Danny Moran: how much do we love the River Irwell?

On the wall of Liam Spencer’s studio in Rossendale is a painting about three feet square. It shows a weir on the River Irwell by Hardman’s Mill in Rawtenstall…tumbling water, foliage, the dark smudge of a distant chimney stack. “I’m not so keen as yet,” the artist muses as we discuss his latest project – painting the river. “I need to find a way of making the paint work.” Having made his name with Mancunian landscapes – Spencer was The Lowry’s very first guest exhibitor – his gleamy, brickwork-ey, post-rainshowery city centre scenes brought an abstractionist’s brio to popular style. How to capture the rhythms of the countryside, though? That’s a work in progress. Meanwhile the studio accrues new tributaries for the artist to navigate: pigments traced from dyeworks which used to dump in the water; banks of iPhones and tablets with looping trail-cam footage of wildlife in searing slo-mo; there’s talk of oral testimonies from nest-thieves of bygone childhoods. “Some of it, I’m not even sure if it’s art,” he shrugs. “It’s a kind of collecting.”

Thirty miles downriver at Ralli Quays in the centre of Manchester – a short stroll between the old Mark Addy pub and the Irwell Street Bridge – Don Lee and Gloria Gaffney show me the centuries-old towpath which Don himself uncovered back in the 1960s, and which developer Legal & General is set to swallow into its new hotel complex. Result: there will no longer be a public right of way. “There were more than a hundred objections at January’s planning meeting,” he tells me – but of course the application still went through. “They used the wrong section of the Planning Act to issue the stopping-up order,” says Don, who as a former officer with the Pedestrian’s Association is a veteran of footpath warfare. “That avoids public inquiry…I’ve not seen that tactic before.” As we explore the route it’s quite strange to encounter overgrown edgeland in the city centre. Hope now rests on the Department For Transport being persuaded to see sense and reclaim it from the jaws of the property monster.

What if you could walk the river source-to-mouth, or even follow the Ship Canal on to Liverpool? That’s the wider war here. You can sometimes wonder at the extent to which the Irwell is neglected as a touchstone of our regional identity. How much does our love for it go unrecognised and unreflected by the conurbation? While the Bridgewater Canal gets the credit for the Industrial Revolution and the Ship Canal gets the kudos for supposedly stealing Liverpool’s docks, that thirty-nine mile stretch of water gurgling up from Deerplay Moor, which makes its way into town without hubris or human assistance…that erstwhile burping shit-stream now teaming with life and legend…is it not a diamond necklace in our midst?

Can’t back up etc.

After last week’s council-gungeing (‘Does the planning committee do rehearsals?’ – see link) a secondary custard-flinging with the Liberal Democrats. Not often your reporter gets drawn into this kind of hand-to-hand combat, what with the dignity of local journalism to uphold…but just tell me, tell me honestly: am I the asshole here?  With leader John Leech among the first to suggest the committee may have been flirting with premeditation the party were quick to seize on last week’s column and claim the scenario described as illegal…verboten…haram…it’s simply an offence for the planning committee to pre-meet, never mind pre-decide. As in…against the law.

Okay, I say. Next week the mic is yours: ‘Labour broke the law, say Lib Dems’. Just show me the law, where’s it written. The planning committee breaking the law would be potentially huge. ‘Email the planning officer’ comes the reply. ‘Try the city solicitor’. ‘You could try the constitution but it might take you a few hours, here’s the link.’ Look, I say. It’s you saying Labour broke the law. You should be able to produce the evidence. Right now my story isn’t ‘Labour broke the law’ it’s ‘Lib Dems can’t back up their own claims.” Time passes, then another email. ‘Maybe it’s just the guidelines they’ve broken…’

Come on Lib Dems, buck up. You know what the naysayers in this city say about you. Get your act together, we need an effective opposition and there’s plenty of room for it on this here page.

In the meantime I await response from the city solicitor.

Tower of song

Behind the tenet ‘genre is dead’ lie new worlds of music…or so say the algorithms of the streaming age, at least. Thus, I gather tunes to play at a club night in town with my partner Kyoko Swan…Chess Records ‘45s, Pebbles classics, old-skool hip hop, Northern Quarter future soul… we’re light years beyond ‘mixing it up’ now. ‘The blues’ are dead by this Silicon Valley metric but in my heart…playing records to a room, finding the space in the song that jacks the frequency of a glimmering bar…in my heart that flame is still burning…so long live, at least, ‘Blue’.

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Liam Spencer’s Irwell exhibition opens at The Whitaker, Rawtenstall in December.

‘Blue’ featuring Kyoko Swan and Danny Moran is at the Rose & Monkey, Swan St this Friday 25 Feb, 8 til late. Free.

@dannyxmoran