A Walk in the Park …

I have now visited Trafford Park three times. The first time, on the 4^th June, was to gain an impression of the area and to assess the feasibility of my project.

I will say more about the history and geography of the Park in my next post but on this damp, drizzly Tuesday, the Park appeared as flat, endless and dismal as the weather. 

The Trafford Park Metro Line is currently under construction and adds to the confusion and chaos of traffic that follows after leaving the M60. All signs seemed to lead to Old Trafford (football stadium) on the eastern edge of the Park or to The Trafford Centre (shopping mall) to the west; once you arrive, everything points to the way out.

I headed for the Trafford Park Heritage Centre. This turns out to be a small collection of memorabilia housed in an industrial chaplaincy and community centre. From here, I started the first of my walks around the Park. After a couple of hours in the rain, I realised both the scale, variety and dynamic of the Park and how much I was enjoying exploring it.

Subsequent visits, on the 23^rd June and 21^st July, were on warmer but still overcast days. The traffic was lighter but, because of the Metrolink works, the road layout changed between each visit and although I have walked for miles, I am only just beginning to find my way around.

I prefer to wander on my own and on Sundays when there is less happening – except around Old Trafford and the Trafford Centre, which seem to be busy all of the time. The few people I have met are friendly enough and I have already had lengthy conversations with bored security guards and been the unofficial photographer to a canal boat of very drunk stags.

Photographically, I have found similar ugly, odd and mysterious buildings to those I came across in Westbury. These buildings that give little clue as to what goes on inside them and make little concession to anything beyond the functional;

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Some are genuinely mysterious;

As well as looking at the buildings as places of work, I am also looking at them in a more abstract,  geometrical way, as architectural subjects. I don’t know what to make of these images yet. They do say something about the design of the Park but in reifying the buildings, or details of the buildings, they have a similar effect on me as the platinum prints made as part of my last project – they ‘beautify’ ugly realities and make  distorting ‘art objects’ of their unattractive subjects.

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Security at the Park is much stricter than at Westbury, with many areas accessible only via security gates onto private roads. This, counterintuitively, makes capturing the machinery of security much more difficult – you are kept well away but the razor wire, steel gates and cameras can be seen if you get close enough;

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Sometimes, the security is on a more modest, even human, scale;

Despite the scale and implacability of the Park and the attempts to manage who goes where and who sees what, there are signs of life;

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As well as signs of the fundamentals of human existence such as places to eat and sit, there are also signs of creativity and humour;

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Even if some of the humour is unintentional;

And there are signs of sadness; of failed projects and closed or failing businesses.

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One of the advantages of Trafford Park photographically is that it is over a century old and while most of the traces of the Park’s history prior to the 1980s have been swept away, some relics remain. I have been struck by how many of the older buildings have had their windows bricked up; either to stop people looking in or to stop them looking out; or to make them more crime hardened targets; or because the buildings have changed from places of manufacture to distribution centres – in any event, they reminded me of Milton’s Samson, ‘eyeless .. at the mill, with slaves’;

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Other buildings are clearly designed without any possibility of seeing in or out;

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Nature in the sense of anything cultivated is hard to find on the Park – except for the remnants of the boating lake, now an ‘Ecology Park’ and I have yet to explore this. The most abundant growth is of scrub plants on waste ground or of patches of ‘municipal’ planting, ordered and clipped to within an inch of its life, but doing little to soften the edges;

Shooting in colour has made a significant difference to what I see when I am wandering about. It clearly changes the ‘feel’ of the project. I find myself still drawn to grim, urban monochrome in the reproduction of images but I am increasingly seeing it too as a lazy shortcut to the kind of ‘grittiness’ that is expected of the photography of work and as an appeal to a nostalgia for a time that never was; somewhere between the sentimentality of a Gracie Fields film and the simpler times of a LS Lowry painting. There is colour in the Park, even if it obscures more than it reveals;

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I am not attempting to ‘document’ Trafford Park in a comprehensive way or to construct a linear narrative. I haven’t yet included any of the large household name factories on the site (e.g. PG Tips and Kellogs) nor represented the canals, bridges or monuments that speak to the Park’s civic standing or global economic significance. I am still working in the Myers tradition of looking in the unnoticed for the things that matter and of finding my own ‘meaningness’ in what I see. So far, I have found much that speaks both to the simultaneous bleakness and vibrance of the Park; of a windowless and functional architecture that demonstrates signs of life and of a desolation that is full of movement and change.

There remain large areas of the Park to explore both literally and thematically. While I wait for my next opportunity for a walk in the Park, I want to make sure that I can see it in its historical context; hence the next post will be a (brief) history of Trafford Park itself.