The Turnpike: Planting Cultural Seeds in Leigh

On my most recent visit to the Turnpike, Leigh, on a sunny late-autumn day, I almost missed the community garden at the foot of the large, concrete modernist building which dominates the town’s Civic Square. During a project at the Turnpike, which is situated on the top-floor of a purpose-built 1970s library and cultural centre, Liverpool-based artist Frances Disley worked with the community to plant a range of plants and herbs. As well as being chosen for their appealing visual and aromatic qualities, all have multiple uses, from healing properties to potential transformation into inks and dyes, which are outlined in a series of illustrative boards outside. Although I arrived when the garden was past its seasonal best and didn’t see the plants in full bloom, the seeds will be harvested and redistributed to local residents, who will be able to create their own version of the garden.

For Helen Stalker, who has been Director of the Turnpike CIC for the past five years, the garden symbolises the organisation’s creative process, which has involved working with artists and local partners to co-curate work with the community, embed relationships in the town and leave a lasting legacy.

“Fran’s garden is a community resource,” Helen tells me. “The ownership and curatorship go back out to the community. We’re equipping people to develop their own creativity, ambitions and aspirations.”

This emphasis on achieving change through local action has been at the heart of Helen’s vision since taking over the gallery from council management and forming a new company – the Turnpike (Leigh) Community Interest Company (CIC) – at the start of 2018. “The Turnpike is a unique asset,” Helen explains. “Leigh is rich in community activity and the Turnpike is fiercely community-driven and responsive to what the community needs.”

Before joining the Turnpike, Helen worked as a curator in large arts institutions in Manchester, Liverpool and London. As a member of the community and a local parent in Leigh – a former mill town with little opportunity to see contemporary art locally, which is situated within a borough (Wigan) with low levels of engagement with culture – Helen was driven by a desire to implement change.

Building on the Turnpike’s post-war origins, she pursued an art programme that has aimed to demonstrate the importance of showing contemporary work that is “surprising and ambitious and new”, at the same time as working with the community to “co-curate work towards positive change”.

The Turnpike’s opening programme used contemporary art to shine a light on the history of the borough and its geographical, ecological and social make-up, in particular the influence of coal on the area’s economy and landscape. Highlights have included exhibitions by artists including Dave Pearson and Barbara Nicholls, both of which celebrated the space through what Helen calls “big, beautiful artworks”. “The space was a haven for people, where they could come and be inspired, but it could also be a quiet space if people wanted to be quiet,” explains Helen.

Manchester-based artist and curator Mary Griffiths undertook a residency at nearby Astley Colliery Museum; the centrepiece of the resulting exhibition, Wild Honey, was a gleaming, large-scale wall mural, using graphite pencil marks, that remains in the gallery. “Mary created such great relationships with the space and with people,” says Helen. “She did something special. It was an epiphany when people saw the relevance of the work Mary brought to the space and to the engineering history of the museum.”

Other exhibitions looked to aspects of the town’s more recent cultural heritage, including a posthumous commemoration of the late Pete Shelley, the Leigh-born singer of post-punk band Buzzcocks. Created in collaboration with the band’s designer, Malcolm Garrett, and the Pete Shelley Memorial Trust, the exhibition proved very popular with the public.

The touring exhibition Dream English Kid by Mark Leckey (incorporating a film installation originally shown at Liverpool Biennial) likewise chimed with aspects of the town’s pop cultural past. Dream English Kid foregrounded Leckey’s perspective as a young man growing up in a smaller town (Ellesmere Port), looking in on a nearby city (Liverpool). This had clear resonance in Leigh, a town equidistant between Liverpool and Manchester. “Mark Leckey was a big inspiration for artists in triggering a bigger outlook and connecting the hyperlocal to the global,” observes Helen. “We’ve worked to broaden conversations by bringing in a global perspective that somehow links to local issues and perspectives.”

Before lockdown forced its early closure, the Turnpike worked with Simeon Barclay on an ambitious reconfiguration of another touring exhibition that explored similar themes, Bus2move. Previously shown at the Tetley in Leeds and Workplace in Gateshead, the Turnpike iteration brought together animation and dance with references to the town’s former underground scene to create conversations around sometimes unseen aspects of youth culture. “Young kids loved that show and the playfulness and throbbing soundtrack,” Helen recalls. “Aspirations and dreams were fed through dance culture. There was a group of young people who just wanted to try things and give it a go and not feel shackled by a need to conform.”

Speaking to Helen, it’s clear that she doesn’t just measure success by numbers, or by the popularity of an exhibition or project among visitors, but by what she and her small team at the Turnpike have learned and developed through their work and relationships with artists. The Turnpike Pottery, where young people collaborated with the artist Lindsey Mendick, was a particular highlight. “It was a moment of triumph,” she remembers. “A riot of youth creativity and fun.” Helen describes the eventual exhibition as “a collective show of the collective that developed during the project” and recalls how it transformed the way the gallery worked with partners and artists. “It imbued a new atmosphere and ethos in the place,” Helen enthuses.

While the Turnpike programme has brought well-regarded artists from outside the area to Leigh, artist development has been key to the gallery’s vision. This has included the Greater Manchester associate artist scheme Making of Us, as well as a volunteer programme which has encouraged people to participate, have their individual voices heard and in some cases move into paid work.

“We put the most energy into developing artists,” says Helen. “I want the role of the artist to be really understood and for them to have a place at the table that they wouldn’t normally have a place at. I’m confident that given the opportunity and the facility they can develop more activity and socially engaged art from here. I hope that artists feel equipped and confident to establish their civic role within the town.”

At the time of my visit, the gallery had been transformed through a powerful, immersive combination of sound, light, sculpture, installation, textiles and man-made and natural objects. Created by members of the public alongside two locally-born artists, Anna FC Smith and Helen Mather, These Lancashire Women Are Witches in Politics played with concepts such as femininity, activism, power, mysticism, nature, myth and representation, as inspired by local historical figures and happenings.

Initiated before lockdown, Anna FC Smith and Helen Mather had to explore new methods of working when the Turnpike was forced by the Covid-19 pandemic to close, and the gallery had to find different ways of keeping people engaged with the space. In Anna FC Smith and Helen Mather’s case, a shift to online activity had the effect of broadening who was involved in the project and influenced the form of the final exhibition. The result, says Helen Stalker, was not the two-artist show that was originally envisaged but a “120-artist show”. She explains: “It was meant to be an exhibition in the gallery but it’s grown and evolved their practice.”

Members of the public sent parcels and dropped in objects to the gallery, including air-dried clay sigils inspired by mythical symbols. “The beautiful things made during lockdown had accumulated when we got back into the building,” Helen remembers. “It was a joyful accumulation – people were united through objects.”

It seems fitting, too, that this was the final exhibition at the Turnpike in its current incarnation: Helen sees the work as constituting “a crucial local archive and a collection of our time at the same time as being a nod to the heritage of the place”.

In spite of this, the project’s life will continue beyond the lifespan of the exhibition. In 2022, Anna FC Smith and Helen Mather plan to explore the early nineteenth-century Botanical Society, and its links with local activism, as well as green spaces nearby. There will also be a celebration event with a local high school – one of several with which the gallery has developed an ongoing relationship – at which students will process wearing embroidered t-shirts created for the exhibition.

Although Helen Stalker is moving on to a new role, and the Turnpike CIC is winding down, she believes the past five years have demonstrated what can be achieved outside of a major city, without established cultural infrastructure.

“We’ve demonstrated that it can be done, and done differently,” she argues. “Better-funded, larger organisations can learn a lot. When money, funding and attention is not readily available, nothing is expendable and nothing goes to waste, whether that’s materials or relationships. We’ve worked miracles with the resources we’ve had. There is more confidence in Leigh’s cultural offer and the sector is more united across the Wigan borough. People are collaborating and talking more and there is more of a peer-support network.”

Although she feels the Turnpike needs fresh energy, she sees clear potential for the gallery’s future. “The Turnpike has been a catalyst. Lots of things have grown out of it that now have a life of their own – we’ve enabled them to exist beyond us. I want to ensure that we leave a positive, fruitful legacy. We’ve done a lot of testing and explored new ideas about what the role of the space could be. I hope that the outcomes of our work will be used to trigger new debate and conversations about what the space could be for the next 50 years.”

Helen has already noticed transformed attitudes in the town and the development of sustained relationships. “It’s not just bums on seats and people walking through the door, but a real surge in impact and deep-level engagement,” she observes. “Even if the perception of the town hasn’t changed, people’s perception of their place in the town has changed and they feel better equipped to drive the town forward in a new way. Individuals have really started to lobby for culture in a way that wasn’t happening five years ago and I hope people will continue that fight – but people in Leigh are used to having to fight!”

If the Turnpike has planted the seeds of cultural change, Helen hopes that the local council will keep working with artists and other stakeholders to support and nurture more artist-led activity and that the Turnpike will continue to be a space for the community. “The Turnpike will still be a place for art and culture and the value of that will be ringfenced,” she assures me. “I hope that it continues to catalyse activity beyond its own walls – that it invites people in and initiates change beyond the gallery space.”

In November 2021, the building celebrated its 50th birthday. To mark the anniversary, a new archive of interviews with users, visitors and staff, alongside material relating to its design and construction, is being amassed and accessioned into the local municipal collections. This includes extensive material relating to the Turnpike’s history as a place for radical, innovative art and educational programming.

While Leigh is a very different place to the town it was fifty years ago, in the past five years Helen feels that the Turnpike has returned to its founding premise as “a place to see things that have not been seen before”. She hopes that the Turnpike CIC has planted firm roots for its future use and significance in the town. “We may have left a crack for the light to come in,” she concludes. “The closure of the Turnpike CIC will leave a hole, but I hope that people will sit up and take notice and think about what the future holds.”

The Turnpike: Planting Cultural Seeds in Leigh

On my most recent visit to the Turnpike, Leigh, on a sunny late-autumn day, I almost missed the community garden at the foot of the large, concrete modernist building which dominates the town’s Civic Square. During a project at the Turnpike, which is situated on the top-floor of a purpose-built 1970s library and cultural centre, Liverpool-based artist Frances Disley worked with the community to plant a range of plants and herbs. As well as being chosen for their appealing visual and aromatic qualities, all have multiple uses, from healing properties to potential transformation into inks and dyes, which are outlined in a series of illustrative boards outside. Although I arrived when the garden was past its seasonal best and didn’t see the plants in full bloom, the seeds will be harvested and redistributed to local residents, who will be able to create their own version of the garden.

For Helen Stalker, who has been Director of the Turnpike CIC for the past five years, the garden symbolises the organisation’s creative process, which has involved working with artists and local partners to co-curate work with the community, embed relationships in the town and leave a lasting legacy.

“Fran’s garden is a community resource,” Helen tells me. “The ownership and curatorship go back out to the community. We’re equipping people to develop their own creativity, ambitions and aspirations.”

This emphasis on achieving change through local action has been at the heart of Helen’s vision since taking over the gallery from council management and forming a new company – the Turnpike (Leigh) Community Interest Company (CIC) – at the start of 2018. “The Turnpike is a unique asset,” Helen explains. “Leigh is rich in community activity and the Turnpike is fiercely community-driven and responsive to what the community needs.”

Before joining the Turnpike, Helen worked as a curator in large arts institutions in Manchester, Liverpool and London. As a member of the community and a local parent in Leigh – a former mill town with little opportunity to see contemporary art locally, which is situated within a borough (Wigan) with low levels of engagement with culture – Helen was driven by a desire to implement change.

Building on the Turnpike’s post-war origins, she pursued an art programme that has aimed to demonstrate the importance of showing contemporary work that is “surprising and ambitious and new”, at the same time as working with the community to “co-curate work towards positive change”.

The Turnpike’s opening programme used contemporary art to shine a light on the history of the borough and its geographical, ecological and social make-up, in particular the influence of coal on the area’s economy and landscape. Highlights have included exhibitions by artists including Dave Pearson and Barbara Nicholls, both of which celebrated the space through what Helen calls “big, beautiful artworks”. “The space was a haven for people, where they could come and be inspired, but it could also be a quiet space if people wanted to be quiet,” explains Helen.

Manchester-based artist and curator Mary Griffiths undertook a residency at nearby Astley Colliery Museum; the centrepiece of the resulting exhibition, Wild Honey, was a gleaming, large-scale wall mural, using graphite pencil marks, that remains in the gallery. “Mary created such great relationships with the space and with people,” says Helen. “She did something special. It was an epiphany when people saw the relevance of the work Mary brought to the space and to the engineering history of the museum.”

Other exhibitions looked to aspects of the town’s more recent cultural heritage, including a posthumous commemoration of the late Pete Shelley, the Leigh-born singer of post-punk band Buzzcocks. Created in collaboration with the band’s designer, Malcolm Garrett, and the Pete Shelley Memorial Trust, the exhibition proved very popular with the public.

The touring exhibition Dream English Kid by Mark Leckey (incorporating a film installation originally shown at Liverpool Biennial) likewise chimed with aspects of the town’s pop cultural past. Dream English Kid foregrounded Leckey’s perspective as a young man growing up in a smaller town (Ellesmere Port), looking in on a nearby city (Liverpool). This had clear resonance in Leigh, a town equidistant between Liverpool and Manchester. “Mark Leckey was a big inspiration for artists in triggering a bigger outlook and connecting the hyperlocal to the global,” observes Helen. “We’ve worked to broaden conversations by bringing in a global perspective that somehow links to local issues and perspectives.”

Before lockdown forced its early closure, the Turnpike worked with Simeon Barclay on an ambitious reconfiguration of another touring exhibition that explored similar themes, Bus2move. Previously shown at the Tetley in Leeds and Workplace in Gateshead, the Turnpike iteration brought together animation and dance with references to the town’s former underground scene to create conversations around sometimes unseen aspects of youth culture. “Young kids loved that show and the playfulness and throbbing soundtrack,” Helen recalls. “Aspirations and dreams were fed through dance culture. There was a group of young people who just wanted to try things and give it a go and not feel shackled by a need to conform.”

Speaking to Helen, it’s clear that she doesn’t just measure success by numbers, or by the popularity of an exhibition or project among visitors, but by what she and her small team at the Turnpike have learned and developed through their work and relationships with artists. The Turnpike Pottery, where young people collaborated with the artist Lindsey Mendick, was a particular highlight. “It was a moment of triumph,” she remembers. “A riot of youth creativity and fun.” Helen describes the eventual exhibition as “a collective show of the collective that developed during the project” and recalls how it transformed the way the gallery worked with partners and artists. “It imbued a new atmosphere and ethos in the place,” Helen enthuses.

While the Turnpike programme has brought well-regarded artists from outside the area to Leigh, artist development has been key to the gallery’s vision. This has included the Greater Manchester associate artist scheme Making of Us, as well as a volunteer programme which has encouraged people to participate, have their individual voices heard and in some cases move into paid work.

“We put the most energy into developing artists,” says Helen. “I want the role of the artist to be really understood and for them to have a place at the table that they wouldn’t normally have a place at. I’m confident that given the opportunity and the facility they can develop more activity and socially engaged art from here. I hope that artists feel equipped and confident to establish their civic role within the town.”

At the time of my visit, the gallery had been transformed through a powerful, immersive combination of sound, light, sculpture, installation, textiles and man-made and natural objects. Created by members of the public alongside two locally-born artists, Anna FC Smith and Helen Mather, These Lancashire Women Are Witches in Politics played with concepts such as femininity, activism, power, mysticism, nature, myth and representation, as inspired by local historical figures and happenings.

Initiated before lockdown, Anna FC Smith and Helen Mather had to explore new methods of working when the Turnpike was forced by the Covid-19 pandemic to close, and the gallery had to find different ways of keeping people engaged with the space. In Anna FC Smith and Helen Mather’s case, a shift to online activity had the effect of broadening who was involved in the project and influenced the form of the final exhibition. The result, says Helen Stalker, was not the two-artist show that was originally envisaged but a “120-artist show”. She explains: “It was meant to be an exhibition in the gallery but it’s grown and evolved their practice.”

Members of the public sent parcels and dropped in objects to the gallery, including air-dried clay sigils inspired by mythical symbols. “The beautiful things made during lockdown had accumulated when we got back into the building,” Helen remembers. “It was a joyful accumulation – people were united through objects.”

It seems fitting, too, that this was the final exhibition at the Turnpike in its current incarnation: Helen sees the work as constituting “a crucial local archive and a collection of our time at the same time as being a nod to the heritage of the place”.

In spite of this, the project’s life will continue beyond the lifespan of the exhibition. In 2022, Anna FC Smith and Helen Mather plan to explore the early nineteenth-century Botanical Society, and its links with local activism, as well as green spaces nearby. There will also be a celebration event with a local high school – one of several with which the gallery has developed an ongoing relationship – at which students will process wearing embroidered t-shirts created for the exhibition.

Although Helen Stalker is moving on to a new role, and the Turnpike CIC is winding down, she believes the past five years have demonstrated what can be achieved outside of a major city, without established cultural infrastructure.

“We’ve demonstrated that it can be done, and done differently,” she argues. “Better-funded, larger organisations can learn a lot. When money, funding and attention is not readily available, nothing is expendable and nothing goes to waste, whether that’s materials or relationships. We’ve worked miracles with the resources we’ve had. There is more confidence in Leigh’s cultural offer and the sector is more united across the Wigan borough. People are collaborating and talking more and there is more of a peer-support network.”

Although she feels the Turnpike needs fresh energy, she sees clear potential for the gallery’s future. “The Turnpike has been a catalyst. Lots of things have grown out of it that now have a life of their own – we’ve enabled them to exist beyond us. I want to ensure that we leave a positive, fruitful legacy. We’ve done a lot of testing and explored new ideas about what the role of the space could be. I hope that the outcomes of our work will be used to trigger new debate and conversations about what the space could be for the next 50 years.”

Helen has already noticed transformed attitudes in the town and the development of sustained relationships. “It’s not just bums on seats and people walking through the door, but a real surge in impact and deep-level engagement,” she observes. “Even if the perception of the town hasn’t changed, people’s perception of their place in the town has changed and they feel better equipped to drive the town forward in a new way. Individuals have really started to lobby for culture in a way that wasn’t happening five years ago and I hope people will continue that fight – but people in Leigh are used to having to fight!”

If the Turnpike has planted the seeds of cultural change, Helen hopes that the local council will keep working with artists and other stakeholders to support and nurture more artist-led activity and that the Turnpike will continue to be a space for the community. “The Turnpike will still be a place for art and culture and the value of that will be ringfenced,” she assures me. “I hope that it continues to catalyse activity beyond its own walls – that it invites people in and initiates change beyond the gallery space.”

In November 2021, the building celebrated its 50th birthday. To mark the anniversary, a new archive of interviews with users, visitors and staff, alongside material relating to its design and construction, is being amassed and accessioned into the local municipal collections. This includes extensive material relating to the Turnpike’s history as a place for radical, innovative art and educational programming.

While Leigh is a very different place to the town it was fifty years ago, in the past five years Helen feels that the Turnpike has returned to its founding premise as “a place to see things that have not been seen before”. She hopes that the Turnpike CIC has planted firm roots for its future use and significance in the town. “We may have left a crack for the light to come in,” she concludes. “The closure of the Turnpike CIC will leave a hole, but I hope that people will sit up and take notice and think about what the future holds.”