TERRY WYKE AT ZION ARTS CENTRE

The Zion Arts Centre in Hulme is an arts centre for young artists and creative thinkers to come and think and explore possible ideas that may come to them, a multi art-form place where like minded individuals can come and experience many types of thing, including workshops in painting, digital art, visual, music or video art. Terry Wyke, a historian did a brief talk there explaining about the history of the surrounding area, and of Manchester as a city, and how it's influences are still being felt both here, but also on a national and even global scale.

Manchester as a city has a vibrant history, but this mainly started during the 18th Century, when the Industrial Revolution began, and Manchester and the surrounding towns is in fact where the Industrial Revolution began, bringing with it a completely new way of thinking and living for many people. Before this time life had pretty much simply been a means of struggle and survival, there was a much lower life expectancy than we're used to now, what with public and personal health issues and many people didn't survive past childhood. This area was where people started to accumulate wealth, through the new factories that were being built, some of the first of their kind. This gave Manchester a worldly significance in terms of innovation and one aspect which really cemented this is the cotton industry. This was the basis of the Industrial Revolution, with lots of inventions being made and technologies being increased. The machinery being developed thus helped the cotton industry really flourish, increasing the wealth of the townspeople vastly. This had many knock on effects, including the highspeed urbanisation of areas around central Manchester, such as Hulme, Chorlton and Ancoats. Instead of people working in their houses, they now worked in factories, introducing the concept of work days, becoming our used to 9-5 days. Towns had knowledge of cotton, and it introduced an idea of luxury, in terms that unlike wool cotton was soft, light, comfortable and also could be printed on. This opened up vast possibilities for fashion among other things. Another thing that came up was the concept of a disposable income. People now had more money than was necessary, so came the idea of places of leisure, such as music halls, theatres and later on cinemas.

All of this shows just how integral Manchester was and is to how we have developed as a nation, and how this has affected many aspects of our lives. This is also relevant in terms of the Old School/New School project, and tells you some stuff that can bring the two together, and how we should still keep the innovative ideals that have always been in Manchester's history, whether it is in industry, textiles, music, etc, and that it may seem unlikely, but that the past is still present in what we do, it's sometimes just a question of realising it.