Roses and castles: competing visions of canal heritage and the making of place

ABSTRACT

This article evaluates the cultural politics of waterfront heritage in regenerating Manchester, UK, in order to understand why the benefits envisaged for local communities have not been fully realised. Analysing a database of texts produced for an EU cultural heritage project (2015–2017) we find there is no lack of rich and diverse cultural heritage in Manchester, produced by a broad range of people. Using Lefebvre’s ideas about the social production of space we explore how, nonetheless, waterfronts as heritage spaces are produced in ways that exclude that variety, and thus place and displace people, socially as well as bodily. We propose a role for geolocated mobile apps for spatialised heritage storytelling to enable communities to make their mark on official, imposed representations of space. Our analysis has relevance for cities across the globe, as governments, investors, redevelopment quangos and others seek to use urban waterways as heritage assets to reinvigorate former industrial areas, without adequate appreciation of their full range of cultural meanings.

KEYWORDS:

• Placemaking
• industrial heritage
• canals
• multimedia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The images can be seen on the project’s website at waterwaysexplorer.org.

2. The trails, branded ‘Waterways Explorer’, can be found by visiting https://izi.travel/en/search/waterways%20explorer and they include trails produced after the end of the project by community groups keen to continue the work, such as the Daisy Nook Canal Trail in Greater Manchester.

3. http://www.manchester-forum.co.uk/index.php?topic=9093.0.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the AHRC under Grant AH/N504397/1;Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/N504397/1].

Notes on contributors

Abigail Wincott

Abigail Wincott is a former multimedia journalist and Senior Lecturer in Media and Journalism in the School of Media. She has published on the way ideas about the environment, nature, places like cities and networks like food systems are structured through the lens of heritage. Her recent work focuses on immersive and spatialised media technologies, and the way increasing mediatisation is changing the places where we live and work.

Neil Ravenscroft

Neil Ravenscroft is Director of the Brighton Doctoral College and Professor of Land Economy, specialising in research on people-environment relationships associated with farming, forestry and water resources. Neil’s research has been funded by a number of UK research councils, including the Arts & Humanities Research Council and the Natural Environment research Council. The foundation of his research interests lies in economic questions about the multiple relationships that people have with each other and with the natural and physical environment. At the core of this are questions about the extent to which economic concepts such as wealth, individual utility and exchange can adequately capture the complexities of such relationships.

Paul Gilchrist

Paul Gilchrist is Principal Lecturer in Human Geography at the School of Environment and Technology, University of Brighton. He has written widely on the geographies of sport, leisure and popular culture. Paul’s research has been funded by the British Academy and Arts & Humanities Research Council. His research interests are in people-environment relationships, particularly the politics and history of leisure spaces, addressing concerns such as access, property rights, regulation and forms of resistance found in the public realm as people exercise rights to leisure and pleasure.