I have decided that I am going to use both the library site and the graveyard site.
I began to look at the two sites in relation to each other and to the surrounding area, especially Cheetham Hill Road. I noticed that both sites, although not in direct view of the high street, were well connected to it and therefore to each other. I was able to trace routes between the sites, one of them being a straight path, perpendicular to Cheetham Hill Road. I found this really interesting and I want to use this in my programme as it fits in with my manifesto and re-connecting through using the streets and creating street life.
Buckling down to work this evening, one of the things I really needed to work out was how to tie Lynch's 5 elements theory into my work. I have already made the connection between his 5 elements making up the city and our 5 elements making up the community but I felt that I needed to go deeper than then to enable me to use it in my project.
While Lynch uses them to critique the city and its imageability, as I am in the process of doing with Newcastle, I've realised that I can reverse engineer his method and use it to create a space that allows a community to either begin or grow.
I can turn the theory into a formula:
Paths + Landmarks + Nodes + Edges + Districts = City
People + Employment + Markets + Street + Housing = Community
With the quality of each of these elements making up the quality of the total (City or Community). In Lynch's text, he works out the quality of each of them to find the quality of the city. In my project, I know what I want the end result to be and can work backwards by looking at what the current state of each of the elements is to then create what is lacking or improve what is in poor condition in my project.
In order to do this, another trip up north (that is, to Cheetham Hill, not Newcastle) may be needed and a closer look at the other groups' findings is definitely needed. However, just from looking at the area and listening to presentations etc, I can already make a start piecing together what is required:
People: Cheetham Hill has such a diverse population that I would be willing to say that the richness of the community in this sense doesn't need to be altered.
Employment: As with much of the country in the current climate, the state of employment in Cheetham Hill is not good, although I think it was suggested that this area is one of the worst. Something that needs looking into.
Markets: I've looked at markets in Cheetham Hill enough to know that this isn't an issue within the community and doesn't need faffing with by architecture students.
Street: This varies throughout the area but while the sites are in the centre, there is a good sense of street life although the street is something that is the main focus of my work anyway.
Housing: I already know there is a lot of housing around Cheetham Hill, much of it off the main high street through the sites though. Housing does however form part of our brief.
After quickly listing what the state of each of the elements is, I can see that my project will mainly be focusing on Employment, Street and Housing although I will still keep People and Markets in mind throughout the project.
Now to choose my site!
As part of our manifesto, as we were looking at street life and the elements that make up the community, I did some market studies around Manchester. I did have a list of markets that I could visit but unfortunately didn't get to see all of them. The two I did visit though, Castlefield Market and Church Street Market were interesting to study and I particular found studying Church Street Market useful. I also got back into contact with Victoria Baths where I recently did a craft fair, asking for the layout as another case study. While I did hear back from them, I was unable to really use them as I wanted to look at what was where in relation to other stalls and how this might affect sales etc but there was no information as to which tables sold what. The key thing was the circulation around the fair. There was an order to the tables, creating a single 'street' through the fair. This was the same on the first floor.
Castlefield Market was different. From ground view, there didn't seem to be much order to the stalls but after I sketch out the plan, while there was still a sense of lack of order to the market, there was a clear route through. There was an order to the tables; food items were gathered together around the edges of the room while other items such as art work and home decorations were in the centre of the hall.
Church Street Market, just outside the Arndale Centre is a small row of what are essentially permanent pop-up shops. I only found it as I went past on the tram one day. It was very reminiscent of the markets in Cheetham Hill. The shops displayed their good on the street, creating a blurred boundary between public and semi public, what was street and what was shop. The canopy over the front of the shops also added to this sense of uncertainty.
I also saw this when I was working on my sections of Cheetham Hill Road. My first section through the industrial estate showed very clear boundaries between public/private, street/building etc but the further into Cheetham Hill I went, there were more overlaps and more public spaces that weren't just the street or the pavement. I began to wonder if this was a correlation with the sense community in the areas.
I went to site for the first time the day after studio to get a feel for the area and maybe gather some ideas.
I started by taking the bus to Victoria Station and then I planned to walk the remainder of the way up to Cheetham Hill. I briefly looked at the map before I left and saw that Cheetham Hill Road started near the train station so it was pretty straightforward to get there. However, so does Great Ducie Street and this was the one I started up in an attempt to get to Cheetham Hill. Luckily I realised my mistake before I had gone too far and found a route to Cheetham Hill Road with as fewer turns as possible.
My route took me straight around the Strangeways Prison perimeter. I had already walked past the prison en route but it was one thing to walk past along a main road and another to walk past along quiet back roads. There were no cars, except those parked outside the brick warehouses and I passed only a couple of people. The high walls of the prison were unsurprisingly intimidating and the quietness of the surrounding streets really made me want to move on as quickly as possible to Cheetham Hill Road. There was very little activity along the surrounding roads and there was not much sign that they buildings were inhabited, particularly on the side facing the prison.
Despite being late morning, when I reached Cheetham Hill Road, there was very little pedestrian activity on the street although there was plenty of traffic in the way of buses, cars and lorries. The activity seemed to increase as I approached The Manchester Fort and headed further into Cheetham Hill. The section of the road I walked along before I reached The Fort seemed to be more of a transitory space rather than part of the Cheetham Hill territory, a bit of a no-man's land between the city centre and Cheetham Hill.
The amount of activity increased further as I headed up the road. Along with houses, there were more shops, restaurants and community buildings such as mosques and job centres. There were more people out and about in the streets, many of them shopping. There were lots of small supermarkets that spilled out onto the pavement creating small markets.
Once I reached the library, I turned around and headed back to the city. This time I managed to stay on the right road!
