For Final Fridays 6, we visited three significant sets of steps. The video displayed above documents the moments where I decided to take instant film photographs along the way.
Our first stop was the Lowry Bridge in Collyhurst, where one member of our group experienced what they described as a ‘flashback from the future’ – which led on to a conversation about Hauntology.
We considered the notion of ‘going somewhere’ and ‘above and beyond’ and how steps are commonly associated as an in-between stage of being or going somewhere. A liminal space that is neither here nor there, a place where we carry ourselves from one place to another. These particular steps have lost that sense of purpose, as they are only accessible from one side. Perhaps they have yet to find their new purpose. They are themselves in an in-between stage, isolated in the no-mans land of the edgelands, as they look over a vast landscape of development and contemporary industry. It seems this site has always been on the fringes, a place on the edge of industry, and dispensing isolation, a place where people go to be elsewhere and nowhere all at once, as witnessed by L.S. Lowry in his painting of the scene A Footbridge (1938).
Our second stop took us to a set of steps leading up to the trees from Collyhurst Road. From the road, there is no clear indication to where these steps lead, other than into the trees. They are narrow, relatively steep, and dead straight. They reminded one member of our group to steps leading up to a temple, and another of a notion of ‘going somewhere where there’s nowhere to go’.
Finally, we reckoned with the steps leading to and from the railway underpass that links Bromley Street to Dalton Street. Here we contemplated strange traces unravelling a sense of place. A definitive place that leads to something else entirely. An altogether other.
We reckoned with our thoughts and marks over beer in the pub.
The next Final Fridays walk is Friday 26 July 2024.