WORKTOWN: MY ROOM. MY BOLTON. PERFORMING CONNECTIVITY LEADS TO LIVING CONNECTIVITY “A city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.” Sir Patrick Geddes
The profound and complex relationships we have with the notion of ‘home’, be they framed by memory, postcode, bricks and mortar, travel, transience, cultural heritage, disenfranchisement, representation, nationalism or refugeeism, sat at the heart of our performing arts projects this year. Exploring the notion of feeling at home has unlocked conversations about identity, neighbourliness, locality, community and civic duty. The project has helped us work towards an understanding of what thriving creative community partnerships and areabased learning might look like in Bolton. My Room My Bolton evolved in collaboration with RoughHouse Theatre Company, a residency project with 12 to 15 year olds. In the first year of our work together we used verbatim theatre methods to capture and present the authentic voices of our pupils and wider school community. Pupils carried out questionnaires and recorded conversations on matters of race and social justice. RoughHouse drew these words together into a script which was taken on a short public tour by our Young Company. It was apparent as the first phase unfolded, that the second year of residency would need to be outward-facing. We needed to enfranchise people both vertically and laterally if it were to achieve its aim of diverse and democratic representation of opinions and ideas. Research and development quickly lead us to the Mass-Observation project, an extensive exploration of the conducts and customs of the people of Britain that began in Bolton in 1937, 80 years earlier. ‘Worktown’ was Mass Observation’s case study name for Bolton. Using the original directives of the movement, we asked about the personal: ‘Tell us about a room in your home.’ We also asked for personal views about the public: ‘How do you perceive Bolton? How do you think Bolton is perceived by people that live elsewhere?’ We sent out questionnaires far and wide. We had conversations beyond our walls. Mass Observer and poet, Charles Madge pointed to a need for what he called ‘anthropology at home’. As we set the project going, work coincided with an article, ‘The north remembers: how once-proud Bolton became 'a nothing of a town', published by the Guardian. In the article Andy Walton reflected that Bolton town centre, the ‘commercial heart of one of the largest towns in the UK is in nothing less than an existential struggle.’ Sitting alongside this picture of the town is the Local Council’s Bolton Vision for 2030: ‘We want Bolton to be a vibrant place built on strong cohesive communities, successful businesses and healthy, engaged residents. It will be a welcoming place where people choose to study, work, invest and put down roots.’ The work also sits within the context of a loneliness epidemic. Over a quarter of all households in the UK contain just one person (circa 7.7 million people) with a sense that this number will rise by roughly two million as the next decade unfolds. The work also sits within a crisis in education. Using cognitive scientist George Lakoff’s framing theory (moral and conceptual), we might note that extreme emphasis on testing and academic achievement limits the way pupils view reality and their relationships with their communities. With testing and achievement emphatically in the frame, pupils’ socio-political and cultural hinterland fall away, along with opportunities to foster strong relationships through collaborative, applied pathways. The voices captured in My Room My Bolton present a somewhat fractured community, labouring under the persisting stereotype that it’s ‘rough up north’, yet buoyed by pragmatic humour and an impetus to connect:
I am a human. I love Bolton. It’s where my parents grew up.
My family are here and where my family belong, I belong. Bolton is a town with lots of different neighbourhoods. People are very attached to their own part. Not all areas are easy to love and where there are more social problems, it’s also not an easy place to live. From down south, Bolton isn’t seen as a desirable place to live. Coronation Street paints my area in a bad light. It makes it seem like nothing good ever happens. We’re portrayed as uneducated, poor, rougher than we actually are. Some areas are rough but I like my town. Bolton played a significant role in the Industrial Revolution. Many of the major players were born and bred in Bolton: Richard Arkwright. Samuel Crompton. John Fletcher. Bleach. Bolton is much more than what most people think. If I lived in California, the weather would be better. There are lots of outside walks. The Wi-Fi could be better but there is nothing finer than walking in the fields and the country. It’s sad when architecturally important buildings like the Odeon and the Palais de Danse are pulled down and not given new leases of life. I like the old buildings so I’m glad we still have some. From My Room My Bolton
The project coincided with an invitation to participate in a Community Development Partnership supported by ACoRP (The Association of Community Rail Partnerships). All of a sudden, ‘my room’ became ‘our room in our Bolton’. Due to the power of local networking and the promise that, “the [station’s] doors would be taken off their hinges”, rhizomatic grassroots are already taking hold. Railway buildings that had been standing in disuse are in the process of being opened up. They present not just new housing for creative community activity in Bolton, but a new home.
The Young Company perform My Room My Bolton at Manchester Art Gallery
When communities open doors to their own cultural capital, the doors are much easier to walk through. As urban writer and activist Jane Jacobs put it, “there is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.” Such projects, the rise of community-powered expression, allow diversity of talent and aptitude to flow through the space they open up. They foster connections. Doors that were closed (moral and conceptual), open up. Conversation and collaboration hold out a hand to loneliness. Learning is made memorable as it is divergent and plaits emotional connections, social relevancy and applied activity around a project narrative.
My Room My Bolton will be performed at Bolton Station CDP’s Community Gala on Saturday 30th June, an event at Transport for Greater Manchester’s Bolton Interchange and Bolton Train Station, to raise awareness of the community activity taking place at the station. It is an early model for school creative community practice in Bolton.