Manvers Main Complex

John Wild / CODED GEOMETRY

16.11.2014

The Manvers Main Complex was staged as part of the Edge of Human project, an exhibition and programme of performance events, curated by Lucy Woodhouse and organised by the French Riviera Gallery. 

The event was staged between 4pm – 5:30pm, on Sunday 16th November 2014, at 70 Paul Street, Hackney, London. The drift had a core participation of nine people. However throughout the event a further 21 people attended and participated. 

The digital drift consisted of the projection of Google Street View onto a large, approximately 3.5 metre wide, projection screen. A wireless mouse was used to navigate, via mouse clicks, along the images of the surrounding streets and Street View was combined with Satellite view and map view to collectively explore the area’s current land usage and architecture. Throughout the event the participants were drinking alcohol and directing the drift, suggesting streets to follow and discussing things of interest as they arose. The participation was transitory and people would move between active engagement, standing outside the gallery, smoking cigarettes, or breaking into smaller groups and carrying out private conversations, sometimes inspired by the drift, the politics of the area past and present, and sometimes totally unrelated concerns. 

Street View’s initial starting point was the Manvers Roundabout, Wath upon Dearne, Rotherham, South Yorkshire; GPS location N 53 30.124 W 1 19.041. This location has deep emotional resonance for me personally. It is the site of my childhood, the former workplace of my grandfather, and my mother’s final workplace before her retirement. The location was selected after observing the ‘mis’use of Google maps, by office workers, who used it to communicate with each other something of the places they had originally lived. Overlaying the banal street view images with their own personal stories. 

Manvers was a former area of heavy industry dominated by the Manvers Main complex. A complex of coal mines linked underground that included Manvers Main, Wath Main and Kilnhurst colliery. Manvers played a key role in the start of the 1984- 5 miners strike. It was in Manvers’s offices that George Hayes, the South Yorkshire NCB director informed NUM officials of the plan to close Cortonwood Colliery, triggering Yorkshire miners to walk out. The Manvers Main complex was closed on 25 March 1988. 

Between 1988 and the late 90’s the area was left derelict and formed the largest area of contaminated wasteland land in Western Europe. 
Through a regional regeneration programme, funded partly by the European Social Fund, the Manvers Main complex was demolished and the area landscaped and redeveloped as an area of light industry, housing call centres, logistics firms, and several very large warehousing and distribution centres, most notably NEXT and Maplin Electronics. 





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