The silence of the Bang

Like a War of the Worlds alien with its limbs severed, the B of the Bang next to the City of Manchester stadium just about still stands – but blunted, stunted and ready for the coup de grace.

I was sceptic when I first the saw the visuals for what eventually became (for a while) the nation’s tallest sculpture, but I started to warm to it when it went up and a Newsnight vox pop had a scally at a Beswick bus stop who shrugged: “It’s great – it’s Manchester, it’s different.”

I grew to love it, and to appreciate that the scale and proportions seemed just-so against the height of the stadium and a beautiful blue sky. On match day, walking up Alan Turing Way, I’d wonder what the away fans made of it and remembered that it sent out a great message to the media and the visitors:  yes, Manchester does things differently.

So the legal wrangles between the creator Thomas Heatherwick and the council were really disappointing to those of us looking forward to it rusting away nicely as a companion to the brave new era for the local area and local team.

Most people I know hoped that a suitably safe area could be cordoned off around it, and ‘the B’ – or the Ker Plunk, as some dubbed it – could be left intact, potentially unsafe only to any nutter intent on slipping security and daring the prickly monster to kebab him.

Perhaps because of the legal liabilities and implications, the contractual stuff, and the kind of nightmare Health and Safety scenario which any major organisation now has to factor into decisions, the Bang had to be silenced.

But not, I hope, for ever. The council is putting the Mancunian porcupine in storage.

One day, with a solution found which, as a H and S professional might say, ‘significantly reduces the risk profile of the sharpened ends of the elongated sculptural elements so as to limit the likelihood of serious injury or death to zero probability’ – oh, and a cool £3m found from somewhere – we may, just may, see Old Spiky rise proudly once again.

There’s loads of good detail about it on Wikipedia and there’s a wicked 360 degrees virtual tour on the Net too.

Tags: B of the Bang, New East Manchester, public art, regeneration

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Andrew Spinoza, SKV Conversations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.