Ruin Renewal: Manchester's Upper Brook Chapel

Photo: Mark Dyer

By Mark Dyer:

Nestled amongst the busy hum of traffic and surrounding car garages, I noticed the crumbling remnants of the Upper Brook Chapel when I first moved to Manchester in 2014.  Recalling a ruin from a Turner painting, the roofless Neo-Gothic church never failed to strike wonder in me. As unopposed vines and vegetation encroached upon the sandstone columns, the elements mounted a relentless assault upon the exposed innards of the building. The open husk of the nave, like the splayed ribcage of a fossilised whale, provided ideal nesting space for winged critters, whilst the intact rose window hinted at its former glory.

A fascination with ruined structures is nothing new. Like the above-mentioned painter, I never fail to recognise the poignancy of man’s futile attempts to defy nature and time. It is a sentiment that fascinated the early modern period when confronted with the remnants of antiquity, through to John Ruskin and the Romantics who contemplated man’s relationship with nature. It could be said that my reaction to the Upper Brook Chapel was commonplace, expected even, or, simply, inevitable.

Then, in early 2016, development work on the Chapel began. According to the aptly named website ‘Saving the Chapel,’ [1] Manchester City Council agreed a proposal from developer Church Converts to renovate the building into micro flats. This involved relocating the Manchester Islamic Academy, who were leasing the attached Sunday School from the Council. By mid-2016, the scaffolding that would support and surround the structure during these developments was erected.

However, the east-facing façade of the Chapel, which I frequently passed, was bedecked with a denser layer of intricate metal. This method of scaffolding is known as Double Scaffolding and is commonly adopted for stone masonry to avoid drilling into the walls. This criss-cross thicket, belted on like a muzzle, transformed the humble chapel ruin into an iron basilica. From the pavement, I was confronted by a fortified cathedral whose stockade loomed above passing pedestrians and would-be invaders. Indeed, the St George’s flag raised on top of the monolith in June 2016 cemented the image of a battle-weary and battered bastion.

We might liken the braced edifice to more modern trends in architecture. Consider Fritz Höger’s Chilehaus, Hamburg; or the Grundtvigs Church, Copenhagen, designed by Peder Jensen-Klint and Kaare Klint. The bare metal of the scaffolding in particular evoked in me a dystopian imagining of Jean Nouvel’s Fondation Cartier, Paris, as if the glass had melted away in some unknown catastrophe. Whether a fortified citadel, a fragment of expressionist architecture, or the future bones of one of our cultural houses, the Upper Brook Chapel had certainly been transformed from its Gothic origins.

So, through the preservation and development of one ruin, we are presented with another, very different, sort of ruin. Robert Smithson conceived the idea of ‘ruins in reverse’ [2] whereby the apparatus and detritus of construction work will grow out of ruin into the finished building. But Upper Brook Chapel was already a ruin and has been made more ruinous, so how might we articulate what is occurring here? Ruin regeneration? Ruin renewal? Ideologically, we might understand such an activity to be part of and run in parallel with urban renewal and cleansing. Aesthetically, however, it appears to work in contrary motion. Presented with such a dichotomy, my interpretation of the Chapel was more nuanced than before the development work began. The preservation of heritage has resulted in a temporary ruin that is somehow more commanding, more socially engaged, and more representative of how ruin can challenge us in the 21st Century.

Illustration: Mark Dyer

Then, one evening, during the full throws of development, I chanced upon a particular sight. In the wake of fading twilight, where the inky sky provided a fitting backdrop to the obsidian basilica, a lone construction site lamp warmly permeated through the vacant double lancet window and surrounding labyrinth of iron. This simple scene, serendipitously witnessed, instantly transformed the imposing ruined monolith into a tender and reverent sanctum.

The gentle glow amidst the darkness gave an air of solemnity that the Chapel had not hosted in years, though this prompted an image of private worship or individual spiritualism as opposed to the institutional congregation.  Consequently, I was reminded of those forced to worship in secret, away from persecution in its many guises. Post-Reformation? Post-Referendum. A sanctuary for the minority, the unwanted, the forgotten. The St George’s flag erected during the EU vote now cast a more sinister shadow across the windswept parapet.

This asylum buried in the stone masonry in turn reminded me of Lud’s Church, Staffordshire, England; a natural chasm in the rock that provided a safe place of worship for the Lollards in the 15th Century [3]. Similar to Upper Brook Chapel, this cleft in the Peak District features towering columns of Millstone Grit rock festooned in lichen, a dizzying open skylight and a quiet aura of solemnity. However, instead of being carved by and into nature, the Chapel has been formed as a result of additive manmade processes to form a composite structure whose social and contextual recollections are multifaceted and era-spanning.

When the development work of Upper Brook Chapel is complete, the church-cum-mosque will host plush apartments for students and young professionals, lining the pockets of shrewd property owners, if not the Council itself. Whilst I appreciate the importance of preserving our architectural heritage and history, as well as the financial viability of sustaining derelict buildings for non-commercial purposes, should stone and mortar be prioritised above existing religious and social networks and relationships? Where will these people now seek sanctuary?

About the author:
Mark is a composer of concert and installation music. His primary artistic focus is the ‘musical ruin’: the quotation and fragmentation of existing music, that might elicit a feeling in the listener analogous to that experienced when visiting an architectural ruin. Mark has worked with ensembles such as Psappha, OUT-TAKE Ensemble and Collective31, and has published in the new music journal Tempo. In September 2017, Mark will begin a PhD in Composition at the Royal Northern College of Music, supported by an AHRC scholarship awarded by the North West Consortium DTP. Listen to his music at http://www.markdyercomposer.com/

Notes:
[1] Czero Developments. (2017) Saving the Chapel. [Online] [Accessed 27th February 2017] http://www.savingchapel.com
[2] Smithson, R. (2011) ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic,’ In Dillon, B. (ed.) Ruins. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, p.49.
[3] Cressbrook Multimedia. (2017) Lud’s Church. [Online] [Accessed 28th February 2017] https://www.peakdistrictinformation.com/visits/ludschurch.php

The Great Ruins of Love Lane

Image: David Lewis

By David Lewis:

Cities are in a permanent process of evolution, fast or slow, and districts within a city change at different speeds, depending on investment, need, attitude.  Nowhere is this more evident than in Liverpool, which is no longer the crumbling monochrome city of the early Beatles photographs, but a modern holiday and conference destination.  Confidence roared through the city again from the late 1980s, building luxury hotels and celebrity-chef restaurants, revamping museums, opening new visitor attractions and developing the huge Liverpool One shopping development complex, a shopping mall in the heart of the city. 

A slower, more varied pace of change can be seen in the 1840s docklands north of the city centre, which have evolved since 1945 through bomb damage, obsolescence and redundancy.  This has left a bruised landscape of old warehouses and railway yards, closed pubs and overgrown vacant lots.  There is silence here, and sunlight, and huge empty skies.  The Mersey is never far away.

It is precisely this neglect that makes the docklands vulnerable to development.  Slowly, with altered attitudes, the pace of change is quickening and the confidence is spreading northwards.  New uses have been found for giant survivors; Jesse Hartley’s Stanley Dock buildings have become the Titanic Hotel, and the hulking Tobacco Warehouse next door, once the largest brick building in the world, is being converted into urban apartments.  

Image: David Lewis

I walk these streets now with a new sense of urgency.  Blackstone Street, Cotton Street, Saltney Street, Dublin Street - I am at home here, clearing street dust to discover cobble or street railway, granite kerb, a softness of old sandstone.  These ground-level Victorian ruins add colour – rusts and steel blue-greys – to the streets.  Old Liverpool is a city of brick, and walls snake through the old districts; ubiquitous and invisible, shiny red or gleaming hard blue-grey; heavily sooted, organic, hand-made.  On the oldest warehouses the brick folds into narrow doorways and narrow barred windows capped with sandstone or rusted iron.  The bricks and mortar have flaked away after 170 years of river weather, but these structures add fluidity and definition to the city and warm colour – chalky reds, dark blues – to the streets.  Each brick was hand-laid decades ago, on bright days or damp days, sooted with river fogs and steam-smuts or laid in warm sunshine as the city roared north along the river; brick by brick, wall by wall, street by street.

This hinterland is full of oddity and unexpected glories.  Gateposts, fragments of walls, arches in stone or brick, monolithic survivors like ruined sandcastles left behind by the tide.  Some have found new uses and stand, silent and dominant, in new fences, new boundaries.  There are also ghost places, vacant lots full of buddleia and butterflies which once housed large railway yards or churches, their histories forgotten.  Nothing survives of the Martyrs’ Church, St. Augustine’s on Chadwick Street; nothing survives of the giant goods stations of Waterloo, Great Howard Street, or Canada Dock, apart from stumped walls and fragments of story. 

Ruins can be invisible here.  Love Lane lies beyond the huge railway arches carrying commuter trains up the coast, and is connected to whole streets of redundancy, truly empty places, scenes for a car chase or a clandestine meeting, film sets for unmade films.  Sprainger Street, Little Howard Street, streets of walls and graffiti, windows and doors bricked up, more buddleia and more grasses, silence, a beautiful decay.  Nobody seems to be here. The air smells of rotting rubbish, vegetation and illegally-dumped engine oil.  At night the few streetlights illuminate the darkness rather than dispel it, sending a weak light spilling across the cobbles to create great polygonal slabs of velvet darkness.  These lost streets are dominated by the amputated, hacked remains of another railway viaduct, overgrown and crumbling, a lost route to the lost station of Liverpool Exchange.  The bricklayers’ art has created great swirls of brick, smooth and close-fitting like dragon scales or armour.  These arches are muscular, seeming to crouch, tense and full of unexpressed energy.  They have the deep calm of gigantic Roman ruins, solid and seemingly permanent. 

Image: David Lewis

And yet these old walls, these folds of brick and obsolete arches, are increasingly vulnerable.  A grandiose, long-term plan called Liverpool Waters is promising apartment blocks, and open squares of bars, restaurants and shops along the waterfront.  Everton Football Club have confirmed a £300m move from Goodison Park to the Bramley-Moore Dock.  At ground level, the Ten Streets project will deliver new work/living spaces, renovated buildings, more public space. 

I believe that cities need dark streets and grey areas, places of awkward, disjointed history and ambivalence.  Cities need to regenerate periodically, but they also need the old, the quiet, the derelict, a sense of faded history.  Is it not possible to have rough edges to our cities, dark corners, un-developments?  We should be able to discover something of our cities for ourselves; not everything should be signposted.  Perhaps these old streets are where the city has most potential, perhaps these scraps of buildings and stumps of walls remind us that all things are possible within a city; perhaps without decay there can be no sense of potential, and ultimately no regeneration.  Our ruins should be left to their decay. 

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside.  He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter