Looking at Mick's photographs I was struck by how oddly ironic this new public object and it's placing is. If one didn't know better, one could almost imagine that there is someone within HBC with some modicum of intelligence.
Ironic? Well, yes, think about it. We are taught that the prime function of art is to reflect and comment on the human condition. This object does that on quite a few levels.
It is a piece of a redundant steam engine, the very thing that made the industrial revolution possible, which, in turn, is the reason that Accrington grew from an insignificant hamlet to the teeming metropolis it is now.
It is sited in the heart of what was the industrial heart of Accrington. Adjacent to a redundant Colliery, a once important but now vanished Railway line and good's yard and also in front of what was once the premises of one of the towns major employers.
All gone. Only this thing remains to remind us of what we once had, of what we were once capable of doing. One meaningless, worthless, lump of cast iron that accidentally has come to represent more than a hundred and fifty years of struggle, hardship, perseverence and success.
And the council hijacks it so that they can have somewhere nice to have their sandwiches. If that isn't ironic I don't know what is.
