Presupposed Actualization Wobble and the Rhizomes of Doubt in the City of Culture

By Trent Dunlop

Warrington, the market town between Liverpool and Manchester, is changing fast and daily, with the past, present and future existing at the same time: mixing, weaving and colliding together as it continues the story from town to City of Culture. A soup of instant history, spin and regeneration is taking place before your eyes as you walk the streets, and at the same time in cyberspace and on social media. I pick up my camera, notebook and pen, and hit the streets for another walk and update, ready to immerse myself in the narratives.

Walking past the chemical works, over the railway bridge and into the town centre I come to the Golden Gates in front of the town hall, Warrington’s ‘Jewel in the Crown’. Such a big fuss is made of these gates, with so many photos snapped and posed that I find them boring: a tourist type area, bringing pride for those who can see no wrong in the town. Some think of it as a rugby team to get behind and support with a ‘you are either with us or against us’ mentality. I walk past shops, and bars now start to appear as I approach the centre.

Two articles have appeared recently in the local press that indicate something is afoot and I want to find out more. The first, a letter from a reader entitled "Why I am worried about Warrington's Time Square". The second, a rant by a local journalist, which in my opinion feels patronizing, instructing us to "Give Warrington a chance" (to roll up our sleeves), and ending with a chilling Orwellian type message: "Remember negative thoughts can lead to negative outcomes". I turn left and into the Cultural Quarter.

I walk past The Lounge Bar, it still has Viola Beach written in chalk on the stonework where the shrine to the local indie band used to be. I pass Springfield Street Post Office and the ghostly figure in the upstairs window, and Palmyra Square with its interpretation boards and public spaces protection order signs. Also, the Parr Hall where the Knotty Ash big bass drum would bang every year when Ken Dodd visited: Diddy Men, jam butty mines, chuckle muscles and tickling sticks.

This is the upmarket area of the town. Posh restaurants and pop-up artisan food stalls, Dan Price and the embedded City of Culture bid. The local libraries saved by the public, 1848 the first town in the United Kingdom to open a rate-supported public library. I walk on towards the new multi storey car park.

The car park is a massive new structure covered in brown and gold hexagonal cladding, at present completely dwarfing the surroundings - the shock of the new and the shape of things to come. "We call it the Beehive", a man whispers in my ear as I stop to take some photos. It is up for a Peoples’ Choice Building of the Decade Award on BBC North West Tonight and has made the shortlist. One local journalist has promised to show his backside at Market Gate if it wins! It represents hyper-capitalism to me, and I wonder if it will become a design classic like Preston Bus Station or the National Theatre.

Opposite me is a large empty space surrounded by a ring of steel where the market used to be - the skeletal steel frame of the new multiplex cinema rising from the ground. The word ‘multiplex’ now feels dated, bringing to mind thoughts of action films and romcoms. What a wasted opportunity, we could have had a good arts centre instead. The whole area has been rundown, looking like 1970s ‘slum clearance’, with the buildings in Bridge Street looking so grotty that people have started photographing the top floors. Pound shops, cash converters and charity shops: there are now more coffee shops than ever, ready for the changing of the area into an entertainment zone. The only places busy in this area at the moment are McDonald's and Burger King: reassuring comfort food in the time of ‘austerity’.

But something has gone wrong, spending has plunged and growth plummeted to its weakest levels in more than five years as the ‘Beast from the East’ storm blew in battering the high street. Shop footfall nationally fell by 6%, mixed with a second wave of shop closures. I think of Fenella Brandenburg's “presupposed actualization”. And, yes, the new buildings do already exist but schizocartographic rhizomes of doubt have grown and spread, causing a presupposed actualization wobble with the illusion of the story unravelling. The city is a failure with the new buildings empty. I walk to Market Gate, seeing the dystopia that now exists. A budget of 1.8 million has been found to promote the town.

Market Gate is the centre of the town/city a crossroads with a bland circular water feature and the infamous skittles. Characterless 1980's style American Mall ornamentation, robbing the area of its roots and identity, embarrassment comes to my mind as I walk past, heading home.

Maybe it is a generational thing with the online shopping and click-and-collect revolution, but I do feel a bit nostalgic and sad as I walk past another pound shop, my memory superimposing the red Woolworths logo that used to be there. I see the newly empty Marks and Spencer store, unavailable, now, for people to pop in and buy a few groceries and comfortable underwear. The town is not fit for purpose if you can no longer buy what you want, I think to myself. I don't know whether I’m in a town or city anymore. A strange thought occurs to me that I need to regenerate myself like Dr Who!

I have always enjoyed catching the train and the excitement of visiting cities: will anyone want to come here? I walk past the remaining wall of the old Victorian Public Baths were I learnt to swim as a child, remembering happy times. Switching on the radio later, back at home, the news comes in that 450 jobs are at risk in the local Marks and Spencer Distribution Centre as it closes down and moves to another part of the country. The Trans Pennine express train will not stop here soon.The story continues...

Whitecross Road

By Trent Dunlop

Winter – cold, icy rain, damp air and mushy cardboard on the ground. I am walking home to my council flat after work at night along a path besides the dual carriageway. To my right cars whizz past as the traffic lights change - a 40 mph speed limit rarely kept at this time. Memories surfacing to mind, police stand (shielding a crumpled car), a squeal of brakes, a child's body flying in the air, a human chain protest and a pelican crossing is built.

To the left side of the path in the woodland of the local park, a banging noise starts, slowly at first then becoming increasingly louder. I look around. No-one else is near. I am on my own. What is it? A poltergeist? A noisy spirit? A mechanical pump? Looking past the belt of litter and moonlit silver birch trunks into the dark beyond, I cannot find an exact location or think of a rational explanation for the source of the sound, although I feel sure that there is one. Part of me wants to investigate but I decide to carry on home.

Whitecross Road Council Estate was built around the same time as the dual carriageway, in the early 70's when Warrington started to become a New Town. It has a bad reputation: a poverty premium landscape at the bottom of the never-ending austerity policy. A confusing maze of flats and houses, with narrow alleys, blind corners and jumbled numbers where postmen get lost. Designer tracksuit-wearing teenage gangs smoke skunk in the subway: ‘too cool for school’, living for the moment. An aura of hopelessness and defeat compacted in a screwed up lottery card a few metres away from an overpriced corner shop. Too bleak and clichéd for some, a difficult, mundane and ordinary area.

Morning hailstone frozen onto car windscreens, the texture of Whitefriar’s glass, the yellow triangle of a wheel clamp in a back alley. Closing the front door a flutter of panic and a pocket check for my keys. A frail looking old-aged pensioner with gold teeth and wearing a thick camel covered overcoat is struggling to put out his wheelie bin. Using the brick wall for support, he slowly makes his way back to the warmth of his flat. I wander on to the shops on Lovely Lane.

This is a multi-cultural area and is reflected by the types of shop on the lane. Full English breakfasts, pies and sandwiches, pizza, kebabs and halal takeaways, Philippine and Indian food, a Continental Bazaar. A canine and feline beauticians, a launderette (the front of which looking to me somehow hipster authentic reminds me of the trendy cocktail bar in Manchester that disguised itself as a launderette). Further down there is a church and an Islamic Centre. A teenager in a red hoodie is talking on his mobile phone. A Hells Angel mounts his bike and rides off. ‘JUST EAT’, a lurid sign seems to threaten, but I have lived in the area long enough to feel at ease in the place. An industrial clothing shop with a window display of hi-viz jackets.

Lovely Lane was once a country lane with rose-covered thatched cottages in this part. An old map from 1851 shows just 11 buildings situated in the lane, the lane dating back to at least to 1775, with Sankey Hall and an ancient water mill. Change feels slow, with people just going about their daily lives. The area still feels the same as when I was a child, time steadily ticking by, but it is happening constantly and I remember climbing the fresh sticky banks of earth as a child when the road was being built. The old Pavilion cinema (now used as a carpet shop) seems to be the most obvious sign of history. A survey of 1465 describes the Whitecross district as a suburb. Will the area become inner-city in the future? My mind projects the White cross into the middle of the giant roundabout with a funeral procession stopping there to rest at a time when burial grounds were not so numerous, the grass on the roundabout being the only reminder of Sankey Green.

The local pub once called The Mad Hatter has now been shortened to The Hatter, losing its Lewis Carroll connection. It used to be full on a Friday night, with workers from the nearby cake factory called Memory Lane. The cake factory itself now only existing in peoples’ memory and replaced by houses. ‘Will the city of culture bid make any difference to the people here and what art and music do they like?’, I think as I walk on. “Man critical after attack”, reads the headline of the weeks local paper. A gang of six of teenagers arrested for allegedly attacking him in the park and leaving him fighting for his life. Back home I wake up after falling asleep whilst reading a book. It is dark inside and outside the room, but by the sound of the traffic flow I can tell that it is rush hour around 6pm.

Later at night sad news comes over the radio that Mark E Smith the lead singer of The Fall has died. One of my favourite groups, I remember when they played the old Carlton Club in Warrington in 1979. I was only sixteen at the time and frustratingly not able to get in. Also I remember missing Joy Division at Eric's in Liverpool, as my friends did want to go that particular week, Karma coming to them the following year when U2 cancelled a gig at Salford University. On the radio the tributes start to come in and a quote by the late DJ John Peel stays with me: The Fall "always different, always the same ".

Slutchers Lane

by Trent Dunlop

The haulage lorries have left, the security has gone, the building is empty and the demolition has begun...

I have noticed the comings and goings of the Spectra warehouse on walks around Slutchers Lane. Slutchers Lane is an interesting place to visit, located within easy walking distance of Warrington town centre. It is a long straight road, about a mile in length, leading to a dead end. It cuts through the middle of the edgelands and margins, surrounded by the River Mersey.

In 2016 the deputy leader of the borough council called for the name to be changed after telling the executive board that in an online urban dictionary Slutcher meant ‘filth, dirtbag , and whore’. He was ridiculed on social media and it was commented that he was a ‘Muppet’. The name stayed the same.

A road to my right leads to Bank Quay Trading Estate. Colourful signs point to scrap yards, back street garages, a martial arts club, an animal welfare centre, and a go-karting warehouse. The road leads past Arpley Meadows railway sidings, under a railway bridge, ending at a path leading to an industrial landscape of chemical plants and the hidden transporter bridge.

I walk past the station overflow car park and the futuristic 1980s small business units. To my left is a restricted road leading to Centre Park, a bland generic business park with equally bland hotels and landscaped pond. The autumn leaves from the trees are covered in warm shades of rusty orange and yellow along the road. Coming to the gates outside the Spectra warehouse, two yellow Cat demolition diggers are parked inside the gates (covered in various warning signs), with a barbed wire fence on either side. All is quiet, with no signs of life this Sunday morning. The road fizzles out at a barrier and another set of locked metal gates, beyond which is an empty overgrown field surrounded by a bend in the river. To my right is a narrow path which leads between the field and the railway line, leading to a footbridge over a viaduct. I walk down this path and turn left onto the overgrown field and start walking across it to the far end. Two mounds of rubble on an oblong concrete patch are the only traces left of what was a golf driving range, along with a few half buried golf balls in the field.

A dip takes me down to the back of the warehouse, Am I trespassing? I have not had to climb over any fences or walls. The demolition is going quickly and the warehouse is vanishing fast A massive patch of concrete is covered in fresh rainwater, the surface reflecting the sky, and looking as if a new lake has formed overnight, giving a strange effect of walking across deep water.

I enter through a hole in a wall underneath a semi-destroyed roof and start exploring. To my left, as I enter, is line of machines looking like a robotic involuntary Picasso sculpture. I alter the settings on my camera as I enter the darkness, trying to get a few sharp photographs. There is not much left inside and this would be called a ‘Derp’ in Urbex language: an empty space with not much of interest. But it is not just about photographs, and thoughts start to percolate, random images, plus memories and the history of the area.

In the 1970s Warrington was an industrial town and this was part of Thames Board paper mills, employing at its height over 2000 people. I remember it had a large wharf on the bank of the river. The river was biologically dead and the most polluted in Europe, with warm water, factory effluent, chemicals and poisons killing the wildlife. The water was foul smelling, a dark claret colour, with a white foam on top which would blow around the street and Bridge Foot on a windy day. A time when workers were looked after by the company with a living wage, holidays and a Christmas bonus, with parties for the children, and a ‘do’ out to a club, like the Golden Garter in Wythenshawe, for a meal and to watch Bernard Manning. The clang of steel in the night, smoke stack chimneys, shops shut and a day of rest on a Sunday. A town of many industries, before closure in the early 1980s, followed by the days of sitting at computer screens in call centres and offices and 24/7 culture.

I walk through massive empty workshops, up gloomy staircases, bare offices, and smashed toilets. Twisted metal is everywhere, the silence is eerie and I lose track of time. Clusters of fire extinguishers have been put to one side ready for removal, and an architect’s framed sketch is next to the exit ready to be salvaged. Glass and tiles crunch underfoot, sounding loud and exaggerated, before a siren of a police car or ambulance travelling down Chester Road, signals that it is time to leave.

Today the River Mersey is a success story: with seals, otters and salmon recorded in the water, and itself the star of a television programme presented by Jeremy Paxman. But time keeps moving and wildlife is again under threat as Warrington plans to become a city, with loss of green belt and part of a nature reserve, and residents fighting against the council for the future of the area.

I head home with a camera full of instant history and another part of my A to Z map out of date...

Warrington Means Business

By Paul Hazlehurst

Walking inside out, explore, photograph, make notes
Warrington becoming a Schizocartian vision of rhizomes
Rhizomes of institutions accelerate the process
A man in a suit, bottled water on desk: ‘Moving Forward’
Council Masterplans, C.G.I

Utopia mediated through billboards, display banners, public consultations, questionnaires, local press...
...and Facebook groups
Psychic rhizomes: tangling, weaving, knotting...
...from one mind to another
Emotional Ley lines, multi coloured connections, the mask of the spectacle slipping
‘Keep the spin and gloss positive’

A town being bullied into a city: city of culture, garden city
‘24,000 new homes by the year 2037’
Bypasses, arterial link roads, riverside apartments, loss of green belt
Japanese Knotweed cracking the pavement
Bat surveys and money for ecologists

I walk along feeling slightly uneasy, a dark cloud forming on the horizon, a liminal time zone between demolition an regeneration, walking past empty shops and windows

Photographic images: a bricolage of the objective, subjective landscape
Urban decay, street photography, hidden places, art, historical documentation...
...ready to download and assemble at home