At the time of the last post we were poised for the launch of our Cornerstones project in St Mary's. From that event, bathed in the glow from magical lanterns and Impossible Theatre's wonderful LightWeight installation, we set off on a path involving symbols, maps and stories that will continue through to the autumn. Project team member Adam Strickson picks up the thread, with some fond Oldham memories of his own.
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Photo: Justin Garner
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I think I know Oldham. I've been working there on and off for years, though a lot more off than on in recent times. I realised my understanding of the place had some gaps when I turned up for a friendly cup of char at a Bangladeshi friend's house in Westwood in the second week of June 2001. He said, 'What are you doing here? We haven't seen a white man round here except for the police for over a fortnight.' I'm not sure 'police' was the word he used. It just never occurred to me, living in the stone villages just the other side of the Pennine ridge, that I couldn't go and visit my friends on those redbrick streets, despite all the smoke, hate and fire of the now notorious 'Oldham riots' on the TV.
That summer trouble erupted in Bradford, Leeds and Burnley, all in areas where I'd been working on modest community arts projects to help intercultural understanding. Clearly, I was ineffectually scratching the surface of things but – surprise, surprise – there was a lot more money available for ambitious work to 'break down barriers' in the four years after the petrol bombs. In 2002, I was able to write a full length multi-lingual musical play for the Coliseum and Peshkar Arts in Oldham , 'The Beautiful Violin' ('Bhelua Shundori' in Bangla), with a multi-talented, multi-racial cast. That kicked off a series of ambitious projects in the 'riot towns', finishing with a play with a huge cast written to celebrate the opening of the new Burnley Youth Theatre building in summer 2005, the first purpose-built youth theatre in the UK. And then the money began to peter out... and the type of projects I was offered were smaller, less risky and a lot less ambitious. And then there was the recession.
But throughout the past nine years, I've continued to visit Oldham for pleasure rather than work. I've enjoyed home-cooked meals of special fish dishes, reminding the older Bengalis of the rivers 'back home'. I've been a special guest who never has to pay anything in smart restaurants. I've been there when British Bengali councillors have been voted in and I've sampled piri-piri chicken in the new kind of café some of my younger Bengali friends are running. And I've had a few cups of milky coffee and egg sarnies in Tommyfield Market too, right in the heart of Oldham.
Now I've just started working with Loca Creatives on St Mary's Estate, once famous for deprivation and near total unemployment. Though it's on 'my' side of Oldham, close to the A62 from Huddersfield, I've never visited before, confirming my experience of the town as a series of villages, mostly defined by ethnicity or social class, with few border-crossings. But the new piece of St Mary's, around Poppy Road and Bluebell Walk, where the streets have been named by the local children, is a different spicy casserole of fish, with smart eco-houses built by Contour Homes populated with a deliberate mixture of people – lots of my friendly British Bangladeshis but also British Pakistanis, white Oldhamers and a scattering of British Chinese and Irish, with Kurds and people who have arrived in recent years from West Africa and Eastern Europe living in nearby streets.
At the end of March, Loca Creatives put together an opening event on the landscaped green area in the centre of the new houses that included outdoor making workshops, a small lantern sculpture, LightWeight – Impossible Arts' spectacular globe of projections – and some wandering music that mixed up English folk with Bengali flute. The first thing we found out is that the land is a wind tunnel and that anything we do outdoors will draw hordes of excitable children without accompanying parents. The second thing we found is that there are some great people living in the new houses who really want to make friends and to work with us. Then it got darker and the youth emerged from the other parts of the estate, so the third thing we found is that working in Oldham continues to be a bracing challenge as well as a pleasure... and we'll be steadily working towards the celebration of a new beginning with the people of Poppy Road, Bluebell Walk, Rose Way and the neighbouring streets for the end of October.
