manchester’s wider shift from an industrial to post industrial economy along with the changing nature of television.

Mapping Manchester's Cold War Tunnels -  Martin Dodge:

This talk focuses on a massive tunnel space built in the 1950s under Manchester city centre and maps out its meanings through different periods of time and perspectives: official secrecy, technical obscurity of service space, securitised critical infrastructure, and conspiratorial obsessions.

The tunnel complex, known by its code-name ‘Guardian’, was conceived as a site of atomic-bomb resistant telecommunication equipment and given the large scale expenditure to construct it 30 metres beneath city streets it clearly had strategic importance to the British Government in terms of advancing its Cold War doctrine.

Oxford Road, the promise, planning & problems - Richard Brook:

This talk will examine the evolution of the Oxford Road corridor in the years after 1945. A series of masterplans were produced from 1945-1967 by a number of different architectural practices and in close consultation with city officers and officials. Each successive plan had its own focus that was reflective of planning policy and theory as it changed with rapidity in the post-war years. Through the built, unbuilt and partially constructed edifices of these plans Richard will show how aesthetic and policy combined in the production of social space in an era of technological progress.

Saving Preston Bus Station: This talk by Sally Stone will focus on Gate 81, a multi-disciplinary series of projects that supported the case to Save Preston Bus Station. Preston Bus Station, generally regarded as one of Britain’s most remarkable Brutalist buildings was scheduled for demolition by Preston City Council. In 2013 Gate81, alongside a strong local campaign and a (third) and successful listing application to English Heritage finally secured a future for the ‘biggest bus station in Europe”.

The Toastrack, also known as the Domestic & Trades College, or the Hollings Faculty of Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), now stands empty.

As MMU prepared to relocate to the city centre, Manchester Modernist Society spent a year at the Toastrack and delved into the archives. Architecture, fashion, and even a mysterious skeleton all lurk within.

Most of our activities were captured on our Toastrack blog.

We also published and printed 'Toastrack an Unofficial History' - available here.

Written and researched by Nicholas James, Matthew Steele & Jack Hale.

Publication designed by Jonathan Hitchen.

Metro Modern, the Manchester Modernist Society’s free map & guide to Manchester’s Twentieth Century Architecture. With the help of our handy guide you will be able to tour the city by foot or on a free Metro Shuttle Bus – all our buildings are within a short hop of Manchester’s three Metro Shuttle Bus routes.

The map includes important Modernist buildings such as the 1939 Daily Express Building and the 1962 CIS Tower as well as some less well recognized buildings such as St.Augustine’s Church, All Saints and the ‘brutalist’ Hollaway Wall on London Road.

Maps are available for just the price of a postage – order on-line here.

Designed by Des Lloyd Behari & Dan Russell

this project kindly supported by The Heritage Lottery Fund and Museum of Transport Greater Manchester

Modernist pranksters confer guerilla conservation status on endangered sixties campus.

Founders of the Manchester Modernist Society, Jack Hale & Maureen Ward together position themselves as uninvited artists in residence of the University of Manchester and autonomously declare the UMIST campus as Manchester’s first Modernist Conservation Area, much against the inclinations of the Manchester City Council and the University Estates department. The campus, much of which was recently under threat of sale by the University, is not only judged by the artists to be of significance due to its architectural and sculptural qualities but also because of its place within scientific and mathematical modern history. It is this legacy that the artists seek to rescue from disregard and neglect.

This is their sketchbook…

The modernists rasied funds for this project by 'selling' degrees from the Modernist University. This crowd-sourced funding campaign later won a national award.

The degrees were awarded at the UMIST campus, followed by the planting of specially designed plaques commemorating each of the campus buidings.

The plaques and campus maps were designed by Lisa Barlow and Nick Yates. Thanks also to Sue Platt and Jonathan Hitchen of the Manchester School of Art.

CAMPUS was a Cornerhouse Micro Commission, supported by Paul Hamlyn Foundation

"Working with The Manchester Modernist Society on their CAMPUS project where they intended to unofficially declare the UMIST Campus a conservation area and to generally celebrate the Modernist architecture synonymous with the site.

Collaborative project with Lisa Barlow, where we worked alongside The Manchester Modernist Society to create material for the CAMPUS event. The day included giving out Modernist degrees to donors, walking tours around the campus where we planted Modernist plaques at some of the buildings and attaching customised crime scene tape.

Between us, we worked on a UMIST map, commemorative concrete badges and the plaques that were planted to celebrate each individual building.

More details of the event can be found here."

Nick Yates

A discrete intervention in concrete. Premiering the new track ‘Good Morning, Midnight’

The mms is delighted to have collaborated with Manchester based Lonelady on the creation of a new piece of music to be hermetically sealed into the Mancunian Way, one of our favourite modernist structures and the subject of several explorations since the society’s formation.

The music will be embedded into its structure and can be experienced via headphones (participants to supply their own) during the love architecture festival – or the life of the battery…!

A limited edition publication ‘TUP’, designed by Julie Campbell and Martin Greenwood, can be found at all MMS events during the festival to navigate you to this very intimate ‘concert’. TUP includes a passage by Paul Morley.

So grab your headphones and plug yourself in….

‘TUP’ can be located via a limited edition pamphlet available at MMS events during the RIBA festival. The music is accessible via a headphones input; the participant supplies her/his own headphones. Entombed in the structure, the music falls silent when the battery dies, and becomes an artefact / a relic / a piece of rubbish.

Julie Campbell was born lives and works in Manchester and is a Warp Records recording artist under the name ‘LoneLady’.

This commission was supported by the Women Make Music funding scheme delivered by PRS for Music Foundation. 

Sadly TUP fell silent on 23.06.2012. RIP.

No Rubbish Tipped Here

If there’s an empty space people will play in it!

The Secret Gardens Festival celebrates the rich creative talent in Salford and Trafford with a range of unique events taking place across the both areas, showcasing a diverse range of local undiscovered talent and creativity. The Festival will be taking place between Thursday 7 and Saturday 23 June 2012 in various locations across the region.

For the Secret Gardens Festival the Modernist Society is launching a series of four postcards illustrating pre-generated urban spaces which acted as alternative gardens and unlikely playgrounds for a generation of Salfordians. (The postcards are available online)

The images have been selected from an archive collated by the University of Salford from their intergenerational project ‘Salford in Pictures’. The images, taken by non professional photographers and local people, reveal beauty in unexpected places.

'a cities wondrous, eerie, unofficial gardens' The Guardian

photo credit:  ©  John Travis

M3 & Chapel Street

A meander as part of Sites of the Other City, a weekend of creative activity and events around Salford's Chapel Street, in May 2011. Exploring some of the M3 postcode's 20th century landscape, this project was inspired by the brilliant m3 magazine, distributed freely to everyone who lives and works in the area.

'We will take on the first leg of the walk then hand over to two of the people behind the magazine, Kevin and Hessel, who will lead us through the Islington estate opposite the cathedral, where we will see some of the history of the estate and hear about future plans for the neighbourhood.'

The map was designd by Robert Shadbolt and was featured as a centrefold in m3 magazine.

In November 2011, at 142 Chapel Street in Salford, we opened a temporary shop. We invited artists and designers to submit work with an architectural theme and we kept the shop open until Christmas of that year.

Prints, posters, etchings and tea towels were all for sale. The glass cabinets were the result of an eBay purchase and a mammoth trip to Leigh on Sea.

A tea towel featuring Salford's Shopping City was an unexpected hit. The illuminated sign was loaned to us by artist Andrea Booker.

The success of the shop led us to continue selling publications and artwork on line - this helps to subsidise our on-going work.

Manchester’s Modernist Heroines

A project created through a collaboration between Manchester Modernist Society,  The Loiterer’s Resistance Movement, and The Shreiking Violet,  Thanks also to Manchester Metropolitan University.

A specially published 'zine and walking tour takes inspiration from ten remarkable women with connections to Manchester and the region. Whilst celebrating their achievements, we will also uncover hidden histories and power relations which have shaped the modern city.  We will share tales of explorers, aviatrixes, architects, artists and more to reveal the valuable role women have played in defining and resisting dominant perspectives of the city.

You can read more on the origins and background to the Modernist Heroines Project, by following  this link.

Alphabet City

A project inspired by the bold lines and beautiful shapes of Manchester as a modernist city and our very own a-z, this pocket gazetteer with its painstakingly drawn architectural prints takes the reader on a whistle stop tour of 26 twentieth century treasures from a to z.

Commissioned by the Manchester Modernist Society, designed by the Manchester Municiplal Design Corporation

Dan Russell sketched the 26 drawings, whilst Dominic Latham created the accompanying limited edition booklet.

The Manchester Kiosks

‘Conversations We Wish We’d Had’ a sound commission by Ailís Ní Ríain

As recognisable as the double-decker bus, as traditional as fish and chips, a familiar presence from Lands End to John o’ Groats, the red telephone box is a national treasure. In 2006 it was ranked amongst the British public’s top ten 20th century design icons, yet there are only five k6 telephone kiosks in City Centre Manchester.

In May 2010 the Manchester Modernist Society (MMS) premiered a newly commissioned sound installation specifically created for the Manchester Modernist Society and FutureEverything Festival by acclaimed Irish composer and sound artist Ailis Ni Riain, funded by Arts Council England. 

Ailis Ni Riain, the Irish classical composer and writer,combines her interests as a composer, sound-artist, producer and writer to produce works which challenge, provoke and engage. She is particularly interested in cross-discipline collaboration, public sound art, opera, music-theatre and presenting contemporary music in diverse spaces. She is a Composition graduate of University College Cork, with postgraduate degrees from the University of York, the University of Manchester and the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, where she also became the college’s first Junior Fellow in Education. Her Carnegie Hall debut took place in October 2008.

On the MMS Kiosk commission, she says,

‘I am fascinated by the idea of the old fashioned K6 telephone booths. I find them iconic, poignant, inspiring and intriguing. They are stunning in their own special way and I want to reflect them, their history, heritage and meaning through a new sound installation - a type of paean to a by-gone era. The concept for my work will be Conversations We Wished We Had. It will take the form of a sound installation combining spoken stories, cello, piano to form an electroacoustic sound-scape. The phone booths would have been, for many, a way of communicating those things we wished we had said. The listener will step inside the phone booth in the Courtyard of the Museum of Science and Industry and experience the piece. There are just four other remaining phone booths in central Manchester.’

The Manchester Modernist Society is an artist led project which aims to raise awareness and appreciation of Modern architecture & the urban environment, and related Modern art and design, in Manchester and the surrounding region. Their Manchester Kiosks project is an opportunity to highlight some of these issues through an event which will temporarily return the K6 to its heyday as a hub of communication, a fitting metaphor for our changing relationship with the public realm, our notions of shared space and sense of community

The MMS also commissioned a special poster to promote the commission, from Sheffield based designer welivehere.co.uk. The poster was sited beside the 2 kiosks at Library Walk, throughout the duration of the FutureEverything Festival.

On 4 May, long after the sun had set, a crowd of 100 people gathered outside the Odeon on Oxford Street. The former cinema, boarded up and unloved since 2004, was the designated location for a self-styled ‘guerrilla collaboration’ between three of the city’s artist-agitator organisations: Manchester Modernist Society, Manchester Municipal Design Corporation (which I admit I’m part of) and the Ultimate Holding Company.

Popcorn was handed out in custom-made boxes. A film that spliced nostalgic cinema snippets with actual Odeon footage, gleaned from the North West Film Archive, was projected onto the facade. Maureen Ward, one of the co-founders of the Manchester Modernist Society, talked up the Odeon’s story and why its demolition, to make room for a new office block, was a bad idea. Perhaps the crowd was moved by her words, or perhaps it was just the free popcorn, but by the end of the impromptu gathering everyone had inscribed their names on a petition raised in favour of retaining this Mancunian cinematic landmark.

Why should we care about this abandoned cinema, a building wedged between a 1970s block cleared for demolition and an unremarkable pub? It reminds us of Manchester’s past, a city that was mad about film (once being home to the most cinemas per head in the UK), and it is a place that remains, despite the dark blue boards blacking out its windows, beautiful.

Rumours swirl around the Odeon, too. The story goes that a bid to get the cinema listed in the 1990s, backed by the Cinema Theatre Association, was deemed unworthy due to internal alterations. But after the last film was shown in 2004, further investigations suggested that behind partitioned walls lay enough original features to warrant a renewed listing application. Those features mysteriously disappeared on the eve of the visit by English Heritage. With nothing left to list, a planning application for the building’s demolition was submitted.

There may be a final twist to this particular tale. The recession, and the resulting slowing-down of city centre regeneration, may just give the Odeon a breathing space. Behind its sub-divided internal walls the baroque style proscenium arch is still intact and worth preserving. Its neo-classical exterior provides much needed diversity to the streetscape – and that was the point of this late night gathering outside the Odeon. It’s not that regeneration is bad, but that the removal of buildings that make up a city’s character and heritage to make way for bland glass boxes and homogenized high streets is a terrible waste.

If regeneration slows, or even fails, then its by-product is the need to make alternative use of vacant buildings. And as the notion of sustainability filters through to the development sector, the idea of reuse rather than replacement begins to make sense – not just environmentally but also financially. The Cinema Theatre Association has suggested a multipurpose performing arts or conference venue as a suitable use for this former film palace. But how about a picture house for the North West Film Archive, a logical extension to the Cornerhouse, a larger Deaf Institute, or even a new home for Urbis?

Dan Russell is the Editor of Things Happen, the fanzine produced by Manchester Municipal Design Corporation (a spin off from MMU’s DesignLab). Images: Ade Hunter (main images) and Rich Brown.

This article originally published by Creative Tourist

An interactive map of Manchester's landmark modernist buildings has been launched today as part of this year's Manchester Architecture and Design Festival. The map, which has been produced by Manchester Modernist Society and Handforth-based architects Taylor Young and is on public display in Piccadilly Gardens, allows visitors to navigate their way through the city to discover four walking routes linking 70 landmark 20th century buildings.

The four themes highlight landmarks such as:

Bold – Toastrack, Kendals

Beautiful – Midland Bank, King Street, Central Library

Beleaguered – Odeon, Oxford Road, Manchester House

Brutal – Piccadilly Tower, City Tower, Mancunian Way

Maureen Ward, from Manchester Modernist Society, said: "20th century buildings are a key part of the city's rich architectural history and deserve to be recognised as such. They inhabit the spaces between the city's Victorian glory and the pastiche and bombast of post-millennium development."

"These buildings are too often overlooked and our map also identifies a number of buildings which have already been lost to the city and a number which are in grave danger of being lost."

"Our map shines a spotlight on to them and we hope that people will use it as a starting point to launch their own investigations into this wonderfully rich and productive part of the city's original modern history."

Lesley Gleave, from Taylor Young, added: "2010 marks the 150th anniversary of Taylor Young and we decided that to ensure that this landmark in the company's history is appropriately marked by sponsoring and hosting a number of events throughout the year.

The map forms the centrepiece of a free public exhibition held in the RIBA Architruck in Piccadilly Gardens from today until Friday (14 May) at 9am-5pm daily. The map then moves on to the FutureEverything exhibition at The Hive in Newton Street between 12-23 May.

Sadly - the map is no longer on-line.. unless you know different! If you can find it in the bowels of the internet, please get in touch.

Latitude

'The latest exhibition hosted by the Manchester Modernist Society, is a fresh and alternative insight into artistic map making. Inspired by the Society’s own collection of maps, the exhibition showcases the work of 12 local artists and designers whose cartographic creations evoke various forms of cultural expression throughout urban spaces in Manchester, Salford – and beyond the rainy cities.

As the exhibition demonstrates, mapping the modern city is not simply a question of charting its geographical boundaries. Instead, the artists seek to capture the variety of emotions, identities, and cultures within the city; to breathe life into depictions of its physical and cultural spaces. This approach is clearly evident in the work of exhibiting artist Daksha Patel. Patel’s creation Route Map re-imagines Manchester’s roads and waterways as an X-ray of pulsating blood vessels. The city’s communication systems become part of a larger living and breathing organism, whose vital vessels connect its many diverse and creative communities.

No Boundaries, a mixed media exhibit by the artist Mark Lomax, seeks to redefine the traditional geographic and social barriers which divide communities and nations. The artist combines fragments of real printed maps with wax, paint and plaster to create a less static conception of geographic frontiers. This novel form of a map challenges the traditionally held conception of national borders and social barriers as fundamentally fixed and unchanging facets of human society.

Indeed one of the most striking features of the exhibition is the political engagement of the artists. Created by the Ultimate Holding Company, a radical design collective based in the centre of Manchester, Heathrow Map was devised as part of the Greenpeace No Third Runway campaign. The map tracks the progress of the thousand-or-so planes which took off from Heathrow airport during a twenty-four hour period in 2007. The grey trails etched on the plain white surface of the map represent the inerasable effect of aviation industry pollution on the earth’s natural environment. As such, the map itself becomes a political tool which encourages its viewers to actively engage in the politics of climate change.

Emotive, evocative, and engaging from start to finish, this exhibition provides a fascinating insight into map making and urban society.'

Robin Macdonald (Mule Magazine)