Ancoats
By the end of the 18th century Ancoats in Manchester, one of the world's first
planned industrial suburbs, was in full steam. The area grew rapidly and the original grid plan became obsolete: roads were swallowed up, walkways and tunnels were built between individual mills which began to function as one complex. Cotton spinning and weaving in Ancoats never recovered from the 1920's depression, the last thriving trade was selling off all the machinery to India and Pakistan by the boatload in the 1960s. In 2003 when thisese artworks began the area's deep dark canyons provided a painful but evocative testimony to a lost era.
The permanent installations 'The Peeps' explore the presence of absence in the spaces' last moments as mills. They follow the journey of the 'ditchers' and the industrial archeologists as walled up rooms, tunnels and walkways were momentarily reopened. With insightful and candid testimonies from the last mill owners and residents before the regeneration took hold and also with key figures involved in the remaking of this forgotten industrial wasteland, this book bears witness to the reinvention of Ancoats as a contemporary suburb of inner city living.