The Very Public Art of Placing Democracy Upon a Pedestal
December 2018 marked the 70th anniversary of that
extraordinary virtual monument, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In
the seven decades since it’s creation, the document has evolved from its origin
as just a treatise and global standard for humanity. Today it is completely embedded
in many aspects of international and constitutional law.
In terms of commemorating the founding of Lancashire’s
own evolution of it’s human rights, the month
earlier had seen the UK release of film director
Mike Leigh’s Peterloo. [1]
It was premiered in Manchester, rather ironically
as an expedient outreach of the BFI London Film Festival. The event marked the (then)
impending 200th anniversary in August 2019 of the notorious ‘Peterloo
Massacre’ of pro-democracy and anti-poverty marchers attending a peaceful ‘Manchester
Reform Meeting’ at St Peters Fields. Earlier that summer, the film had also been showcased
at the 75th Venice International Film Festival. It highlighted that the events
it portrayed were a seminal moment of global importance to the pro-democracy
movement.
Up until fairly recently in Manchester, the
public awareness of Peterloo had remained relatively low. In addition, all that
existed in the public realm to commemorate it in civic terms had been one small
blue plaque - often criticised for being far too inadequate. It referred only
to the "dispersal by the military" of an assembly.
It was only as recently as 2007 that Manchester City Council finally replaced it
with a new red plaque. This new version now talked of "a peaceful
rally" being "attacked by armed cavalry" instead, and for the
first time mentioned "15 deaths and over 600 injuries".
Shortly before the actual 200th anniversary date
of the massacre in August 2019, the City Council has already “quietly unveiled"
its new £1m Peterloo Memorial. This has been created by the 2004 Turner Prize
winning artist Jeremy Deller, [2] in collaboration with Caruso St John Architects. [3] Deller’s vision for
the monument has been to create a public art work that can be used as a
gathering point for future protests - rather than just be seen as a more
traditional (and so often figurative) sculpture and memorial looking backwards in
time.
The
six-foot-high circular tiers of stone steps bear the names of victims of the
1819 massacre, as well as the inscribed names of the towns from which the protestors
travelled and related graphic symbols. At the top, on a small round platform, various
compass points out towards other locations where a state has unlawfully killed its
own citizens. These include the notorious Bloody Sunday in The Bogside
of 1972 Derry / Londonderry and the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests in China.
On the BBC Radio 4 programme Art of Now [4]
marking the launch, the artist called Peterloo
part of an “eternal story” of the “armed state against unarmed civilians” that
had been going on for thousands of years. Projecting things forward, he cited the
even more recent precedents of public protests being violently contested by the
state today, and alluded to notable examples like the Arab Spring uprisings.
With
a number of repeated commissions gained over the years set within Greater Manchester,
and with these and his other notable works not being afraid to court controversy,
the choice of this London-based artist had always been welcomed by Mancunians:
His Acid Brass (1997) had been a seminal musical collaboration with Stockport-based
Fairey Brass Band; whereas his Battle of Orgreave (2001) was his incredibly
ambitious re-enactment of the infamous clash between striking pickets and
police from the UK miners strike of 1984 Rotherham; More recently, and with both
commissioned for the Manchester International festival, his Procession
(2009) had been a free and uniquely eccentric mass parade promenaded
throughout the streets of the city; whilst his What Is the City But the
People? (2017) was a highly public catwalk created to celebrate the life of
150 selected good citizens. So it was, his northern, working class sensitivities
could not have been higher going into the start of this commission.
However,
following the public launch of the stepped form of his podium designs, and rather
unexplainably given the magnitude of the project and history of meaningful
consultations throughout, severe public concerns and criticism were voiced.
These centred on the accusations of overlooked (or under prioritised) accessibility
and inclusion issues, and these were only raised as a major problem at an embarrassingly
late stage of development.
The
irony of this ultimate monument to the past and future sense of public liberty and
equality, when being criticised by disability groups, became an embarrassment. Hence
the soft launch, in the days leading up to the actual anniversary date. Critics
like disability activist Dennis Queen called the memorial inaccessible and a “monument
to steps”. It turned disabled people into onlookers on the sidelines, she felt,
rather than allow them to be equal “participants in democracy”. Some concessions
to disabled access had been attempted, but the singular brass balustrade up to
the conical top and an adjacent level platform circle mirroring the top (and with
identical compass point inset), was seen as too little, too late.
Permanent
public art is by its very nature a strange and delicate beast often needing far
more delicate management of public expectations and shepherding, when compared
to its more temporary and ethereal artistic cousins. Whilst not a public building,
any permanent artworks planned for the public realm, still have to be governed by
many of the same regulatory forces as anything else interacted with and permanently
fixed down on our streets – or to a fair and reasonable degree at least. This
is whether consideration of feedback from public engagement linked to planning
permissions or complying with the statutory building regulations requirements of
such things as safe structures and accessibility. The way forward, whilst also
pushing boundaries can be fraught. In part defence, Jeremy Deller quoted the
often used retort that public art cannot be designed by committee. Whilst of
course this has to be true in the strictest sense of always needing to maintain
artistic integrity and risk, there is an importance in the complex world of
today’s public realm, of also having strength to listen to and (sometimes) concede
to others when appropriate. Whether this is through creative collaborations
with other more experienced specialisms or making other essential design compromises
in the best interests of a more holistic project. These do not necessarily need
to undermine a project artistically, and can even make it stronger potentially.
Indeed,
had Thomas Heatherwick not been so intent on pushing his vain structural
boundaries for such a free-flexing über structure,
his monumental B of the Bang, [5] for Manchester might
not have literally fallen apart, and could still be standing as originally
intended today – gaining the established credence in the process, like Anthony
Gormley’s Angel of the North. As beautiful and popular as it is, optimism
over active engagement with an artwork and public health and safety do not always
align well either: The Diana, Princess of Wales,
Memorial Fountain (2004) [6] installed
in Hyde Park has found this out to its (or our) cost since opening. By 2011, the
public purse has reportedly already racked up £1m in maintenance costs alone,
not to mention its many closures due to safety issues. The National Audit
Commission had also been called in to vet this “troubled project” and work out
how it could have reached £2.2m over its original £3m budget.
In a
desperate act of post-rational justification, at one point Councillor Luthfur
Rahman, Manchester City Council Executive Member for Culture maintained that the
new Peterloo Memorial was simply a work of public art and sculpture that was never
intended for the public to actually use it as a speakers platform anyway.
Thankfully, this ridiculous argument shifted when he and the City council finally
conceded that the resulting pubic engagement over the memorial had created a “greater
emphasis on interaction than they had envisaged”. The city and artist (and presumably
consulting architects) had made a mistake, but at least had now shown the
collective strength of character to admit to this oversight and look to rectify
the designs even though it was now already installed. Deller has confirmed
since that these required changes will become part of the memorial and might
even become a feature of it somehow. A series of holes could even be drilled into
the plinth to support banner and flag poles he said. He accepted that whilst he
had been personally "chastened", he also felt that the “process has
been enlightening” too.
In her
confirmed reaction since, Dennis Queen has predicted that with the necessary modifications
the work now has the potential to be truly great, whilst in fact also becoming
the first truly accessible speakers corner and monument. In the meantime though,
she called for all protest groups to show solidarity with her call for inclusiveness,
by not going to the top of the memorial until everyone can access it equally. What
the actual scope of these modifications will be ultimately, and how long this
will take is currently unclear. However, a period of another year to the 201st
anniversary of Peterloo has already been mentioned by some, before the
unveiling of this renewed monument to democracy can happen.
Six months after the 70th anniversary
of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, June 2019 also saw the opening of the 13th UNESCO Creative Cities
Conference in Fabriano, Italy. [7] This brought together 50 city mayors, and representatives from 145 cities
worldwide. Here they renewed their commitment to achieve the UN 2030 Agenda for
Sustainable Development, through culture-oriented policies and exploring their
theme of “The Ideal City”. This advocated for the principles of sustainability,
resilience, innovation, culture, participation, and ‘antifragility’. As part of
this global collective, Manchester as a ‘City of Literature’, and with its population
of 540.000 comprising 91 cultural groups and an estimated 200 languages spoken,
has already signed up to the same ambitions
of this sustainable, cultural manifesto.
The backdrop and paradox to such idealism is arguably the sense (or the
hope) that we are also on the cusp of a new urban democracy. This is perhaps
more of a wish than reality in the UK currently, with the spectre of Brexit
looming and public dissatisfaction with politicians being voiced increasingly. Sadly,
any rosy optimism and calls for ‘an end to austerity’ also need to be tempered
economically with world markets predicting another imminent global downturn. Such
cyclic shifts of fortune never change unfortunately.
The Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 [8] have their own long-term vision for Europeans,
which is to write a new Constitution of Participatory, Open-Source, Democratic Action.
But where does this leave Manchester and the rest of the UK post-Brexit? In the recent 2019 BBC Reith Lectures, author,
historian and former senior judge Jonathan Sumption [9] remined everyone that the UK still has no written
constitution, but also argued against us ever adopting one as a response to any
political alienation.
So, in terms of exploring the changing design and culture of our civic
life, even our public spaces look to be standing at a seminal point in time –
and particularly regarding the facilitation of any new public engagement models.
One has only to consider the rapid rise in the reclamation of our public spaces
being used by various pro-democracy movements such as in Hong Kong’s Umbrella
Movement; Greta Thunberg’s school strike for the climate; Extinction Rebellion;
Gilet Jaune; Occupy; and the Peoples Vote march, to see the potential power of our
evolving new public realm.
In classical times the Greek Agora provided their citizens with a
central public gathering place or assembly. it was seen as the physical centre
of the athletic, artistic, spiritual and political life of any city. But could
a new democratic blueprint for a modern equivalent for this ever fit with the
complexities of our shared public realm today? With urban centres increasingly
coming under the guise of something being called ‘pseudo public space’ or
‘privately owned public space’ (POPS), a free market neo-liberalist approach to
governing (and sanitising) our civic life is growing fast.
The tragic, unnecessary murder of men women and children by the state in
Peterloo 200 years ago marked a seminal point in the long trajectory ever-upwards
of Manchester’s egalitarian society. That the massacre came on the cusp of massive
change happening throughout both world, country, region and city was perhaps no
accident though. The city of Manchester rightly saw itself then as being on
the brink of a new dawn of liberty, and intellectually looked everywhere for inspiration.
When it happened though, change came first not through social but a technological
revolution. But this was fired by the relentlessly entrepreneurial spirit of
the greater north. Today, such
a seismic shift could never be to that same magnitude perhaps, but the call for
a new sustainable and democratic momentum remains valid, and could even be
gathering pace.
Social & Economic Aftermath of the
Peterloo Massacre
Prior to the Great Reform Act (1832) that
was to change the British electoral system, the political fear of a popular
uprising in the United Kingdom had been founded upon the precedent of the American
and French Revolutions of 1783 and 1789 respectfully, and the
Irish Rebellion of 1798. This and the philosophy of key thinkers like the English-born
American patriate Thomas Paine, whose published manifesto Rights of Man (1791)
had argued that popular political revolution was permissible when a government
did not safeguard its people. In
this, he also called for reforms to English government, including the
need for a written Constitution, composed on national assembly lines of newly
independent America.
Deliberately opposing such democracy, statutes
like Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger’s Combination Acts had earlier been
conceived as An Act to prevent Unlawful Combinations of Workmen: The
1799 and 1800 acts were passed under the Tory government and set up to prohibit
trade unions and collective bargaining by British workers. It came from a government
paranoia of a Jacobin-like rebellion similar to that which had happened earlier
in France, and the fear that workers would strike during conflict to force the
government to accede to demands. Tempered by a preceding century that had seen the
so-called Age of Enlightenment flourish, expectation on the intellectual
advancement of public ideals were already heightened, as indeed were common social
ambitions for liberty, progress and toleration.
However, things were changing fast on many fronts
in the early 19th century, and none more so in the industrialised
north of England: The critical cloth trades here were already well-depressed
due to the long legacy of fighting Napoleon and a series of Anglo-France wars. Throughout
this period, and in addition to Luddite uprisings developing in parallel
against the technology of the mechanical looms, there had been many riots
throughout the north, linked in part to high bread prices caused by both poor
harvests and Corn Law tariffs deliberately restricting the import of
cheap foreign grain.
Unemployment in this era typically meant
destitution, and ultimately this was to cause a chain reaction at a time when fewer
than 2% of the UK population had the right to vote anyway. Hunger was becoming increasingly
a way of life, but was ultimately the catalyst for change here. In the period
before 1811, many petitions to Parliament, had asked for help for the starving
weaving and framework knitting communities of the north, but the calls had been
repeatedly ignored by successive Tory Governments.
Putting this combined period of change and decline
further into political context, the country had recently seen the Slave Trade
Act of 1807 passed, and this was to pave the way ultimately for the 1833 Slavery
Abolition Act that was to end slavery throughout the British Empire. Rather
ironicaly, up until this point Manchester’s ‘course-check’ cotton had been mainly
exported out of Liverpool to the African slave coast as part of the trade for more
slaves. Along with the port of Liverpool, it had been helping perpetuate and
triangulate the cyclic slave trade to the West Indies. However, despite the critical importance of this
commerce to the city’s wellbeing, the ultimate passing of the Slave Trade
Act had still been strongly influenced by Manchester’s campaigners, including
some of Manchester’s very own cotton merchants.
So it was that on Monday 16th August 1819, an
expectedly normal working day in the Lancashire mills, that a peaceful crowd of
60,000 people from Manchester and surrounding towns converged on a legal assembly
announced on the open space known as St Peter’s Fields. Although a working day
in the cotton mills, many attending were
handloom weavers, who worked from home and traditionally took Mondays off after
working the weekend. Along with their banners calling for fundamental
rights like “Liberty and Fraternity” and “Universal Suffrage”, they also paraded
their so-called red ‘Liberty
Caps’ on the top of their carried flag poles. The caps were an ancient proletariat
symbol of freedom, but ominously from the perspective of magistrate overseers, also
cross-referenced the proceedings with the French Revolution.
The crowd had come to hear a British radical
speaker and agitator called Henry "Orator" Hunt speak from a raised husting
platform. He, along with other speakers like
Mary Fildes, the President of the Manchester Female Reform Society were due to
speak against worker poverty and to demand Parliamentary reforms and extensions
of voting rights. The call was for a reformed parliamentary system in which
Manchester would get a fairer and more proportional representation for the
first time.
But seeing this as rampant insurrection, and
following a magistrate verbatim reading of the infamous ‘Riot Act’ (that no one
could reasonably hear amongst the din of a large crowd), an order was issued to
first arrest Hunt and then break up the gathering. So it was that first the drunken,
mounted militia of the Manchester & Salford and then Cheshire Yeomanry, and
ultimately then the regular cavalry of the 15th
Hussars, entered the fray on the already heavily crowded field. In the melee, as many as
18 peaceful protesters eventually died in relation to the indiscriminate attacks
and 700 were also wounded, many linked to sabre injuries or from the trampling and
crushing by the cavalry horses. The immediate political aftermath of this massacre
and this deemed “Waterloo of St Peters Field” was simply a crackdown on reform
itself via the passing of something called the Six Acts – that looked to
stem any further fears of seditious activity in the north by suppressing
any meetings for the purpose of radical reform. However, the
subsequent outcry did eventually lead to the direct founding of the Manchester
Guardian and also played a significant role in the passage through Parliament
of the Great Reform Act 13 years later.
Only 10 years later, in 1842 Prussian philosopher
and social scientist Friedrich Engels was to arrive in Manchester to work in a
mill owned by his family. Here he would spend the next 30 years or so developing his socialist and economic thinking.
Influenced by his local partner Mary Burns, she helped him experienced the industrial
working conditions and plight of the poor of Manchester. This in turn acted as the
inspiration for his first book, The Condition of the Working Class in
England (1845). Just a year earlier had seen the establishment of the
principles of the first modern cooperative movement in Rochdale, and so fittingly
Engels was later to invite Karl Marx up from London to develop their Marxist
ideals further. It was in Manchester that they collaborated out of Chetham
Library (the world’s first free public library since 1655) to
co-author The Communist Manifesto (1848). Manchester later became the
first local authority to provide a free public lending and reference library
service after the passing of the Public Libraries Act two year later in 1850.
Around this same time, the release of Knutsford
author Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton (1848) also focused
on relations between employers and working class of Manchester from the
perspective of the poor. Her story was set between 1839 and 1842, and was subtitled
"A Tale of Manchester Life". Gaskell’s later book North and South
(1854) later used a protagonist from southern England to also present and
comment on the regional perspectives of mill owners and workers in an
industrialising northern city.
Add to this despair from poverty, the unfortunate
confluence of the Great Famine of mid-nineteenth
century Ireland: The resulting mass migration of desperate Irish refugees to the
north of England following the potato blight simply compounded the social pressures
on the lowest working classes there further. With the increasing Irish Catholic
populations of Manchester and Salford, two cities not normally associated with
sectarianism, were to endure a short period when anti-Irish and anti-Catholic
sentiments became more commonplace.
The then Tory Prime Minister Robert Peel attempted
to introduce many social reforms, most notably for the mills in The Factory
Act (1844) that limited working hours there for children and women. As well
as this, being generally unable to send sufficient food to Ireland to stem the
famine there, he also proposed that the controversial Corn Laws finally be
repealed out of pure humanity. However, his party would not support him on this,
and the debate lasted for 5 months. When eventually the Corn Laws were repealed
in 1846, Peel was defeated on another bill and resigned. The Tory party then broke
apart and fell, and William Gladstone followed Peel as a new more Liberal-Conservative
Leader of the Opposition, believing strongly in free trade.
So it was that Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, built
on Peter Street from 1853–56 adjacent to St Peter’s Fields itself, commemorated
the repeal of these hated Corn Laws. As well as this, and in terms of
supporting the working man and woman, Manchester continued to pull its weight
politically on many other socialist fronts:. The first Trades Union Congress
was held in Manchester (at the Mechanics' Institute) in 1868 and the city also became
an important cradle of both the Labour Party and the further development of Manchester’s
Female Reform Society and the Suffragette Movement - marked with the birth of Emmeline Pankhurst in Moss Side in 1858.
However, by this time, the trade route to and
from Manchester as provided by the Mersey & Irwell Navigation was
already becoming obsolete 50 years after its establishment. Only boats of
moderate size were ever able to make the journey from quays near Water Street
to the Irish Sea anyway. The subsequent completion in 1776 of the Runcorn
extension to the Bridgewater Canal only helped supplement this weakness briefly,
as did the 1830 opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Pressure was
mounting with the intensified competition for the carriage of goods and this with
deteriorating economic conditions in the 1870s. This period coincided the start
of a global downturn and what became known later as the ‘Long Depression’. Affecting
the global economy, it was the most pronounced in Europe and the United States.
What happened next came out of pure entrepreneurial
reaction to this recession and helped forge the real start to and the burgeoning
growth of the so-called ‘port’ of Manchester. It also ominously marked the beginnings
of Liverpool’s economic decline compared to Manchester. Countering excessive
dues charged by the Port of Liverpool and the railway charges from there to
Manchester, a 36-mile long ship canal was proposed via a bill to Parliament in
1882 as a way to literally bypass the competition. Faced with stiff opposition
from Liverpool, the ship canal's supporters were unable to gain the necessary
Act of Parliament to allow it to go ahead initially, but permission to construct
was eventually granted and started in 1887. It was to take just six years and a
cost £15 million before the ship canal was officially opened by Queen Victoria
at the Mode Wheel Locks in 1894.
Manchester's golden age is arguably this last
few decades of the 19th century. Many of the great public buildings (including
Manchester Town Hall) date from then. Thereafter the prime importance of cotton
to Manchester slowly diminished. However, this period of decline also coincided
with the rise of the city as the financial centre of the region. The die of Manchester’s
social and economic future was finally cast.
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