45HiltonStreet

Old home for new work. We can definitively say that we are the oldest art gallery in Manchester. Well, the building is.

[45HiltonStreet @45HiltonStreet]

@eamonncanniffe Exactly my thought yesterday!! And that is to allow regulatory exit when functioning at max capacity! What was the client thinking??? Indeed, was anybody really thinking?

[Jonathan Schofield @JonathSchofield]

Three years and counting since I first exposed ‘fat cat’ millionaire Barry Tucker’s vile treatment of Manchester’s heritage. The owner of Euro Car Parks also owns a pair of lovely Georgian Grade II listed properties on Byrom Street, Manchester, his home town. He is letting them fall down. On Friday I bumped into Manchester Central MP @LucyMPowell campaigning with Councillor @Joand7. I highlighted the neglect and dangerous condition of these important heritage assets. Tucker’s hand needs to be forced on this site. Why aren’t they up for sale, why doesn’t he repair them? Following my original article vulturine lawyers @Mishcon_de_Reya threatened to sue Manchester Confidential. Fortunately @PrivateEyeNews also published my report on Tucker’s dereliction of duty and advised us not to back down in face of the threats. We didn’t. It was a Pyrrhic victory though as nothing has been done since. Please step up @ManCityCouncil. @Eurocarparks_CS explain yourselves.

This is the article I wrote in 2022: https://t.co/cQs1A3RI9p

[Eamonn Canniffe @eamonncanniffe]

AJ Review of ‘Making Matters’ which continues at @MaterialSource until April 2 https://t.co/dsMdUsFVkk

[Eamonn Canniffe @eamonncanniffe]

In process at @MaterialSource - opens March 2 https://t.co/P7aXFvbL0S

[Eamonn Canniffe @eamonncanniffe]

Architects Index of Modelmaking exhibition build at @MaterialSource - exhibition runs 2 March until 2 April - details here https://t.co/KLHPVnFvN8

[45HiltonStreet @45HiltonStreet]

@JonathSchofield I don’t think Brumby worked any debris from the blitzed church into Christ in Majesty.
To my eyes, there is nothing “plain” about the exterior of St Augustine’s. It’s a beautifully assembled sequence, from the entrance steps to the bell tower. Masterly verticals & horizontals.

[lemn sissay OBE FRSL @lemnsissay]

Thank you Sheffield. Last night was a proper treat.

#offtheshelf

[45HiltonStreet @45HiltonStreet]

@carl_thompson70 And baseball caps surely warrant a beheading (or is that a bit extreme)?

[Jonathan Schofield @JonathSchofield]

THIS SATURDAY. The Peterloo Massacre Walk - The Drama, The Reality & THE REAL SIGNIFICANCE. An anniversary walk.

Two hundred and six years ago an event in Manchester defined the British struggle for democracy but also something else and that latter point is perhaps the most important.

In August 1819 came a day that coined a phrase and stirred a nation. This tour takes in the key locations associated with a peaceful meeting in central Manchester that ended in death and mayhem. Expect powerful words, poetry and contemporary context.

'If you want Peterloo explained with verve, wit and real knowledge then this the easily the best tour around,' Marple Historical Society.

https://t.co/sxa31GVuoK

@MENnewsdesk @BBCRadioManc @visit_mcr @PeterlooMemoria @PeterlooBook

[Eamonn Canniffe @eamonncanniffe]

Last few days to catch the @TheMSArch BA, MArch and MLA Degree Show at @McrSchArt - the MA Architecture +Urbanism and MA Architecture and Adaptive Reuse Degree Shows will follow in September

[45HiltonStreet @45HiltonStreet]

@JonathSchofield Delivering a mega-structure in instalments, by canal is eye catching. I’m wondering where these pre-fabricated elements are arriving from. Foster’s HSBC HQ was entirely imported. It was also hugely expensive. It would be great to see prefab elements manufactured in Trafford Park.

[Jonathan Schofield @JonathSchofield]

TOUR Saturday 8 March: 10.30am Alexandra Park and Whalley Range with a special visit. A fine park and a fascinating suburb with loads of stories to tell, Suffragettes, May Day marches and Carnival, there'll be music too. We will finish with a special visit into the incredible former Lancashire Independent College, a theological college for training Congregationalist ministers which opened in Whalley Range in 1843 and is now the Muslim Heritage Centre. @WhalleyRangeorg @AlexParkMCR

[53two @53two]

🚨URGENT CASTING!🚨

[Peter barber @PpeterPeter]

Peter Barber, "Reimagining Social Housing" - Harvard Graduate School of Design https://t.co/t60cE2wu8s

[Joshi Herrmann @joshi]

🚨 Sacha Lord has resigned as an advisor to Andy Burnham after the Arts Council found that his company should repay the grant it got during the pandemic. Lord threatened to sue @ManchesterMill for revealing this story. Burnham says he accepted Lord's resignation last night.

[S Sebag Montefiore @simonmontefiore]

Let us celebrate a great year for history books. It’s become a slight tradition that I always  produce a list of the best books of the year. And also for thrillers. And tv dramas. First the history books.  My favourites of the year are:

Augustus the Strong by Tim Blanning the riotous debauched  life of the King of Poland and Elector of Saxony who had the misfortune to be crushed between the voracious ambitions of the ruthless giant,  Tsar Peter I of Moscow and the manic, capricious, cruel Charles XII, a titanic conflict that resulted in the end of Poland and Sweden as great powers and the Petrine creation of a new power called Russia with himself as its first emperor.  Yet Augustus’s flamboyant and wild life resembles the novels and movies of Barry Lyndon and Tom Jones. He didn’t really have 354 illegitimate children nor did he (probably)  sleep with his own daughter by mistake but this superb history book catches the artistic brilliance and entrepreneurial gifts of Augustus along with his disastrous reign in Poland and the great success of his reign in Saxony.  A delight!  A feast!

Cromwell the Commander in Chief by Ronald Hutton – the second part of a masterwork that recasts Cromwell as military genius and wily, inscrutable, weaselly, subtle,slippery, lying and extremely ambitious politician. Here we follow him as he defeats Scots and Irish and Brits, never losing a battle.  It is unputdownable and outstanding. We cant wait for the third part of this trilogy – Cromwell the Monarch:  We wish Professor Hutton a happy Xmas but urge him to work hard on the next volume…

The Eagle and the Hart by Helen Castor. This is just superb – one of our greatest historians and literary stylists  - because history is a weird mix of science, ethics, literature, humanities  and the best historians are all great writers too – retells the great and cruel duel between Richard II,  one of the worst and most cruel of our rulers, and Henry IV,   that ends with the murder of the former and the crowning of the latter - the start of a turbulent reign filled with rebellions and betrayals and tension with his son.    Castor does it beautifully in a real virtuoso demonstration of how to write a great history book.    I recommend that you finish it and then immediately start Dan Jones’ s gripping Henry V that reveals one of our most able rulers as exactly what you would expect: a brutally ruthless, highly religious but talented man of his time.

Eastern Front by Nick Lloyd.   Like Cromwell this is the second of a masterwork trilogy a history of the WW1 by the great Professor Lloyd: Western Front is already out and is the best history of the ww1 so far. Now with this one, he gives us the gigantic and catastrophic panorama of a war of which many know little – that between Russia and Germany/Austria alongside Austria vs Italy. The scale of death and tragedy the span of the fronts are astounding.   All is told neatly,  elegantly, with flawless scholarship and acute character portraits.  Again, Professor Lloyd enjoy your xmas but we crave volume three: the Ottoman war….

All His Spies: the Secret World of Robert Cecil by Stephen Alford is another work of beautiful writing in a literary sense but also superb scholarship and  brilliant characterisation worthy of the greatest novelists -a humane portrait of statesmanship, espionage and personality at the courts of Elizabeth I and James I, showing the thuggish Mafia style rule of absolute personal rulers.   Alford is a maestro of humanism but also the dirty business of politics, spying and courtiership. Now i am going to read his Burghley and his Watchers.

Izabela the Valiant by Adam Zamoyski  is  a pure joy and delight. Zamoyski always writes beautifully and always has an empathetic feel for past times particularly the 18thC, the nobility in eastern Europe and his native Poland.  All his books are outstanding but I think this is his best since Last King of Poland: it’s the life of an extraordinary and lovable and admirable woman, Princess Izabela Czartoryska,  collector, politician, grandee and prolific passionate  lover.

To Run the World:  the Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for World Power by Sergey Radchenko is a virtuoso history of the Cold War filled with new material from the archives of the Politburo,  with a sense of humour (Brezhnev’s comments come to mind) but it is also special because the cold war was so often covered in a strictly centralized focus on the superpowers Moscow and DC and no one else. This is properly international starring Cubans, Vietnamese, Libyans, Angolans.  It is the best history of the Cold War yet.

Damascus Events by Eugene Rogan, the most distinguished & most balanced of Middle East scholars: this is the story of the Druze-Christian war in the Ottoman Levant in 1860 that led to the massacre of 20,000 Christians in Damascus and the intervention of French and Western troops.   In many ways as Rogan shows it was an event that helped formed the Middle East today and it is grippingly told.

Those are the formal history books but then I must recommend some history that is so recent it merges with journalism and here I recommend two books that expand our knowledge of the region where it seems people know the least and yet feel the most: the Middle East.

We are Your Soldiers by Alex Rowell is a biographical study of Gamal Abdul Nasser,  Egyptian dictator and Arab nationalist hero who has been weirdly neglected by modern historians. But Rowell chronicles the other side of his oversized charisma – the tyrant whose secret police terrorized Egypt, whose purges expelled so many of the ethnic minorities, Greeks,  Jews, Italians, Turks who had made Egypt so cosmopolitan, and whose wars and assassinations and ambitions spread havoc in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq. (I think the book is mistitled – in the ppk, it should be called Nasser and the Arab world or something like that)  Essential reading to understand the Middle East.

While we are on the Middle East, Steve Coll’s The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the Middle East 1979-2003 is as exciting and thrilling as a thriller, as lurid as any history of tyranny and is as essential to know how the Middle East works as any book you can possibly read.  Superb and upputdownable.  It is certainly a chronicle of America’s clumsy mishandling of Iraq and misunderstanding of Saddam Hussein over 30 years of his dictatorship.  But it is also a chronicle of the tragic misrule of the Arab world by merciless dictators like Saddam – and of course the Assads. The Assads and Saddam came from the same Baathist Party and ruled their multi ethnic multi secular republics invented by the Imperial powers in much the same murderous way.  This book is not only a must-read but is totally compelling.  Enjoy.

[Eamonn Canniffe @eamonncanniffe]

Augustus the Strong very good indeed

[45HiltonStreet @45HiltonStreet]

https://t.co/Q6me10CyZ2
Ahem. That’s Cooke, with an “e”, as in editor.

[Rory Stewart @RoryStewartUK]

This is not good from a government with deep legal experience from the very top - the last thing our overcrowded prison system needs it the invention of more offences

[Eamonn Canniffe @eamonncanniffe]

#fakenews alert - this plea from the developer is misleading because it’s voluntary groups such as @SAVEBrit who are actually trying to protect the survival of this example of Manchester’s pioneering industrial heritage https://t.co/GCIrwgoyHW