Echoes of Blackburn Meadows is an sound project based on the history of, and situated at the site of the former Blackburn Meadows power station, home to the Cooling Towers. The project will eventually place radio transmitters across the site, allowing visitors to tune into a historical industrial soundscape of the site’s past. It’s an incredible idea, and one which we hope will add much to ideas that surround the changing Sheffield by avoiding blank symbolism and properly locating memories to form a greater, more critical understanding of place.
We spoke to Jennifer Rich, one of the team behind the project.
How did the project begin, and who is involved?
The project began as a dissertation for my MA in Landscape and Culture at the University of Nottingham in 2006. I looked at Sheffield’s municipal electricity supply up until it was nationalised in 1948, focusing specifically on the machines and architectures of Blackburn Meadows power station. Recently, geographers have begun to collaborate with artists under the title of ‘Public Geography,’ aiming for innovative and engaging methods of exhibiting research findings. As much of my research was based on oral histories with former workers of the power station, it seemed appropriate to explore sound as a medium and I teamed up with two sound artists, Lewis Heriz and Tom Dixon. It was really the demolition of the cooling towers in 2008 that gave the project the boost it needed. We were now able to look at the landscape as a whole and situate the towers within the wider and more dynamic landscapes of a power station. We put in an R&D bid to the Arts Council and here we are about to launch Echoes of Blackburn Meadows (EBM) phase I.
What does Phase I involve?
EBM will eventually be made up of around fifteen solar powered transmitters, hidden at points along the public footpaths surrounding the site. The transmitters broadcast sounds of the power station via an FM frequency. Arts Council funding has allowed to us construct the first of these transmitters as a prototype of the wider project, which we aim to launch next summer.
It’s slightly unusual to see a sound based project as a response to a site and its history. How did this come about as the medium, and what are its particular characteristics?
The use of sound is beneficial on a number of levels. The area of Blackburn Meadows has changed irrevocably over the past thirty years. Sound is there regardless of the flux and flow of the physical landscape beneath, even as it morphs into its next persona: a biomass power station. We turn to the propitious public spaces that encircle the site and enliven the landscape by weaving memories into the spaces in which they were originally formed. The idea of memory is at the heart of EBM. Memory is subjective and situational; it is performed in the context of both past, present (and futures). We combine the acts of walking and listening to galvanise new memories as people walk across the landscape. The result is a cacophony of emergent personal memories, spoken memories, of sounds of past and present.
What’s the importance of the site to you, and in the context of Sheffield?
The site to me has always been much greater than the sum all of its parts. Blackburn Meadows was the powerhouse to Sheffield’s development during the middle of the twentieth century and its architectures and machines were presented as icons to progress and prosperity in both homes and industries across the city. It is the source of memories and identities of all those that worked there and who lived in the local area. To me it is a place; I dwell there and my understandings of this place are informed by my dwelling there. To others, the site has most recently been represented as an icon and gateway to the Sheffield but to me the cooling towers have always been simply hyperbolic structures; responsible for the disposal of the cooling water used to remove heat from steam in a power station. That’s exactly where the project finds meaning; in the subjectivity of remembering and understanding our environment.
Talk about the oral history side of the project. Who is represented and what did they do? Who recorded these, and have you edited them to fit in the work?
I began collecting oral histories with former workers of the power station back in January after a call-out for memories via local press. Spoken memories are the foundations of the artwork and have been edited, cut and layered alongside sounds of the power station to form the composition. For those who want to look at the subject in more detail, both the interview tapes and transcripts are being held at Sheffield Local Studies Library.
What hopes do you have for the future and the effects of this project, because as a way of creating an experience and understanding of a place it seems very powerful. Could this ambient history be the basis for architecture, or other artworks?
We definitely want to use this format for future collaborative projects and have various sites of historical interest in the pipeline. The basis of our work will remain this method of situating individuals as artists and architects of memory, who - when working in situ - mould a sense of place. Architectures can be rebuilt, re-animated and commemorated but in a way that remembers history not as a relic consigned to history but as a living, working landscape. We aim to maximise participation from the research process through to engagement with the final artwork, which itself helps to garner a shared history and a shared sense of place.
The location of the team’s first transmitter will be revealed on the project website HYPERLINK “http://www.sheffieldelectricity.com/”www.sheffieldelectricity.com just a few days prior to the launch. Transmission begins on Friday 25th September.
The team is holding workshops at the Sheffield Showcase office on Pinstone Street, for participants to build their own FM radio receivers with which to access the artwork. Drop in at any time between10am-4pm on either Friday 25th and Saturday 26th September. To access the artwork, participant toolkits, which include a map, FM radio receiver and a pair of headphones, will be available for hire free-of-charge from Sheffield Central Library. Mobile phones with in-built radios can also tune in to the artwork. EBM is a FREE event.