Gayfield
Gayfield proposes a new queer epicentre for Manchester, transforming a former industrial site into a vibrant public space for storytelling, performance, and exchange. Situated in a disused arch above the River Medlock, the project intercepts the waste stream from the deconstruction of Depot Mayfield, reusing and reimagining them in the construction of a printworks, archive, and exhibition space. Using the FLUX:OEC, an event that I co-curated shown in videos on this account, we explored act of exchange in both material and symbol — challenging systems of disposability, erasure, and exclusion that often shape the city.
Gayfield operates as a living cultural infrastructure. It holds space for queer voices, past and present, while fostering new modes of collectivity, making, and visibility. The printing press at its heart is a working machine, a catalyst for knowledge sharing and protest-making, producing prints, posters, and propaganda that spill into the city — reminders that queer culture is ongoing, made in public, and worth preserving.
Gayfield is a connector — bridging Mayfield Park and the Gay Village, nightlife and daily life, personal memory and public history. It resists the commercialisation of queer identity by offering space for community, transformation and exploration.
Once it has fulfilled its role as a hub of queer expression and assembly, the printing press — a catalytic artefact — is demounted and rolled as part of an alternative pride parade. No longer fixed in place, it becomes a moving monument to queer resistance and reclamation: loud, visible, and rolling through the city, gifting prints and messages to those who gather. Leaving behind a series of impressions, Gayfield, in this way, is not a static institution, but a process — one that asks what queer space can be when it is made with care, memory, urgency, and the power to move.
