Honouring a proud local legacy of arts-led social reform

A Manchester mental health charity is working to create a new venue in a historic building, with young people taking on a role as place-makers

42nd Street is a mental health charity working with young people under stress. Launched in 1980 and based in the Ancoats area of Manchester, it has seen a 200 percent increase in the number of young people it works with over the last three years. The charity offers a wide range of services including one-to-one support and counselling, cognitive behavioural therapy, identity-based group work and a creative programme which involves people across all of these services.

The organisation is housed in a purpose-built, RIBA-award winning building on Great Ancoats Street. Opened in 2013, the building serves as a gateway and visible landmark for Ancoats, and heralded a comprehensive programme of regeneration and development in the surrounding area.

42nd Street is very much in and of Ancoats. Its creative programme reflects and celebrates the area’s rich heritage of promoting health and wellbeing through artistic and cultural engagement. Julie McCarthy, Creative Producer at 42nd Street, says young people gain a critical sense of identity and purpose from participating in the creative programme:

“Every day we see the value of encouraging creative expression, of making and producing arts and crafts, and of appreciating the beauty, value and purpose of art. This year we are launching The Horsfall space, which will bring national and international artists, makers and heritage experts to Ancoats. They will work with local young people, and the young people who use our services from across Greater Manchester, in reinterpreting stories from the past, articulating their own stories and imagining new futures. Our aim is to have a real and tangible local presence alongside a nationally significant programme.”

The Horsfall project takes inspiration from the Ancoats Art Museum, a unique social and artistic experiment founded in 1884. Its founder, Thomas C. Horsfall sought to promote the improved health and wellbeing of the working poor through contact with art and nature. Horsfall filled the museum with artworks, sculptures and, the inventory reveals, even live rabbits on occasion — in a bid to alleviate the everyday misery and monotony of life in the slums.

“Horsfall was a reformist and radical thinker who followed the Ruskin school of aesthetic thought. The museum featured a number of works of art by women and Horsfall was a great supporter of female artists, although arguably this may have been because the works were relatively inexpensive rather than any particularly elevated thinking. Victorian women artists often painted in water colour, which is cheaper and more accessible than oils. The majority of works were studies of flowers and animals, and not commercially valuable, but nevertheless they provided access to images of art and nature to the desperately poor people of Ancoats.”

Horsfall also included two model rooms in his museum; a parlour and a children’s room. The purpose of these rooms was to inspire the people of Ancoats to live more aesthetic lives through decoration of their own living spaces. The museum also offered a range of classes including woodwork and embroidery so that people could learn to make aesthetic objects for their own homes. Originally these rooms were decorated by William Morris, but it was soon realised that the styles and objects on display were too expensive for the working poor and the rooms were restyled using supplies from a local haberdashers.

Inspired by Horsfall’s ideals and his ground breaking museum, 42nd Street, with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund and other key funders, has renovated and repurposed a neighbouring 19th century shop building as a dedicated creative space.

“The shop itself has such a rich and diverse heritage. It has at various times in its life been an electric and gas fitters, and a felt dealer. An Italian family owned it at one stage and it is said that they developed the mechanism for manufacturing the first ice-cream cones in response to the contribution of re-using glass ice-cream bowls to the spread of cholera.”

Launched in summer 2016, the associated artistic programme includes a site-specific theatre experience, visual arts exhibitions, online collaborations between young people in the UK and Los Angeles, and opportunities for young people to develop creative skills for a commercial market.

“We want to work with our young people in reflecting on what Horsfall was doing and how it is relevant to their lives now, to weave together the story of the Art Museum, the Ancoats area and its people with young people’s realities in the 21st century. We want them to look up at the same sky and down to the same cobbles as he looked up at and walked on, and think about what that means. The vision is for The Horsfall to become a shared space; shared with young people, local people and wider communities. Ancoats is our starting point. We want to instil that confidence of being situated in a place and time in the young people with whom we work so that they are empowered with a self-assured sense of themselves, a sense of belonging. Place-making is not just about physical spaces and places; it’s about people finding their place in the world.”

The majority of heritage projects start with a single issue, building or campaign. The Horsfall demonstrates the value of taking a wider view. Despite being at face-value a capital build project, it has taken place as its starting point, as opposed to the build itself. It is embedded in Ancoats, but not confined by it; it celebrates and takes inspiration from its history, but is not limited by it. Its successful integration with Ancoats as a place, its engagement of local young people as place-makers, and its contribution to how those young people self-identify and connect with the local area heralds a new, dynamic and impactful approach to heritage practice, founded on and starting with place.