Ordsall creativity celebrated at University of Salford event

An event celebrating the fantastic achievements accomplished by those involved in the University of Salford led ‘Ideas4Ordsall’ initiative was held at the University’s Old Fire Station on Saturday 12th September 2015.

  Here is the Ideas4Ordsall group celebrating at the event with Salford’s Ceremonial Mayor Cllr Peter Dobbs (centre).

Ideas4Ordsall, which supports the Ordsall community of Salford to develop cultural and creative activities, launched in January 2015 and the event was created to acknowledge its early success.

Local people from Ordsall and Islington were awarded certificates at the event by one of the Guests of Honour, Salford’s Ceremonial Mayor Cllr Peter Dobbs, which recognised their achievements in developing their ideas into community activities.

The University of Salford’s Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Enterprise, Professor Nigel Mellors and the City Mayor of Salford, Ian Stewart also made guest appearances. Mr Stewart gave a rousing speech which highlighted how the local people had worked creatively in their community to realise their ideas and ambitions.

The University of Salford’s Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research and Enterprise, Professor Nigel Mellors (left) and the City Mayor of Salford, Ian Stewart (right).

Local ideas range from Rosemary Swift’s idea for an Ordsall Social History play to Shannon Randall’s dog walking service, from Ronnie Crowther’s Ordsall Art Collective to David Winston’s research into WW1 nurse heroine, Edith Cavell.

Ideas4Ordsall is funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and is led by Dr Jessica Symons and Dr Beth Perry from the University of Salford’s Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures (SURF)  group in the School of Built Environment (SoBE).

It is part of a four-year project on cultural intermediaries in the creative city with partners at the Universities of Birmingham, Birmingham City and City University.

Ideas4Ordsall has supported over 20 local residents to carry out community festivals, art collectives, bee hive installations, craft clubs and local history plays, to name but a few. The initiative takes local residents ideas and turns them into reality through the provision of much needed financial and practical support.

Named the ‘Ordsall Creatives’, residents have also received support from a range of local organisations including Let’s Go Global, Chapel Street Community Arts, Ordsall Community Arts and local Salford artist, Amber Sanchez.

Speaking at the event, Nigel Mellors, PVC Research and Enterprise at the University of Salford, said: “It was great to be able to welcome the Ordsall community onto the campus and celebrate their creativity.

Professor Nigel Mellors discussing the initiative with a member of the Ideas4Ordsall initiative.

“Ideas4Ordsall illustrates the high commitment to working with local people that the University wants to support.

“SoBE’s SURF team have done a fantastic job”

Dr Beth Perry, Director of UPRISE/Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures in SoBE, from the University of Salford, said: “There is so much energy and creativity in Ordsall that we wanted to give people a chance to develop their own ideas.

Salford’s Ceremonial Mayor Cllr Peter Dobbs (centre) and Dr Beth Perry, Director of UPRISE Research Centre looking at Ideas4Ordsall’s ideas.

“Local cultural organisations and artists have played a vital role in supporting residents to make their ideas happen.

“We wanted to have an event to celebrate all the wonderful people that have participated in this research.”

Research Fellow Dr Jess Symons spent time in Ordsall getting to know people and then developed ‘Ideas4Ordsall’ to give local people’s ideas a boost.

One of the ideas supported is the Ordsall Art Collective. Local resident Ronnie Crowther, a 44-year old father of two who works night-shifts at Sainsbury’s, brought the collective together. They have had a pop-up shop at the Lowry Outlet Mall and will be exhibiting at the Royal Exchange Theatre between 7-27 September 2015.

Ronnie said: “There is a lot of artistic talent in Ordsall that goes completely unnoticed and it was my idea to create a platform to get that talent recognised.

“The work of the Collective is of a very high standard and we wanted somewhere to say ‘we are here and look at what we can do’.

“These people should be making a proper living out of their work and hopefully this can help them take the next step.”

Laura Kendall is a local resident whose volunteering with Ordsall Community Arts has changed her life. Ideas4Ordsall supported Laura to work with Ordsall Community Arts and develop her idea of a community billboard. The billboard is now displayed on Ordsall Community Allotments to let local people know about all the activities taking part in the neighbourhood.

Laura said “With the right support I’ve learned how to cope in social situations, I have become so much stronger in myself and I am now very active in my community.

“There is so much going on in Ordsall but a huge majority of people just don’t know about it.

“I thought of having a noticeboard where I know it will be seen by so many people walking by to school, the shops, the doctors, and the dentist.”

A full list of creative activities undertaken as part of the project can be found on the Ideas4Ordsall website.

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What an adventure we have had in Ordsall

The project is reaching a crescendo this month with a Celebration Event at the Old Fire Station in the University of Salford campus.

We are pleased to welcome the Pro-Vice Chancellor of Enterprise at the University of Salford, Professor Nigel Mellors together with the Civic Mayor of Salford, Ian Stewart and the Ceremonial Mayor of Salford, Councillor Pete Dobbs who also happens to be Councillor for the Ordsall Ward. The other councillors for Ordsall, Cllr Ray Mashita (who is Chair of Planning and Regulatory Panel at the council) and Cllr Tanya Birch are also going to be attending.

All these grand people are coming to applaud the hard work of the Ideas4Ordsall cohort – 20 local people who were supported by the Cultural Intermediation project to develop ideas that they have for the local area.  These ideas have ranged from beehives in the Ordsall Community Allotments to a Social History play at the Salford Lads Club, to photo/craft/bike workshops to the Islington Community Festival. We have learned about World War 1 nurse Edith Cavell, a war heroine who was shot by the Germans for helping wounded soldiers escape Belgium from one enthusiast who is now giving regular talks across the city region about this remarkable woman.

You can find out more about these great ideas on the Ideas4Ordsall website

Ideas4Ordsall Highlights: Laura’s Billboard

Laura is a local parent and worker at Ordsall Community Arts. She used to think that there was ‘nothing going on’ in Ordsall but after getting involved in the project she changed her mind.

The University of Salford project team commissioned Ordsall Community Arts to find out about cultural activities in the local area and OCA recruited 6 local people to spend time in the community talking to people and finding out what’s on. As they asked questions, looked at adverts and posters in windows, on noticeboards and online and listened via ‘word-of-mouth’, the community researchers realised that there was ‘loads going on’ in the area.

Laura was one of the community researchers and she got really excited about sharing and communicating ‘what’s on’ to her friends and neighbours. As a local parent, she is always out and about in the community anyway so it is easy for her to let people know. She started talking to people about their activities and set up a Facebook Group called On in Ordsall which now has 555 members (as of 3rd Sept 2015).

When the project funding came available to support the development of local people’s ideas, Laura proposed a public billboard in the Ordsall Park area for posters and info about local activities and events. After a number of false starts and waiting for people to get back to her, she was delighted when the Ordsall Community Allotments agreed she could put up a board on their fences.  Laura worked with local artist, Marie (another Ideas Person who has put beehives in the allotments), to create a fabulous board that can be updated regularly.

Laura’s launch of the billboard was featured on Salford Online.

Lots of people thank Laura for sharing info about events and activities that they otherwise wouldn’t realise were happening. People stop and read the Billboard regularly and also stop and chat to Laura about what they are doing.

Cultural activities only work if people know about them! Laura’s billboard and Facebook group is making sure that happens in Ordsall… Well done Laura 🙂

Ideas4Ordsall Update January 2015

Tags

intermediaries, Ordsall

New year, new ideas, new developments.

Check out our Facebook group and Twitter @ideas4Ordsall

We are pleased to announce that the four cultural intermediaries working with us on this project have found a fabulous collection of people with ideas they want to develop. This stage of the project has taken six months to come into fruition so a moment’s reflection is worthwhile.

When I started on the project in May 2014, my brief was to put together a panel of people in Ordsall and provide funding for them to commission some artworks. As an anthropologist, I did my research by going into the Ordsall communities, chatting to people, visiting the cafes and cultural spots, asking questions and looking around me. I spent some time with ‘community researchers’ from Ordsall Community Arts who were looking into cultural activities in the area as part of the same project.

After a while it became obvious that people within the community had plenty of ideas, thank you very much, about what they wanted to happen in their community and what they really needed was some support and funding to help make them happen. So in October we asked the cultural intermediaries to gather these ideas people together into The Cohort (said with deep voice – the Apprentice was on TV at the time…).

Three months later, we are about to get together the members of The Cohort for the first time and find out about the ideas they are developing. I’m hearing whispers of a bee observation hive, bike co-op, dog walking, the longest washing line in Ordsall, a foraging game/app, WW1 uniforms display, even a whole festival.

And I’m the lucky researcher who gets to follow the development of these ideas and see how they take shape. I’m interested in what and how organisational structures support or obstruct the creative process in making these ideas happen. Watch this space…

Diving into big data in Salford

The hacker community came to MediaCity for the Greater Manchester Big Data Dive on Tues 22nd July 2014. Coders, data monkeys and other techie enthusiasts gathered to respond to social challenges set for them.

Our project asked a big data team to paint an alternative data portrait of Ordsall (the Salford district where we are researching cultural activities).  Policy direction and language about the area tend towards identifying problems and issues (see the Ordsall Ward Profile) rather than looking at the good and interesting activities going on. Our challenge at the event therefore asked participants to:

• Present an ‘objective’ portrait of statistics
• Characterise the area in a way that challenges stereotypes (about demography, built environment)
• Frame ‘absences’ (certain types of provision against national averages etc)

Here was my presentation for this event: bigdata_surf

The results

Our team came second!  What a great result. We should have come first really 😉 The data helped us:

We challenged perceptions of crime in Ordsall by creating a map of hotspots across the city region (see below).

Hotspots in Burglaries data for Manchester city region, 2000-2014. Note how parts of Manchester are white hot with crime while Ordsall is darker with only a few pale patches.

Hotspots in Violent Crime data for Manchester city region, 2000-2014. Again, note how parts of Manchester are white hot with crime while Ordsall is darker with only a few pale patches.

Car accidents near Ordsall Park area, 2000-2014. Note how residents within ‘the triangle’ are trapped on all sides by dangerous roads.

Hotspots of car accidents in Ordsall area, 2002-2013. Note how Chapel St is red with accidents.

Hotspots of car accidents in Ordsall area, 2011-2013 (after traffic calming measures). Note the difference between Chapel St before and after traffic calming.

Tracking positive and negative tweets about Ordsall in Twitter, 2014. Note that 60% of tweets are positive. The negative ones were complaining about litter and graffiti.

Thanks to the Team5 for making it happen. We met for the first time that day and yet worked together really well. 🙂 While we all walked away with Amazon vouchers for coming 2nd, the real prize was learning about what was possible to do with data.

If just one day with open data helped us learn a lot about the area, what would regular and unrestricted access to the data and a talented techie team help us do?

Ordsall Update June

Latest from Ordsall

June was a busy month in Ordsall with the On in Orsdall Community Researchers developing their approach to finding out more about cultural activities in the triangle and M3 magazine working out what to publish in a special on cultural activities around the Chapel Street area (which is in Ordsall).  Yours truly has been helping them and also trying to make sense of the bureaucratic structures that sit around the communities in Salford. This culminated with me making a short introduction to the project at the Ordsall and Longworthy Community Committee meeting on 1st July at the local neighbourhood centre.

I’ve also been volunteering at Ordsall Hall in the gardens there, learning lots about weeding (water the soil first if the plants are hard to pull up) and about tudor gardens (who knew that gem lettuce was around in medieval times – I thought it was a posh supermarket idea!). I’ve also started volunteering at Kids with Dreams at Salford Lads Club, where my favourite activities are colouring in with the kids and playing pool and only just about holding my own on the table.

I’ve spent time in Salford Quays (also part of Ordsall, dontcha know) and finding out about what goes on round there. I have a radar for free/cheap activities and so I am looking out for them.  I have hung out at Salford Uni MediaCity Campus and a community researcher and I went to the Lowry to find out from their learning and community engagement manager about what the Lowry do for their local community. Turns out, there’s loads going on – so much that it deserves a post of its own, so more later on that.

I’ve also been wandering around the Chapel Street area, taken on a guided tour of the other end of Ordsall all the way up to Greengate (the new development opposite Manchester Cathedral), along the pedestrial walkways next to the river Irwell, past the listed railway arches next to Salford Central station (where they used to keep horses back in the day), admiring Islington Park and the domes on buildings along the way.

Over the next 12 months, I will carry on helping with various cultural activities in the Ordsall area and developing links with other individuals, groups, organisations and events which give the area its heart and spirit. We are defining cultural activity very loosely here – any activity which gives life meaning – it’s that loose. I’m also trying to unpick the government structures that sit around the area as they are critical in understanding what helps people realise their ideas/ambitions.

I’m a fan of digital stuff so I’ve been looking out for apps and games ideas, none yet but it is early days.

Jessica in Balsall Heath

As I walk through Birmingham streets on the way to the university, I notice that the city experience for a new visitor is shopping, as it is in many other cities.  I find out that the university had to abandon years of planning after HS2 was announced – the trainline was due to go through the space allocated for a new building.  Even universities, massive institutions as they are, have to move out of the way when the corporates are coming through.

Predatory corporates, sit like hawks watching people as they go about their lives, swooping in to pick up any assets of potential value. People worry that their (Council owned) homes will be handed to the developers and they will be moved somewhere else (unknown) with other people (unknown) rather than in the safe and familiar community they live now.  Gradually, every available patch of land is converted into expensive flats.

In inner cities, billboards loom suggesting lifestyles local people know are not aimed at them.  It has happened before, in the 1960s when whole estates were knocked down and rebuilt.  In Balsall Heath, a community member recalled how houses just round the corner were bulldozed due to damp just months before damp proof coursing became available.  It’s hard not to be suspicious of fingers of power working invisibly to lay claim to these areas for profit. Who can be trusted and who cannot.

It’s hard to talk about ‘a community’ as people are not bounded, although they do all live physically in one area and what affects that area would affect them all.  Try to identify people within the ‘community’ to talk to and every time you try to zoom in on community, it disappears.  People do orient around common interests.  The cost of living has been cheap in inner cities until recently so people for whom high income was not possible or not a priority were drawn to these areas.  Especially if they needed to walk places.

In this project focused on cultural activities, we asked are artists just a niche community who get funding to show artworks to each other because they cannot access funding for it any other way? Are audiences for artwork incidental to the artmaking process?  Is that the same for culture as well?  Does the audience matter? In this context, how then to interpret art, culture, community, creativity in ways that make sense to others or even to each other in the research team?  What words do you use, if you don’t want your words to affect how people understand what you are trying to say.  Does art provide obliqueness and therefore a form of transparency?

Timing itself becomes a frame.  The terms, the process, the arrangement.  Who is in and who is out is predicated more on the structure of the process than anything else. Who gets to decide who decides? The point of this project is to sit outside the local authority / Arts Council frames and yet it would perhaps help to select another alternative frame rather than having one emerge which we do not like.  As people manoeuvre to ‘jerrymander’ the process, we could end up in an uncomfortable position, painted into a corner.

My own assumption was that we would support cultural activities as small scale initiatives done by local people who had an idea for something they thought would be cool and which they could persuade their friends, neighbours, local people to support them to do.  I imagined a girl who wanted to get a recording contract and needed time in a studio; a kid with a great idea for an app who wanted to get some advice/programming support; a woman with an idea for fluffy dogs that she could sell on a market stall.

Since a university will only pay organisations or people set up as sole traders, this whole vision collapsed and I did not know what to replace it with (immediately).  A new vision is building but the question remains – how to enable people’s ideas, and where are the blocks, even unintentional ones?

Introduction to Jessica

Hello

I’ve just been appointed to the Cultural Intermediation project as a Research Fellow focused on cultural activities in Ordsall, Salford.

Here’s some background info on me

My interests lie in creativity, cultural meaning and urban sustainability.  I joined SURF in May 2014 and contribute as an anthropologist to the AHRC Connected Communities Programme. I am just finishing my PhD at the University of Manchester on idea generation and realisation in the making of a civic parade (due mid-2014).  I have an MA with Distinction from University of Manchester in Social Anthropology (2007) and a BA with First Class honours from University College London in Ancient World (1994)

I am focused on the generation of cultural meaning through creativity as an adaptive process and how organisations act as enablers and barriers.   Key areas of enquiry include:

•           Political influences on city making processes

•           The dynamics of collaborative creativity and co-production

•           The role of artists and other ‘creatives’ in working around organizational barriers

•           Alignment of anthropology and art

•           The potential for anthropology as a storytelling medium to engage in futures thinking

I also have a background in digital media, consultancy and social enterprise.  After graduating in 1994, I became an IT consultant focused on emerging technologies such as internet and interactive TV.  Mobilised by the dot-com crash, I moved into activism and social engagement, becoming Knowledge Manager at the Demos thinktank in London in 2002 and co-founder of the thinkingwomen network. 

In 2005, I founded social incubator, Krata developing a think-and-do-tank in Manchester with projects around environmental issues, community engagement and social enterprise.  Key outcomes included community engagement on the Regional Strategy for NWDA, analysis on barriers to healthy eating for Food Futures and raising funding for two projects: a café and market garden and a social enterprise running cooking workshops, the latter now independently run by the co-founders.  In 2003, I designed a foldaway bag as an alternative to plastic bags working with Oxfam to sell through independent retailers and online.  I am an active member of a female social entrepreneur network seeking to promote and support social enterprise.

I have ongoing enthusiasm for speculative fiction, short-filmmaking and community radio, broadcasting weekly on an ALL FM show with my kids.