From an aviatrix to a eugenicist: walking with Manchester’s Modernist Heroines

Abstract

This article offers an autoethnographic account of developing a multidisciplinary feminist local history project. In particular it focuses on the construction and delivery of a walking tour celebrating ‘Manchester’s Modernist Heroines’. These were ten women from Greater Manchester, UK, who achieved professional success in the twentieth century. The author evokes ideas of psychogeography and the dérive to produce a tour with collaboration, accessibility and public participation at the heart of its ethos. However the notion of a psychogeographical heritage tour is an oxymoron as the praxis resists essentialist notions of time and space. Additionally, the women featured did not have blue plaques, stately homes or any of the conventional badges of achievement. The focus instead was on resonances, echoes, connections and traces in the everyday landscape. Some, such as Marie Stopes, have a complex and deeply problematic legacy. Geographer Doreen Massey, born in Manchester and one of the subjects, provided inspiration with her progressive vision of space as a simultaneity of ‘stories-so-far.’ The traditional heritage tour became reconfigured as something overtly and proudly performative, participatory and fluid. The route and location contributions are anchored in is mutable, with content evolving as new stories are shared. The walk incorporates education, conversation, art and provocation. This is Feminist public pedagogy which uses the pedestrian to examine issues around commemoration, memory, gender and the right to the city. It utilises embodied creative walking methods to uncover the power dynamics that shape Manchester and offer an alternative way to view them.

Keywords:

• Collaboration
• Feminist
• history
• Manchester
• psychogeography
• walking tour

It’s unclear, from the pile of rubble and foundation bricks, what used to occupy this square of wasteground in central Manchester. Now, it is an ad hoc car park although today buddleia blossoms outnumber vehicles. It’s a banal space, not picturesque or immediately exceptional. The Sir Ralph Abercromby, an adjacent pub, claims historical links to the Peterloo massacre, and the nearby synagogue is of far more immediate architectural interest. Neither of these are the focus of about 25 people loitering in the corner next to a crumbling brick wall. They, we, are invoking the presence of pioneering aviatrix Winifred Brown. In 1930, aged 22, she became the first woman to win the Kings Cup flying race. At a celebratory event for her victory the Mayor of Salford said ‘No man begrudges you your honour and you have put us all back in our place.’ Brown later embarked on a number of sailing expeditions but her fame was eclipsed by her son who starred in the soap opera ‘Crossroads’. Brown’s story provokes a conversation about safety, fear, access, public transport and adventure. After a while the group moves on, passing The Nags Head pub. Someone remembers how complaints led them to changing their sign to a horse. Earlier versions depicted a woman in a bridle. The visual pun of a muzzled woman served as a reminder, from a city saturated with subtle warnings about gender appropriate behaviour, about where a woman’s place is ‘supposed’ to be.

Introduction

This article recounts embodied experiences of creating a walking tour as part of a multidisciplinary feminist history project. ‘Manchester’s Modernist Heroines’ aimed to celebrate the achievements of twentieth-century women in Manchester, UK, particularly focusing on those absent from dominant place-making narratives. The collaborative, not-for-profit initiative encompassed a number of elements, including an exhibition, website, zine and – the focus of this work – a series of public walks. The majority of women discussed have not left physical markers in the city such as public memorials, statues or heritage plaques on places they lived or worked. Instead they have gifted us intangible traces, inspirational legacies inscribed in actions and memory. This represents a challenge to a tour guide and, rather than a conventional guided tour, psychogeographical techniques were adopted to construct a mutable route. The focus was on absent-presences and resonances, echoes, connections and traces in the everyday landscape. The theories of feminist geographer Doreen Massey, born in Manchester and one of the ‘Modernist Heroines’, provided the underpinning for a tour seeking to reveal invisible power relations and amplify seldom heard stories. Her progressive conception of space as a constellation of relationships and ‘simultaneous stories-so-far’ (2005, 15) was entwined throughout the narrative of the walk, affording opportunities to engage a general audience with theory outside the academy.

This paper will begin by introducing the project partners and explaining the context and need for the intervention. It will then discuss the construction and delivery of the walking tour before briefly considering the limitations and legacy of this work. The Modernist Heroines project situates itself throughout as an attempt at alternative place-making and public pedagogy which conceives the process of creation as a feminist act. The author is embedded, implicated and entwined throughout the narrative.

Project context

Collaboration and a participatory approach were key to the ethos of the Modernist Heroines project from its inception. It was born from a series of informal, collegiate conversations between three women who shared a deep concern about the narrow focus of dominant place-based narratives of Manchester, a city in North West England. At the time the project was devised all three were running not-for-profit arts and culture initiatives. Maureen Ward had co-founded Manchester Modernist Society (http://modernist-society.org/) Natalie Bradbury was producing arts and culture zine the Shrieking Violet (http://theshriekingviolets.blogspot.com) and I was facilitating psychogeographical collective The LRM (Loiterers Resistance Movement) (http://thelrm.org).

The focus within this article is on my contribution, and I am responsible for this particular account, but it must be noted there was a symbiotic relationship between the three project partners. Ward and Bradbury made equally valuable contributions to the project as a whole and I must acknowledge their influence, because without their support and inspiration I would not have conceived this tour. In keeping with our ethos, I also want to be clear work written from other perspectives could usefully focus on different aspects of the collaboration and may draw differing conclusions. Furthermore, although the project is still notionally ongoing, no group walks took place in 2020 due to the impact of COVID-19. Therefore this is both a partial and retrospective account. It is hoped that tours can resume safely in the future; readers are welcome to email for updates. First person is used due to the situated knowledges focused on. For clarity, ‘we’ refers to the collective consensus between Rose, Ward and Bradbury and ‘I’ refers to me, Rose, explicitly.

In the ten years since ‘Manchester’s Modernist Heroines’ was first conceived, my positionality regarding academia has changed considerably. Manchester’s Modernist Heroines Project (hereafter MMHP) was developed as an activist project with no agreed research output or outcome beyond disrupting established narratives and raising awareness of women its instigators admired. Since the work began, both Bradbury and myself have completed PhDs. I am now working within academia and remain committed to using walking as a tool for participatory learning and teaching. This account, therefore, blurs some of the lines between amateur and professional research, and work which occurs inside, outside and beyond universities. It contains an implicit call to challenge dismissive attitudes to ‘hobbyists’ and recognize the immense value of activist-led research. Of course, we are not alone either in our personal trajectories or this call to champion community research. We have been inspired and supported by work such as Fuller (2008) Craggs, Geoghegan, and Neate (2015) and the excellent work of the RGS-IGB Participatory Geographies Research Group. Back (2017), Springgay and Truman (2019) and Silver et al. (2021) offer examples of walking tours as co-created public pedagogy.

The context from which MMHP evolved was a very particular location in North West England, although similar challenges are faced in many other places. This paper begins by discussing what we perceived as a problem within the presentation of popular Manchester history and then explores why an alternative tour was seen as one micro-solution. In local heritage discourse, Manchester has often been characterised by its nineteenth century nickname ‘Cottonopolis’ (OED: online). Its mills and factories were at the heart of the first Industrial Revolution. The city expanded and prospered in the chaos and rupture of those times, with municipal wealth, as so often seen, built through exploitation and suffering of workers (Engels 1845). Later, Manchester followed the trajectory typical of northern industrial cities, entering a period of decline after the second world war before a renaissance in the 1990s; for a comprehensive history which focuses on how the city changed shape, see Parkinson-Bailey (2000). Manchester was the testing ground for a range of neoliberal policies which focused on its reinvention as a creative, entrepreneurial city which is primarily a site of consumption (Peck and Ward 2002). A range of marketing strategies and cultural events cultivated the idea of Manchester as the ‘Original Modern City’ (Bayfield 2015). The epithet was coined by designer Peter Saville in 2006 as part of his role as Manchester City Council’s Creative Director. While regeneration undoubtedly brought benefits, it also exacerbated inequalities, entrenched social exclusion and smoothed away stories which did not fit easily within the public-facing, commodified urban idyll (Minton 2009, Hatherley 2010). As the city reinvented itself as a tourist destination many people, cultures and stories were obscured from public narratives (Mellor 2002).

The burgeoning tourist industry inspired a number of walking tours within the city, a common trope across the world. In Manchester, as in other cities, the role of the tour guide is multi-faceted. Tour guides act (among other things) as gatekeepers of place-based knowledge, representatives of their environment and a tourist spectacle (Pond 1993, Holloway 2010). An informal survey looking at Manchester tours prior to developing this project found they largely ignored women’s role in history of the city (Rose 2013). Within popular culture more widely Manchester tends to be linked with localised constructions of masculinity and northernness (Milestone 2016, illustrating Massey 1994). For example, local radio station XS Manchester state the top 32 songs from Manchester are all by men (Bourne 2019). The more diverse and interesting reality is reflected in the Manchester Digital Music Archive, a volunteer-led online repository for grassroots documentation of the city’s music cultures. Artist LoneLady (aka Julie Campbell) occasionally uses the #Blokechester hashtag on Twitter to highlight how Manchester’s mainstream reputation remains dominated by male artists.

There is one notable exception to the masculinist and capitalist triumphalism within marketing discourse about Manchester. This strand of place-making focuses on the conception of a ‘radical city’ based on a number of factors, including the city as Emmeline Pankhurst’s birthplace. Respect is clearly due to Pankhurst but MMHP were concerned that she is often portrayed locally as a singular heroic figure, overshadowing other struggles. (There are many other important critiques of the framing of Manchester as a radical city but they are outside the scope of this article; see Hanson 2018: online and Barrett and Ward 2020 for examples). MMHP wanted to make clear ‘herstories’ did not end with the Suffragettes, highlighting the fight for equality was, and still is, more diverse and intersectional than a Pankhurst-heavy story suggests. We were particularly concerned about the lack of acknowledgement for remarkable women after the Suffragette era and wanted to expand the scope of popular discourse. We took inspiration both from stories of particular women we have encountered and many antecedents in the feminist history and heritage movements such as those documented by Bartlett (2013) Reading (2015) and the Manchester Radical History website. The DWAN (Digital Womens Archive North) manifesto for a living archive resonates deeply as we ‘disrupted and reimagined the archive….generated new herstories’ (Ashton 2017, 115).

Walking as method

The instigators of MMHP were particularly interested in how public walking tours can be creative and activist acts. There is a plethora of excellent examples. Some of those are explicitly feminist, such as Women’s History Birmingham, or the programme of tours linked to Glasgow Women’s Library. Others seek to highlight issues such as homelessness (Invisible Edinburgh), investment in the arms trade (CATT), or the impact of regeneration (Greater Manchester Housing Action, The LRM and others). This is an international movement, as demonstrated by work such as Tumerdem (2019, Istanbul), Perryman (2019, Dublin), Worst Tours (ongoing, Porto) and Page Rwanda (onging, Montreal).

There has been a proliferation of work on the more general benefits of walking as a means to co-create and share knowledge. See, for example, Pink (2015) on how walking allows an embodied attunement to place which generates a new understanding or Bates and Rhys-Taylor (2017) and Springgay and Truman (2019) for comprehensive edited collections. It also affords an opportunity for an engaging public pedagogy, as walking together generates new understanding. Hickey-Moody, Savage, and Windle (2010) use public pedagogy as a lens to view culture and society, and suggest it offers a possibility of change because of its potential to disrupt norms and not just transmit knowledge. Walking together creates new situated knowledges. It can facilitate ‘thinking-making-doing’ (Springgay and Truman 2018, 135) because when immersed in an environment with others the creating and sharing of knowledge become entwined.

The walking tour has proved highly resilient and adaptable as a popular form of entertainment. However, the concept of a heritage tour, and indeed heritage itself, has been criticized. Truman and Springgay (2019, 1) state that ‘conventional walking tours reinforce dominant histories, memories, power relationships and normative or fixed understandings of place’. This was the MMHP convenors’ experience thinking about tours of Manchester. We were also mindful of Phil Smith’s (2009) critique of many tours as episodic, fragmented and failing to encourage the audience’s critical judgement. In his performative work on counter-tourism, Smith dissects the absurdity of much of what Laurajane Smith calls ‘authorised heritage discourse’ (2006, 11) and suggests tour guides have much to learn from walking artists. I position myself within this movement which embraces creative walking (Morris and Rose 2019). Exemplars can be found within Billinghurst, Hind, and Smith (2020), Heddon and Turner (2010) and Mock (2009). I took heed of Smith’s (2013) observations and combined my experiences as an artist with a desire to make a tour that was simultaneously disruptive, constructive and entertaining public pedagogy. To enable a focus on intangible forces I also drew upon psychogeographical praxis.

Pyschogeography is both a theory and a practice and the practice is enacted by walking. The psychogeographical dérive is an attentive, creative walking praxis which is led by desire, playfulness and emotional attunement. Initially associated with the work of Guy Debord and later the Situationist International (SI), both the dérive and psychogeography were tools conceived as part of a wider neo-Marxist project. They aimed for revolution, to resist capitalism and transform everyday life but the instructions Debord gave were vague enough to inspire myriad interpretations. Contemporary British psychogeography (Richardson 2015) and Walkings New Movement (Smith, 2015) helped me partially reconcile paradoxes around an anti-nostalgic heritage tour of invisible sites. I will explain further when discussing the construction of the tour. MMHP made our positionality and ontology clear in every aspect of the project – although those terms were not used whilst conducting the tour to ensure language used was accessible. MMHP shared our reference points and inspirations widely, encouraging conversation and debate with participants.

The catalyst for turning frustration with Manchester’s authorised heritage into action was an invitation to participate in an event at Manchester Town Hall to commemorate the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day (IWD). We perceived this as an opportunity to gently challenge and expand the focus of heritage in Manchester. Although our backgrounds and areas of expertise differ, there is a considerable overlap and our individual work also maintains something of a DIY or punk spirit. This is an aesthetic that values vernacular creativity in all its forms and embodies what I call ‘creative mischief.’ This is a lo-fi, ludic praxis which aims to ask awkward questions in a playful, non-didactic way using a variety of tactics, including creative walking. It is exemplified by the decision to produce a free zine: short for ‘fanzine, a zine is a ‘photocopied, stapled, non-commercial and non-professional, small-circulation publication… (which is) …politically self-conscious and can form an important communication network for alternative cultures’ (Triggs 2010, 10–12). Significantly this project was not part of our employment or professional life, although of course we used those skills. We felt, and still feel, that top-down, institutional community engagement is frequently patronising and rarely non-hierarchical and all remain keen to champion passionate amateurs and autodidacts. We strive to foster research, pedagogy and art that is genuinely collaborative, accessible, permeable, transparent and participatory.

Project development

We all knew what we wanted to do with MMHP, and the spirit in which we wanted to do it, so very early on a decision was made that the project would be multi-faceted. The components of the Manchester Modernist Heroines project were as follows:

1. An exhibition stand at the Manchester Town Hall IWD event. This was designed to facilitate conversations among visitors about who they would like to see celebrated and to ensure MMHP had a physical presence at the primary public event. We distributed information about the project, including the zine, and invited visitors to add to the display we had produced. This was a one-off intervention, but the discussions and suggestions received fed into later iterations of the walking tour. As the instigator of the project, Ward led on the day and later translated information onto the Modernist Society website.

2. A special issue of Bradbury’s zine The Shrieking Violet (Bradbury, 2011). Print copies were available on the day and it can be viewed online at https://issuu.com/natalieroseviolet/docs/manchester_modernist_heroines.

3. A walking tour devised by myself which placed these stories into the public sphere; its construction will be explored in detail shortly.

These strands reflected the MMHP instigators’ interests as did the focus on particular modernist heroines. Ward is a co-founder of Manchester Modernist Society, now evolved into the Modernist Society. Its remit is as an organisation ‘dedicated to celebrating and engaging with twentieth-century architecture and design, through publishing, events, exhibitions and creative collaborations.’ (mms: online). Ward was acutely aware of the masculinist tendencies of modernism, which so often lionised male figures while ignoring gender issues and the contributions of women (Laity 2018). She wanted to reinstate women into the pantheon and also, crucially, insert them into the fabric of Manchester. Modernism was an international movement, but it had a specific local impact as well: the project was designed to bring heroines home, connecting them to the provincial cityscape. The MMHP utilised the Modernist Society mailing list, and the social media networks of The Shrieking Violet and The LRM to ask people to nominate their modernist heroines. We added our own personal suggestions to come up with ten women, and then issued another invitation, this time to write about or respond creatively to one of the heroines in the special edition of the Shrieking Violet.

The criteria for inclusion in the list was that the women should have made a significant contribution to their field in the twentieth-century. They should also have a link to Greater Manchester, whether born, living, working or studying here. The decision to take a broader geographical area than just the city of Manchester – which is one of the ten boroughs in the municipal area of Greater Manchester – reflected the reality that the boundaries are often blurred. MMHP concentrated on fields that were not deemed traditionally feminine and that broadly corresponded with the focus of the Modernist Society. The achievements spanned the fields of invention, aviation, media, science, design and architecture in the twentieth-century, but no claims were made for this to be a definitive or representative list. The instigators of the project acknowledged from the beginning that we were limited by the networks we shared and collected information from, and also constraints on time and other resources limited our access to research materials. By definition, the stories we were seeking are often seldom heard and so we knew this could only ever be a partial account. Our emphasis on professional achievements also meant that the list replicated privileges of race, class, caring responsibilities, dis/ability and access to education. Later iterations directly sought to address this by discussing Whiteness and including Black women and Women of Colour. Ward made clear in her introduction to Shrieking Violet special issue that the heroines profiled were ‘a ridiculously short list, not definitive … It is a primer, a provocation, a protest and an invitation for addition, discussion and debate.’ The zine also lists women who the organisers had been criticised for overlooking, many of whom they personally admired. Essentially, MMHP wanted to start a conversation and promote a century of modernist women. These were the ten initially chosen:

• Winifred Brown (1899-1984): aviatrix, sportswoman and sailor

• Mitzi Solomon Cunliffe (1918-2006): sculptor and designer

• Professor Rosalie David (1946-): Egyptologist

• Rachel Haugh (1961-): architect

• Susan Sutherland Isaacs (1885-1948): educational psychologist and psychoanalyst

• Professor Doreen Massey (1944-2016): social scientist and geographer

• Olive Shapley (1910-1999): broadcaster, radio producer and humanitarian

• Linder Sterling (1954-): artist and teacher

• Marie Stopes (1880-1958): paleobiologist and family planning pioneer

• Mary Stott (1907-2002): journalist and campaigner

The women included on the most recent tours reflected our commitment to honour Black history and be clear that trans and non-binary women are an integral and vital part of our community.

• Louise da-Cocodia (1934-2008): anti-racist campaigner and housing worker

• Julia Grant (1954- 2019): entrepreneur and trans rights activist

• Kath Locke (1928–1992): community organizer and co-founder of Abasindi Co-operative

• Olive Morris (1952-1979): activist, campaigner and co-founder of the Black Women’s Co-operative

• Esther Roper (1868-1938) and Eva Gore-Booth (1870-1926): writers, publishers, partners, human rights and trade union activists

• Harry Stokes (circa 1779-1859): Manchester’s ‘female husband’ and a departure from our timeline to celebrate not just Stokes but the work of Warp and Weft and other feminist heritage projects

Constructing the tour

Participants were primed for provocation and disruption by advance publicity for the tour, which said:

(our) history is permeable, participatory and opinionated, so please bring stories to share along the way. Expect a guided walk that is equal measures of performance, rant, tribute and tour…. Please be advised this walk contains explicit feminist geography, frank discussion of sex, disability, abortion and swearing…. Please walk with us; everyone is welcome. Our events are free and open to all: these are our streets and they are yours too (Rose, 2016: online reprinted from the original flyer for a later iteration of the walk).

Constructing the walk was a challenge that was implicit in the themes it sought to illuminate. There are no landmarks specifically associated with the ‘Modernist Heroines’ which could act as conventional anchors for the route. This very absence had provided impetus for our project. Instead, we invited participants to imagine how the cityscape could be transformed if looked at through a different lens. I talked about the dominant discourses which shape the spaces participants were walking through and how they could evolve in alternative ways. A series of proxy locations were selected as a symbolic site for each heroine. At each location, the tour would stop to learn more about one of the women, but participants were also encouraged to engage with the themes of the project while walking between these points. Every stop represented both the specific heroine and the way her work has impacted on the contemporary cityscape. As well as discussing factual information about the women’s life stories and their work, participants were made privy to more occult or hidden knowledges embedded within the urban memoryscape. Sharing stories in situ conjured up memories and concepts which were made visible through the tour narrative.

An example of this is the decision to begin several walks at Ishinki – Touchstone, a sculpture of a giant pebble by Japanese artist Ken Yasuda situated outside the Bridgewater Hall, a prestigious concert venue which opened in 1996. This was chosen pragmatically as a local landmark and a convenient location for access by public transport. The plaza area also gave lots of space for gathering. Yasuda’s sculpture had been subject to local controversy centred around the cost, value and benefits of public art, particularly non-figurative art. The piece’s tactile qualities were helpful as an ice breaker, as I invited participants to touch the stone. The Heroine invoked here was Mitzi Solomon Cunliffe, a sculptor and designer. Cunliffe was introduced as part of a post war movement of planners, artists, architects, designers and dreamers who wanted to create a functional, aesthetically pleasing and egalitarian public realm. This provided a useful introduction to a more positive vision of modernism than many participants were familiar with. Cunliffe wanted her work to be part of the fabric of everyday life to be ‘used, rained on, leaned against, taken for granted’ realising her ‘life-long dream is of a world where sculpture is produced by the yard in factories and used in buildings as casually as bricks’ (quoted in Pearson 2007, 131). In the context of the tour, Cunliffe became a conduit through which to think about the role of good design. As an artist whose work is displayed in highly visible accessible places – including a stone frieze on Heaton Park Reservoir Pumping Station in North Manchester – participants were invited to think about who deserves beautiful things. Originally from the United States, Cunliffe moved to Manchester in 1949 with her British husband. Discussing her ethos provoked conversations around class and taste which were nuanced and resisted obvious stereotypes. A range of observations were triggered. For example, proud memories were shared of graduation ceremonies and performances in The Bridgewater Hall. One participant pointed out the former site of Tommy Ducks pub, a traditional old-fashioned boozer which was controversially demolished during regeneration of the area in the early 1990s. As some nostalgia was creeping into discussions about how the city had changed a woman interjected with a story about how the ceiling of the pub was covered in women’s underwear and she and her friends never felt welcome there.

This was not a ghost walk; MMHP was seeking living legacies of the Modernist Heroines. To transform the disparate strands and invisible resonances into a coherent whole, I turned to the work of one of the heroines, Professor Doreen Massey. Her progressive vision of space as a complex web of relationships and constellations of power will be familiar to many readers of this journal and has been a profound influence on this work. In conversations with friends and colleagues the MMHP organizers realised her work still had the power to trigger imaginative epiphanies. Massey was invoked implicitly at each point of the walk, although her work was most directly referred to during the segment of the tour which focused on her life. This was always scheduled early on in the route to help set the tone. It was usually a banal location, such as a parade of shops or small public square. For example, on the original tour the group paused in Lincoln Square, at the time home to a range of businesses including a Chinese restaurant, a post office, newsagents, hairdressers, pubs, offices and sandwich shops. I sat on a low wall near the eponymous statue of Abraham Lincoln. This monument now commemorates Manchester citizens’ role in supporting the abolitionist movement during the Lancashire cotton famine of the 1860s but embodies its own complex histories (Wyke: Online). The immediate surroundings, which made manifest the transnational links of trade, technology, relationships and ideas that connect cities, would be used to illustrate Massey’s theories and philosophy. Comparisons were drawn to her walk down Kilburn High Street in ‘A Global Sense of Place’ (1991). Care was always taken to ensure my narrative was attentive to different power relationships and to be clear that the future is not pre-ordained. We are entwined in those ‘stories-so-far’ (2005, 9) and so can help change direction. This aspect of Massey’s theory segued well with psychogeography as a tool of re-enchanting and re-imagining space.

The construction of the tour was in some sense a tribute to Massey’s insights and I viewed it partially as an opportunity to deliver a stealth feminist geography lesson. We felt that if the event was advertised as such the audience would likely be much smaller, but participants did receive a surreptitious primer in theories of place and space. There were also more pragmatic considerations regarding the safety of the routes used. For example, stops needed to be free from traffic and offer enough space for a group to congregate comfortably without blocking the pavement. There had to be safe places to cross roads, with drop curbs to enable access, and the organisers avoided rough territory, steps and steep hills. Practise walks took place to consider the needs of different kinds of bodies and ensure that some of the stopping points had a place to sit while listening for those who needed a rest. The beginning and end points always included public toilets. The stroll was also guided by the results of emotion mapping by Manchester Women’s Design Group (MWDG), which focused on architecture, access and the way women feel about the city. During 2010, MWDG carried out research to explore how women react emotionally to urban spaces. These maps highlighted spaces in the city centre which women loved, as they felt happy, relaxed, contented and proud there, as well as spaces that women feared, as they said they made them feel worried, anxious, angry and confused.

The dérive as theory, and method, in action

The final consideration when designing the tour was an interest in psychogeography. For Rose (2015), this means a clear rejection of essentialist notions of space, a rejection of passive consumption and a deep scepticism towards place-making or the creation of a singular definition of space. Place-making myths manifest as spectacles for mass consumption and easily digestible pleasure. In 2006 I founded The LRM (Loiterers Resistance Movement). a Manchester-based psychogeographic collective who host monthly communal walks. With The LRM I have developed an artist-activist-academic praxis that uses creative walking to critically engage with the city. Amongst other things we are interested in bearing witness to the changing urban environment, in active remembering, and critically engaging with the fabric of the city. We follow De Certeau’s (1984) belief that walking activates place and gives it life: as Morris (2004, 677) puts it, ‘space and place are not merely inert or neutral features of the built environment… (walking) affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects… transforms’. From the birth of the MMHP tour our agenda was explicitly stated and the construction was laid bare. In each iteration of the tour, participants are invited to interrupt, embellish, question and contribute, with an explicit desire to break down barriers between expert, audience and performer. Time and space are provided for imagination, spontaneity and resonances; however narrative decisions have of course been made and the performance constructed with prudence. Massey (2005, 47) dismissed psychogeography as ‘Laddish thrills’ but I have used The LRM to expand the field to accommodate a more diverse range of participants. This is part of what Richardson (2015) has termed the ‘new psychogeography’ which is somatic and heterogeneous and addresses other important critiques of psychogeography which are beyond the scope of this paper.

The philosophy of the dérive goes some way towards providing a way to blur fixed-place narratives. Rather than a linear progression, it is a walk which proceeds in a rhizomatic way, offering a route which is unstable and has many branches. However, the notion of a psychogeographical heritage tour is also an oxymoron because the praxis of the dérive seeks to disrupt essentialist notions of time and space. This project does not see this as an irreconcilable difference but has instead interpreted psychogeography as an invitation to open up multiple meanings of any particular space, meanings that can be personal, affective and telegraph across imagined pasts and futures. They also encompass collective, shared memories and understandings. The dérive is reconfigured as a ‘join the dots’ puzzle, making connections that can be poignant, absurd, insightful, misleading, mischievous and many other things as well. This multiplicity contradicts and complicates the idea of one ‘true’ story or essence of place and instead celebrates an expanded heritage(s).

Alongside the dérive, another key concept drawn from the work of the SI, was particularly pertinent to conceptualising this work: détournement. This involves taking something that exists, deconstructing and reassembling it and giving it new meaning. MMHP added new stories to existing places, which offered a novel perspective on their construction. It made visible the legacies of specific women, who themselves opened up a space to think about legions of others. Debord (1967), a key figure in the SI, wrote that the spectacle hides authentic desire behind commodification. Place-making strategies and tourist narratives are commodifying acts which sell a version of Manchester (or anywhere) that is smooth, appealing and easy to consume. Dismantling, or at the very least questioning and complicating this manufactured truth, is surely at the very heart of psychogeography. Détournement has an aesthetic component, too, and embraces the DIY spirit of this work. It encourages passionate and knowledgeable amateurs to simply set up their own alternative tours without accreditation or permission. Marcus (1989) provides a compelling overview of the impact the SI have had on popular culture. Among the SI’s legacy in Manchester is its influence on pop music, including the name of the Haçienda nightclub. We were all fans of SI-influenced art before becoming aware of the original texts.

This conceptual underpinning fed into decisions on where to place heroines’ biographies along the route. It helped to deal with the challenges when there was no single obvious connection in the subject’s life story to anchor them to a place, or any of the conventional badges of achievement, such as a statue or blue plaque. A variety of strategies were used, all of which sought to affectively remap the city. Occasionally there were physical traces of a place that the heroine would have recognised. For example, both the Haçienda nightclub (demolished in 2002, the site houses apartments named after the club) and the Free Trade Hall (now a luxury hotel) were significant sites for Manchester’s pop cultural heritage. These were utilised to discuss how the Manchester music canon is dominated by male voices. The tour paused outside and discussed one of the heroines, Linder Sterling, a powerful and inspirational force in punk and performance art who remains too often defined by her relationship with men. She was also a catalyst for a discussion about participants’ favourite women musicians. Another heroine, the architect Rachel Haugh, has had a profound and literal influence on the physical landscape of the city. The Beetham Tower skyscraper, completed in 2006 and designed by the architectural practice SimpsonHaugh, in which Haugh is a founding partner, dominates many vistas when walking around the city. The walk did not need to visit the building to be able to see it, meaning it was straightforward to find a convenient stopping point to discuss her work. Other links were perhaps more tenuous, but highlight the fluid and freeform spirit of the endeavour. For example, Susan Sutherland Isaacs took play very seriously, regarding it as children’s work and an essential part of healthy development. There are very few playgrounds within Manchester city centre, so the tour would pause somewhere ostensibly dull, such as a scrap of wasteland, and participants were invited to imagine a city designed for, and by, children. Other women were a conduit for wider debates: for example the adventures of Winifred Brown offered a chance to discuss transport, travel and safety for lone women. The tour group stood in one of the many car parks which proliferate and discussed (im)mobility. This seemingly ad hoc location underlined the DIY ethos encapsulated in the zine. MMHP did not want to wait for the landscape to reflect their desires but chose to use what was readily available to create a space that could be re-imagined and re-storied.

Performing contested and complex histories

The personal and performative nature of the tour was most explicit when discussing Marie Stopes, the most famous of the heroines. I began by asserting an absolute personal commitment to women’s sexual health, to freely available contraception and the right to choose an abortion. Bringing these issues into the public sphere is somewhat transgressive as they remain uncomfortable, contentious and indeed taboo for many. Musial (2019) demonstrates how powerful spatializing these issues can be. Usually I stood near a pharmacy, or occasionally near a billboard advertising contraceptives, or a lingerie shop. Care was always taken to stand at a discreet distance, because of a mindfulness of the rights of others to access services. I made sure this was around halfway into the tour so the group were comfortable talking to each other and had established rapport with their guide. I acknowledged a debt to the pioneering work of Dr Stopes in progressing issues around reproductive health and women’s right to choose. I also recounted how Stopes was appointed to her role at Manchester University on the strength of her academic work and an assumption that she was male. Stopes had to fight to retain her job when this mistake was revealed.

However, the tour then complicated the narrative by problematizing Stopes’ political beliefs. This was done first by questioning why Stopes was so driven in her family planning work and explained it was because she was a proponent of eugenics. Stopes was committed to notions of physical purity and was racist, anti-Semitic and enthralled by Hitler. She despised disabled people and disowned her son because he married a woman who wore glasses (Rose 1992 provides a biography). Stopes opposed laws restricting child labour and her clinics were situated in poor neighbourhoods because she feared the proliferation of the working class. In short, her motivations were not benign. As a working-class disabled person with a genetic condition, I would confide ‘I know she would want me dead’, and used a short, profoundly personal monologue as a catalyst to discuss eugenics, welfare and perception of disability. Wider questions were also raised about celebrity, remembrance and more contemporary politics. This narrative also made explicit links to austerity policies and the continued demonization of disabled people. Parallels are drawn with the mostly anonymous working-class women of Salford and elsewhere who formed neighbourhood health co-operatives, founding clinics to support their communities (Debenham 2011).

Audience responses to the Stopes segment were profoundly emotional and underlined the affective power of performance. People were often shocked into silence, but as the group moved on there was a tangible shift in atmosphere and it was common for participants to begin to discuss personal experiences or political convictions. Group dynamics changed with each iteration, but this always signalled a shift to a more inquisitive and actively engaged audience. Perhaps an implicit invitation was given by personal disclosure, or perhaps the debunking of a heroine made it obvious that criticism was welcome. I used Stopes to question the very notion of IWD, stating I would not celebrate somebody just because they happened to be a woman. There was a personal cost in sharing intimate details and revealing my vulnerability, but I feel ultimately that this was worthwhile. The construction of the walk as a feminist space made this easier, as did my professional training. I was still mindful of keeping some boundaries, for example I chose not to disclose my diagnosis, instead referring to a general neurological disorder and physical impairment. Participants had been warned in advance of potentially distressing content.

Stopes, as a ‘heroine’, was made very hard to consume and this in turn revealed the artifice and construction of the heritage tour (Smith 2009). The received knowledge commonly held of celebrities, and indeed the commons themselves, is exposed as neither neutral nor innocent. Participants, including myself, were revealed as complicit in their construction. This was disquieting and uncomfortable, although not necessarily negative. Neimanis and Phillips (2019) used proxy stories in a walk thinking about invisible water sources and conflicts over water in lands stolen from Indigenous peoples; they discuss the ambivalence of their own positionality and suggest ‘sometimes complicity just is and that can still be part of resistance and change’ (2019, 135). This unravelling of a benign Stopes is perhaps the most psychogeographic aspect of the whole tour, revealing both the construction of the tour and its ideological underpinnings. The SI had wanted to use psychogeography to break through the artifice of spectacular cultures of commodification. They wanted to look beyond the surface to find what is affective and authentic. For a moment, at least, the artifice of a tour, and the construction of popular narratives, was exposed and found to be problematic. Participants were invited to question the whole project they had chosen to be part of and to think about their presumptions of who, and what, a heroine was. The temporary nature of the disruption means the impact does not have a tangible spatial impact, but we assert the value of performance as a way to learn, teach and understand the world.

This kind of public pedagogy was integral to MMHP. The organizers were very clear in our mission to educate as well as entertain; the belief that walking together can facilitate new connections has been central to The LRM since its inception. Walking aids kinaesthetic learning through the engagement of multiple senses and an innate desire to ‘show and tell.’ As Back (2017, 20) asserts: ‘Walking is not just a technique for uncovering the mysteries of the city but also a form of pedagogy or a way to learn and think not just individually but also collectively.’ To walk together in a group can help breakdown traditional classroom hierarchies (see Riley and Holton 2017) although it must be acknowledged that any walk with a guide cannot create a truly horizontal space. However, an atmosphere was created where participants were encouraged to interrupt, question and contradict. Stories shared by participants enriched the experience and shaped the direction of future walks. Memorable insights include a woman who became very emotional after hearing about heroine Mary Stott. Journalist Stott inspired the National Housewives’ Register, and the participant shared her experiences of them. She told tour participants the group had been a lifeline to her when she was isolated and experiencing post-natal depression. (The organisation is still going strong as the National Women’s Register). Another participant talked about the struggles for women in architecture and how Rachel Haugh was a personal inspiration: she provided insight into the culture of an architectural practice. Several women shared tales of everyday sexism, struggles and women who had inspired them. On one occasion the walk took a detour to Manchester Central Library to discuss the work of participants’ favourite female authors. Most tours included an acknowledgment and discussion of women left out. I invited suggestions and, rather than feeling berated for their non-inclusion, encouraged participants to share stories and ideas for the evolution of the project. These contributions shaped the content of each future iteration. This is reflected not just in the expanded list of women discussed but in the detail, depth and nuance added to the narratives. I am grateful to everyone who was generous enough to share their insights, which enriched the tour considerably.

Conclusions

The aim of this project was to bring attention to the fact that Manchester’s feminist history did not end with the Suffragettes. We wanted to start a conversation and act as a catalyst. The metaphor of Manchester as a palimpsest is pertinent, suggesting that space is constantly rewritten but that previous scripts remain visible under the surface. The layers are muddled, messy and not of equal width, so many are hard to decipher. The hope of MMHP was that this work would pay attention to some of those hidden stories while adding an affective new narrative layer, but this very much remains a work in progress. The other strands of the project are dormant at the moment, for a variety of reasons, but the tour is ongoing. I usually facilitate at least one tour a year with The LRM, as well as responding to invitations to contribute bespoke tours to festivals and other events. Inevitably, COVID-19 has impacted this work, so no communal walks took place in 2020, but it is hoped they will resume when it is safe to do so. Feedback from participants has been overwhelmingly positive. We all feel MMHP attracted a more diverse audience and range of contributors to our individual projects than usual.

MMHP should not be viewed in isolation. It is part of a wider milieu of projects striving, in different ways, to acknowledge the roles women have played in making our city. For example, in 2014 craftivists Warp and Weft appropriated the male statues in Manchester Town Hall, covering them with crocheted masks of eight women. Their excellent work, and especially their research into Harry Stokes, a gender-variant Victorian, influenced future performances of the walk. In 2018, heroine Mitzi Solomon Cunliffe was honoured by a blue plaque on her former home in Didsbury, Manchester, which was unveiled in her centenary year. A bronze statue of Emmeline Pankhurst was installed in St Peter’s Square during a ceremony commemorating 100 years of women’s Suffrage, again in 2018. She was selected by public vote from a shortlist of local women after a campaign led by councillors to begin to redress the lack of female statues. Two other statues have been installed celebrating the achievements of women born within the Greater Manchester conurbation. Comedian, writer, actress, musician and producer Victoria Wood is commemorated in Bury and working-class suffragette Annie Kenney in Oldham. MMHP hope this signifies an ongoing blossoming of heterogeneous, plural, contradictory and community generated understandings of what ‘Manchester’ means.

The Modernist Heroines tour has undergone various iterations since its debut at International Women’s Day in 2011. The route and locations that anchor the contributions are mutable, meaning it can be transferred to other locations with just minor adjustments, such as the sequence of stops. It has been repeated several times, for different audiences at events including an AnarchoFeminist conference, Manchester Histories Festival, as part of The Art of Walking (a course at the Cornerhouse Arts Centre), alongside the exhibition Loitering with Intent at the Peoples History Museum, and for the LGBT Foundation’s Sugar and Spice Festival. Each time, the tour has evolved to incorporate stories collected along the way and to reflect on the instigators’ learning. The locations associated with each woman change depending on the logistics of each event, adding to the sense of shifting resonances and dislocation from conventional cartography. The most recent iterations explicitly engage with Crenshaw’s (1989) concept of intersectionality, correct the absence of Black women and women of colour in our original list and acknowledge an ongoing commitment to the decolonisation of both heritage and pedagogy. They also make explicit our assertion that transwomen are women and a valued part of our community.

Through MMHP the traditional heritage tour became reconfigured as something overtly and proudly performative, participatory and fluid, congruent with the ideas of Smith (2009, 2013) and Truman and Springgay (2019). The walk incorporates education, conversation, art and provocation. This is feminist public pedagogy, which uses the pedestrian to examine issues around commemoration, memory, gender and the right to the city. It demonstrates the use of creative walking methods to uncover the power dynamics that shape Manchester, and provides an alternative way to conceive of public space. The project’s collaborative ethos embodies values of co-operation, intersectionality and female friendship, which the founders continue to cherish and nurture. Readers are warmly invited to contact me with comments, questions and suggestions, to download the zine and to join us for future walks. Together we can, and will, rewrite the histories and shape the future of our city through our footsteps, memories, and creativity.

Acknowledgements

Heartfelt thanks to Modernist Heroines Maureen Ward and Natalie Bradbury who co-founded the project from which the tour developed and who were both generous enough to give constructive feedback on this article. This walk would not be possible without them. Thanks also to everyone who has joined me on a tour and/or played a part co-producing the wider Modernist Heroines Project, whether by contributing to the zine, attending an event, or commenting online. Finally, thank you to the editor, my anonymous reviewers and Bethan Evans, John Hawes, Ceri Morgan, Jane Samuels and the Keele micro-climates group for their support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

No funding was received by the author for this project. The initial International Women’s Day event received support in kind from Manchester City Council.

Notes on contributors

Morag Rose

Dr Morag Rose is an anarcho-flaneuse, walking artist and part-time lecturer in Human Geography at The University of Liverpool. In 2006 she founded the psychogeographical collective The LRM (Loiterers Resistance Movement). Morag has developed a unique academic-activist-artistic praxis asserting that the streets should belong to everyone. She has performed, exhibited and shared her work widely.

The Manchester Modernist Heroines Project was a collective endeavour and reflecting this ethos the author wanted to explicitly acknowledge the wider communities of scholarship, support, activism and care which enabled them to write this account.