Spring Cleaning

• Kate Feld
• 6 Apr 07, 04:42 PM

The lawn in Piccadilly Gardens has been magically resurrected overnight, which means it must be spring. And with the change in seasons, Manchester bloggers seem to have found a new interest in the beautification of their environment.

Craig, our formerly mild-mannered mathematics graduate student, has a riveting account of almost starting a fight at a bus stop on Gooseania. Why? A man threw his barmcake wrapper on the ground. Stand up to litter, man!

Northern Quarter resident Rob Adlard and his friends from the City Centre Conservatives have embarked on a spring campaign to clean up the 'hood. Turns out not everyone enjoys the graffiti stencils and tags that lend the nabe its scruffily bohemian aesthetic:

“As we had a day to clean up parts of the city to show how neglected they are by the council (we filled 8 large bin bags in the Northern Quarter in less than an hour, finding health hazards such as used condoms, bloodied swabs and used needles) we will be taking action on graffiti.

I walked down Dale Street and Church Street today to catalogue the issue in that area and found that EVERY building had some graffiti on it. Although I’d noticed it and already decided it should be a key aspect of the improvements to our environment, I was amazed that no building had escaped.”

Police were involved in a very different sort of cleanup earlier in the week. Manchester Clubbing provided us with on-the-spot news coverage oft just the kind of motorcrash you’d expect them to be especially interested in. In a post entitled “Code 8… We need pretzels,” they reported that “A beer truck was involved in a crash underneath the Mancunian Way tonight, causing the closure of a roundabout and re-routing of traffic away from the Premier Travelodge (can this be made permanent?).”

”The truck was laden with beer kegs and some unlucky sod is having to remove every single one before they can tow the vehicle away. At present it's surrounded by a suspiciously high number of police...”

Yes, the supercasino controversy is still with us. Many bloggers were surprised by news that the House of Lords rejected the proposal to turn Beswick into Las Vegas East. Surprised, but not disappointed, in the case of The Art of Fiction:

“Its highly likely that this little piece of contentious legislation, having now caused the government such problems, could disappear for good. The spurious arguments about "regeneration" … have clearly not worked in this case; since anyone with half a brain would at least question the logic of creating a gambling maelstrom in one of the most socially disadvantaged boroughs in the country.”

And Mamucium has been writing an ode to Manchester Town Hall. He points the way to one of the city’s secret treasures – the spectacular murals in the Great Hall by Ford Madox Brown. I stumbled upon them almost by accident a month ago myself.

“These murals tell the story of Manchester with a Victorian twist and focus on the themes of the day, namely Christianity, commerce and the textile industry. These murals took many years for Madox Brown to complete and his health unfortunately suffered in this time. So much so that following a stroke, Madox Brown completed the final mural with his left hand. Despite this, it is very difficult to tell which of the 12 this actually is!”

If you haven’t seen them, go. No rush, though.