A Corner Bakery and a Town's Rebirth - Nytimes.Com

A Corner Bakery and a Town's Rebirth - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/arts/design/a-corner-bak...

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Liverpool Biennial Closed-up houses in the Anfield suburb of Liverpool.

By ALICE RAWSTHORN Published: November 25, 2012

LIVERPOOL — For 85 years, Mitchell’s Bakery in Anfield, a northern FACEBOOK

suburb of this city, sold bread, cakes and pies to local people and the TWITTER soccer fans flocking across the road to Anfield Stadium, the home of GOOGLE+ Liverpool’s famous soccer team. Since the bakery closed for business early last year, it has fulfilled a new function as a community design SAVE studio where groups of high school students and campaigners have E-MAIL

been planning the future of their neighborhood. SHARE

Mitchell’s was a casualty of a PRINT Connect With moribund government regeneration Us on Twitter SINGLE PAGE Follow program in Anfield. Since the area was REPRINTS @nytimesarts for designated for redevelopment in arts and entertainment 2002, the occupants of more than news. 4,000 homes, mostly small terraced Arts Twitter List: Critics, Reporters houses, have left them. Some of those and Editors homes were demolished and replaced by new ones only for construction to stop when the recession struck. Entire streets of houses have stood empty for years, their windows and doors “tinned up” with metal A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York sheets. The surrounding area has been paralyzed, as region, selected by Times critics. residents have waited for demolition orders to arrive and Go to Event Listings » businesses, like Mitchell’s, have died. MOST E-MAILED MOST VIEWED Enlarge This Image The disused bakery is now the hub of 2Up 2Down, a 1. A Black Mound of Canadian Oil Waste Is Rising Over Detroit community design project initiated by Jeanne van Heeswijk, a Dutch artist and activist, with the support of 2. YOUR MONEY the Liverpool Biennial 2012, the city’s contemporary art Standing Out From the Crowd festival. Its aim is to enable members of the local community to redesign the old Mitchell building and the 3. New Jersey Hospital Has Highest Billing Peter Carr/Liverpool Biennial house on each side into a new bakery and affordable Rates in the Nation Mitchell's Bakery. It has become the heart of a community project to help housing, and to raise the money needed to build them. determine the fate of Anfield. 4. 36 Hours in Texas Hill Country “People around here have been living in limbo for so long, not knowing what will happen to their homes or the area,”

said Lynn Tolmon, one of the residents who is involved with the project. “We all remember 5. WELL Mitchell’s Bakery. Reopening it would prove that something good can come out of this.” The Scientific 7-Minute Workout

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2Up 2Down, which is named after a typical Anfield terraced house with two rooms 6. Some of My Best Friends Are Germs downstairs and two upstairs, is one of the new genre of projects that are using the design process to address the type of problems traditionally dealt with by social scientists and economists. Rather than bringing in professional designers to tackle those issues, it is 7. GAIL COLLINS Hard of Hearings using them to teach residents how to do so, thereby enabling them to drive the process. “If a project like this is going to work, the local people must be responsible for it, especially in 8. DRAFT a place like Anfield, where they have felt powerless for so long,” said Laurie Peake, The Role of a Dictionary program director of the Liverpool Biennial.

9. Anfield is one of the poorest but, thanks to the stadium, most evocative areas of Liverpool, Leaving the Met, but Not for Valhalla a spirited city, which is famous for music, soccer, radical politics and its sumptuous Georgian architecture. When Anfield was designated as part of the government’s Housing 10. FROM THE MAGAZINE Market Renewal initiative, Mitchell’s Bakery was among the first buildings to be slated for Rajat Gupta’s Lust for Zeros demolition. The couple who owned it were then in their 60s, and considering retirement.

Unable to sell a business whose building was threatened with demolition, they waited for Go to Complete List » Show My Recommendations the local council to buy them out, losing custom as the surrounding streets were emptied. By early 2011, the Mitchells were in their 70s but as the renewal program was frozen and the demolition order remained in place, they had no choice but to close the bakery and retire without compensation.

No sooner had they done so than Ms. Van Heeswijk asked if she could rent the building for a project she was planning for the Liverpool Biennial, which had commissioned her to produce a long term program in Anfield with a lasting impact on the local community. “Seeing the ‘Closed’ sign on Mitchell’s door seemed like fate to us,” Ms. Peake recalled. “We’d failed to persuade the council to let us use the rows of empty houses, even on a temporary basis, and Jeanne had always wanted to combine housing with a social enterprise. What could be better as the heart of the project than a bakery?”

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A version of this article appeared in print on November 26, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.

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