Stockport Creative Campus walking tour
Our research in Stockport is funded by the Arts Council and is a partnership between Manchester Metropolitan University and Stockport Metropolitan Council, MadLab, FutureEverything and In 4.0.
The £2.5m provided by the Cultural Development Fund (CDF) will provide refurbished spaces for creative businesses and a range of activities delivered by the partners, providing opportunities for people in Stockport to participate in creative projects or business enterprise.
All partners agree that things are changing in Stockport; we are seeing a whole new range of creative businesses starting up, complemented by the availability of new spaces run by the council and private enterprise. The question now is, how can we collectively build on this to make Stockport a more attractive place to live and work into the future?
The University’s input is to focus student projects and academic research on Stockport to raise awareness of the potential of the town and to build on the sense of change that people are talking about.
This seemed like a daunting task. How could we get staff and students from the University, and other people we work with, to begin to see Stockport through our eyes?
The best way to achieve this was to take interested parties to see the places we were talking about, and to meet the people there who make a difference. Thus the (soon to be world famous) Creative Campus Walking Tour was born. This begins at the newly refurbished Hatworks, the University’s partner in a Women in Archives project and home of ARC (Arts Recovery in the Community) a mental health charity. From there, we move on to the Merseyway Innovation Centre (MIC), office accommodation in a former retail space part funded by the CDF scheme which aims to build a community of digital and creative businesses at the heart of the town. Next door is the site of Stockroom – a council-run initiative that aims to provide an innovative new facility for people in the town. In the Underbanks, Stockport’s historic district with its independent boutiques and famous vinyl record shop there is a different kind of feel. In Yellowhammer we meet Joe Hartley, creative entrepreneur and MMU graduate who has established a new business bringing together a bakery and ceramics workshop. At one edge of the Marketplace we find a black and white half-timbered building that will eventually become the CDF HQ with space for community workshops, business training and graduate businesses. Just opposite this, is Profolk, a new kind of flexible workspace located in an old bank. The tour concludes with a visit to Grit Studios. Here, John and Sophie Macaulay have taken an unloved building surrounded by scrapyards, and turned it into a thriving community for glassworkers, ceramicists, sculptors and other artists who typically have difficulty finding suitable space in the area.
Every time we walk the route there seems more to add. If this sounds like something that would be of interest to you, please get in touch and we can ensure that you walk the walk too. Email: designfactory [@] mmu.ac.uk.
Research theme: Stockport Creative Campus
