TITLE: Visualising Gentrification in Ancoats, Manchester: A Multi Method Approach to Mapping Change. Keywords: Gentrification, Visual Methods, Visual Sociology, Photography, Entrepreneurial Urbanism Author Bio: Gary Bratchford is a senior lecturer in photography and President of the International Sociological Association’s Visual Sociology Research Committee (RC57). Gary is co-founder of Critical Lens, a contemporary platform for critical debate in arts and the academy and Book Review Editor for Visual Studies. This chapter explores how we can come to see global gentrification through a variety of visual processes, including visual ethnography, social and spatial semiotics, and image analysis of developer hoardings, which in turn, can be read through a series of communicative ‘scenes’ (Silver et al., 2011). Focusing on two areas of Manchester (United Kingdom), Ancoats and the neighboring district, Miles Platting, the chapter begins by setting the conceptual framework and aims of the study. Thereafter, the chapter unpacks the history of East Manchester’s industrial decline and subsequent ‘regeneration’, having been awarded host status of the 2002 Commonwealth Games. The chapter explores the ‘partnership mode of governance’ with specific attention paid to the public and private sector developments which promised ‘seamless tenure’ that ‘celebrated variety and identity’.1 Through researcher-produced imagery and fieldwork, the chapters unpicks how Ancoats has been, and Miles Platting is, subject to a process of middle class restructuring through production (Smith & Williams, 1985) and consumption (Ley, 1996; Massey, 2015, Milestone 2008) based gentrification. In particular, this chapter looks at New Islington including the Ancoats Marina and Cutting Room Square, all of which exist in a 0.5 mile radius, close to the North Eastern edge of Manchester. In part, this chapter is also about the optics of visibility, the battle over perceptibility and the ways in which gentrified space can be interrupted (Jordan & Linder, 2016), specifically through socially engaged visual practices and the ‘deglamorizing effect’ that blogs and social media can have upon a development project when looked in upon by outsiders. By foregrounding researcher-produced imagery to narrate the physical and cultural change of the landscape in addition to the analysis of visual works produced by others, professional or otherwise, the essays final aim is to continue to normalize the use of visual imagery as a valid and relevant type of data for sociological research (Nathansohn and Zuev, 2013). Walking Ancoats The contemporary visual analysis of urban space reveals a great deal, specifically when the process is repeated over time. Longitudinal studies carried out in particular sites or with specific communities for example, help to better frame our understanding of an environment. 1 These statements have been drawn from the New Islington Manchester Millennium Community Masterplan distributed to community members and stakeholders. These long-term investments enable researchers to collect data, which might not be immediately noticed. This process allows for connections in spatial, social and cultural practices to be drawn out, becoming visible over weeks, months or years depending on the scale of the project. Since 2014 I have been walking, observing and periodically documenting a cycle of ‘urban regeneration’ and gentrification of Miles Platting and Ancoats, a rapidly (re)emerging ‘fringe’2 district of Manchester, North West of England (UK). Located on the North Eastern edge of Manchester, just 0.5 miles from the city boundary both, Ancoats and Miles Platting are blends of old, deindustrialized spaces, long established social housing and newly developed ‘urban villages’ that offer incoming, affluent residents, the opportunity to experience new, complete communities (Ward, 2003). It is the latter component of this triangulated relationship, the urban village, and the residents it attracts, and by virtue, those it omits, that is focus of this study. The photographic images presented in this essay represent just one aspect of a more extensive photographic survey (Krase & Shortell, 2011) of the areas in question. The survey (of which there are more than 1,000 images to date) presents a visual record of the physical and social streetscapes within a 1.5 mile radius and a maximum 0.8 mile distance from the city centre boundary; extending into the neighboring districts of Bradford to the East and Collyhurst to the North. Yet for the purpose of this chapter, my focus is more refined to Ancoats and the increasingly blurred Miles Platting boundary.3 In refining the scope of my survey to Ancoats and Miles Platting I locate the space in question through ethnographic approaches including repeat photography and image analysis to unpack the practice of gentrification through the application of a visually engaged sociological lens. Firstly, I focus on the regeneration of the Rochdale ship canal as a re-envigored post-industrial asset. Key to the gentrification of the Ancoats Marina and the development of ‘New Islington’, the ship canal and the surrounding land is a threshold space, once an industrial highway for cotton traders (rapid disinvestment from the 1950s-70s brought about dilapidation) these wastelands are now prime development spots. One of seven national ‘millennium community programmes’, the redevelopment of the canal as an exclusive space of leisure, consumption and domesticity extends the city boundary, acting as a catalyst for change in and of the neighbouring post-industrial spaces of Ancoats. While Ancoats is rebuilt, others, like New Islington are reborn and rebranded. Once the name of a road close to Ancoats, New Islington 2 In a March 2015 in a Neighbourhood development Framework produced by Deloitte on behalf of SimpsonHague and Partners entitled New Cross, an area neighbouring Ancoats to the south, the wider area of Ancoats and New Cross, both of which sit outside the Inner ring road of Manchester are defined as ‘strategically located within the North Easter Fringe of the City Centre’ (pg4).The sematic nature of calling these areas ‘fringes’ implies its potential for conversion and their easy consumption into the wider cosmopolitan city space. 3 Miles Platting is a neighbouring district of Ancoats, and is, at the time of writing (summer of 2018), subject to the next phase of gentrification. One such example is the Lovell Home project with 1000 homes to be built in phases under the overarching and rebranding title of Platting Village. In 2016 a new, 4 bed home in phase one was priced at200,000. Prior to this, the existing housing stock was social housing with a maximin capacity of 3 bedrooms. As of the summer of 2018, newly built 4-room housing released onto the marking for phase four are selling for 275,000. was also the site of the ‘cardroom’ estate, a residential area blighted by unemployment, social deprivation and inadequate housing (Ward, 2003). Such spaces are now sites of strategic private/public initiatives including the Manchester Life Development Company who are spearheading the ‘Ancoats and New Islington Neighbourhood Development Framework’ (Manchester Life 2017). I then turn my attention to Cutting Room Square. An ex-industrial site next to Ancoats Marina, reinstated as a European style piazza, framed by independent, upmarket bars, eateries and luxury apartments, the site is a heuristic snapshot of a broader ‘institutional future vision’ of the city by some of the city’s key stakeholders (Pieri ,2017). Imagining cities of the future engenders lively debate about function, urban scalability and cosmopolitanism across a range of platforms and forums, Elisa Pieri notes, ‘visual and discursive practices are far from straightforward’ (2017: 131). As strategic advertising, visualisations and promotional material through developer hoardings and websites reach a wider constituency, these visual artefacts and latterly, spatial design is always open to interpretation. Such interpretations are often anchored in subjective semiotic readings, based on our cultural and social understanding of what we see and who participates in them. Taking a less institutional perspective, I explore how spaces, like Cutting Room Square, which reflect the city’s institutional vision to become… ‘a major European regional capital, a centre for investment and growth, [that is] competing internationally’ (Pieri, 2017: 132), can be read, vernacularly. In doing so, I suggest that the effect of entrepreneurial governance and private investment in previously deindustrialised spaces not only effects the physicality of the space but how we can see ways in which the new, economically dominant class appropriate, dominate and perform in these spaces, in turn, excluding longer established residents. Based upon the use and analysis of ‘researcher-produced images’ (Pauwels, 2015) I document the development of these spaces by employing a spatial semiotic analysis of the area. Through my own photographic practice, this chapter reflects on the ways in which the once run down, de-industrialised spaces of Ancoats and Miles Platting have been altered to meet the needs of its new residents and, in turn, the way these residents operate in these newly developed spaces. By virtue of this, the space and the amenities around it, come to service the needs of the new communities and in doing so exclude longstanding residents based on social habits and income. A revitalised inner-city housing market accompanied