5. X MARKS THE SPOT: MAP MAKING
X: used to represent a number, or the name of a person or thing that is not known or stated.
‘A friend recently told me that he had just traveled through the region of Hartz, Germany, with the help of a map of the city of London, the directions of which he had followed blindly.’
— Guy Debord
Above is a Charles Booth-style poverty map of Manchester’s Red Bank slums - recently repaired and photographed having been overlooked for the past 130 years. The 1880’s map depicts dense conglomerations of dwellings, swathes of industrial warehouses, and is peppered with the ubiquitous ‘x’ - the Public House. Friedrich Engels, when writing about Red Bank in 1840, described the area as ‘utterly uninhabitable’. One can hardly orientate themselves through today’s city centre using this map. However, there is something productive in their comparison or superimposition: the investigation of their individual omissions and advancements. Furthermore, the earlier map forces one into uncharted territory, reappropriated spaces, and the shadows of a former Manchester life.
I took this map into the Red Bank area. Whilst the general skeleton of the map remained loosely intact, the labyrinthine slums were untraceable in the glass facades of apartment blocks and corporate lobbies. Where there had once been a row of gabled timber-and-plaster houses along Long Millgate, there was now Manchester Victoria Station car park - a 192-space monolith of asphalt. Where there had once been the Great Mill, only the namesake remained. The Sun Inn, a Public House, would have stood sandwiched between the two 1950’s red brick eyesores. Grainy images show the beamed structure to have jut out on the street’s corner. Taking the ‘x’ to mean Public House, forgotten treasure, and unknown quantity, I will explore the notion of reconstructing lost dwellings through concrete poetry - a practice with topography at its forefront.
