5: George Leigh Street School - New Ancoats

Turn right...

Wait can you hear that.

On the corner. A red brick castle.

An office block with 151 in shining silver digits.

This was once a school.

Look up at the bars on the roof. It’s coming from there, that sound.

Children on the roof?

A playground on the roof?

And open space above when everything down below was so cramped.

Bean bags to throw and wooden hoops to jump through.

Skipping ropes and Hopscotch.

Happening high up in the air.

Down below the ground, bath-showers for the children to

wash once a week when conditions at home didn’t allow.

Children in small classrooms, with stern looking teachers.

Jan I live right near Ashbury Meadow Primary School, which once was two schools and they amalgamated to a different site. So it was Bank Meadow where all my children went and then there was Ashbury's School. And we've got two other primary schools, The School of the Resurection, the Church of England, School, it's a really good school and there's a church as well which is just round the corner. And then there's Saint Bridget's which has a church attached to it, which is a catholic school. Twinkle Stars Pre School attached to the Grange Community Centre. There's loads of different clubs that go on.

Memories of school are enough to make us walk on.

Straight down Bengal Street.

Paving stones, tarmac, cobbles, yellow paint.

Deliveroo cyclists speeding past on a mission… on the road, the curb

wherever they like.

Sausage dogs on leads with trendy owners.

A man on a bike with a tinny stereo strapped to the back playing his

favourite tunes.

And on the right, the call of St Peters.

That tower, the centre of it all, our own little citadel.

Don’t turn, keep going, we’re not going back yet.

*I moved into Jersey Street with my partner in 2015, when 'new' Ancoats was half finished and it was tipped to be the next coolest place. Surreally, it felt at least as though the gays were the first colonisers of this new world. You couldn't leave the house without seeing another gay couple, which was great for me as a newly uncloseted guy; we shopped at what I heard someone dub 'gay Aldi'; and the residents group for our block had a high LGBTQ+ representation. The stats may not back it up, I don't know - maybe it never was - or maybe I just got a bit older and saw things differently - but as Ancoats was gradually 'finished' I had the sense that our little unwitting clan was overtaken by another tribe - younger, straighter, and uniform in their individuality, with baggy everything’s and home cut fringes. I get the impression that the gays have started colonising somewhere else, someone said Prestwich, but maybe New Brunswick.”*