Landmarks

Nope..ALL children know about parks..they grow up there..behind the bike sheds...in the bowling pavilion..third hydrangea from the right..etc...

We dont need panopticons, we need little men in huts in summer selling time on the tennis courts, providing bowls for the bowling greens and clubs for the putting greens..we need paid employees walking round the park ensuring safety...Much more important than modern day 'follies'
 
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Parents take children to parks but these days parents are taking their children to Sealife, Eureka, indoor play areas, etc. Parents don't let their children go to parks any more because they believe they are full of bad men.
 
Guinness said:
we need little men in huts in summer selling time on the tennis courts, providing bowls for the bowling greens and clubs for the putting greens..we need paid employees walking round the park ensuring safety...
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Agree with you on this point!
 
all follies were once modern day, and our parks are full of them.

youths are not interested in parks with or without panopticans, kids are, adults are, if there's something to do there.
Rawtenstall has tennis courts and bowling green. dunno if they're on my gallery pics but they're there. other than that parks are out of fasion, and most are run down. Bacup parks fairy dell is a perfect example, it's a beautiful park with a cascading stream, but it's under used because it went out of fasion and got run down to the point now that non of the cascades are working. Kids love that place, they think it's magical, I've heard them say, they'd love it even more if it was working properly and was clean and tidy, and so would the adults. Somewhere to sit would be nice, watch the world go by.
Thats just an example not all parks have streams so those without need something. some sort of interest or it's not a park it's just a piece of green field.
I'll go to see them when I'm up that way gayle and I'll photograph them and put them on my site with all my other monuments and sculptures, the blackpool ones, the doncaster brick train engine, the Stoke on Trent michelin men roundabout, the cowboy sherifs at popular 2000 services at warrington, the mersey wave. our shrove tuesday football games sculpture.

What I would like to do here, is get artists to sculpture pictures in rope light and decorate the town, with them, like christmas lights but they'd be based on book characters cos we're a booktown, they'd only be on as end of summer of course. that would need lots of money though and I wouldn't know were to start.

seems a bit mixed up that, but I see them as art, and something to look at, brighten the place up, tidy a place up, they are a modern day folly. You just need the right thing in the right place. I do think that one of the things against the hyndburn thing is that people see that all that money has been spent on the town centre and it's still bare, yet money is being spent on a panopticon in the middle of nowhere.
 
Gayle said:
So it's a lose-lose situation isn't it? We put challenging pieces in front of you and you hate them, we put subtle and understated ones in front of you and you hate them too.
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I don't hate it, I'm just under whelmed. I'll reserve final judgement until I've seen it though.

The fact that they may be affordable doesn't mean they are, or are going to be great artists. It doesn't have the grandeur of the enviromental art of Christos, or even the subtlety of Tracy Emin's bird at Liverpool. It just looks so measly.

You mentioned before we both like Gormley's beach people. I would rather have one piece of world class art than lots of things in our area that don't stand up in the art world nationally, never mind on the international art scene.
 
so you would like something then, just that nobody seems to have said what is acceptable yet so they've given up on you.
 
I blame the why-aye men. They started it with their 'Angel of The North' and ever since the rest of the country has been trying to emulate them. The geordies' heap of rusting steel knocks any of these crackpot panopticon ideas into a cocked hat.
 
It would have fulfilled the brief better if they had built a great big towering phallus people could have climbed up to see the view even clearer.

The Victorians had more idea about publicly acceptable art/follies than we do today. Plus it would have been there for centuries rather than a few vandalised years.
 
you could always put a giant yellow submarine or a giant yellow lamb with a banana up it's bottom on top of your hill outside that tumbling down bus shelter, liverpool think they are great
 
Madhatter said:
have you not got tennis courts and bowling in your parks then?
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Yes we've got some bowling greens but most of the parks which have/had tennis courts now have derelict sites which look like they've been bombed. The tarmac has holes, the nets don't exist, there is broken glass etc etc. Even the fencing around has been vandalised.

Madhatter said:
so you would like something then, just that nobody seems to have said what is acceptable yet so they've given up on you.
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We haven't been offered anything which any of us like. We've been offered a series of concentric circles of earth on top of the Coppice which would cause all manner of problems not least of all with drainage and possible danger from the flooded trenches not to mention vandalism and no plans to prevent or discourage it. The location is all wrong. Most people just want the Coppice to be left alone but wouldn't object to something more suitable in a better location. We were offered the spaceship up there on the Coppice but that seemed far too fanciful. Rossendale have got that now. At least Burnley and Blackburn have got theirs in parks. If Blackburn can have one in Corporation Park why can't we have one in Oakhill?
 
garinda said:
It would have fulfilled the brief better if they had built a great big towering phallus people could have climbed up to see the view even clearer.
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So you're saying that if we'd have suggested that for the Coppice you'd have been happy? Rubbish! You'd have been objected to it like you've objected to everything else.

garinda said:
The Victorians had more idea about publicly acceptable art/follies than we do today. Plus it would have been there for centuries rather than a few vandalised years.
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Over 150 people signed a petition against Darwen Tower being built back in the Victorian times.
 
There are two replies after my last one I can't read in this thread.:(

ARRGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!:(
 
Gayle said:
So you're saying that if we'd have suggested that for the Coppice you'd have been happy? Rubbish! You'd have been objected to it like you've objected to everything else.



Over 150 people signed a petition against Darwen Tower being built back in the Victorian times.
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Firstly I've always said the Coppice was the wrong location in Hyndburn. Doing anything upon such a naturally beautiful place would have been like gilding the lily in my opinion.

The population in Blackburn and Darwen at the end of the nineteenth century was 133,000. So 150 objectors isn't really that many. Besides I did say it should be challenging, as it obviously was to those one hundred and fifty souls.;)
 
WillowTheWhisp said:

We were offered the spaceship up there on the Coppice but that seemed far too fanciful.
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I have spoken to the project manager about this and the Halo (spaceship) was NEVER actually an option for Hyndburn despite what people think. The competition was run and there were six designs in the running for Hyndburn (including the Halo and the Accrington Sign). It was realised at an early stage that the Halo would never be acceptable for Hyndburn and so was taken OFF the table before it was officially offered. As I wasn't involved in the project at that time I have to accept their word for it and by the time I had joined the project I know for a fact that the Halo was a Winner Without Site. From what I can understand someone leaked the designs to the press and they went off on one before anyone could stop them. Therefore the public of Hyndburn believe that they rejected the Halo when in fact they never actually got offered it in the first place. The huge shame with that is that the public got soured to the project before they had a chance to see any of the other more subtle designs.

When the steering group came back together in the second phase (remember the steering group was made up of Councillors and officers of the council and MPA did not have a vote in the decision making) they selected the least obtrusive design which did not impact on the skyline believing that would be most acceptable to people.

WillowTheWhisp said:
At least Burnley and Blackburn have got theirs in parks. If Blackburn can have one in Corporation Park why can't we have one in Oakhill?
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Blackburn is in Corporation park
Pendle is in Wycoller Country park - not a park in the sense that you're talking
Burnley is at Crown Point - not a park
Rossendale is at Top O'Slate - not a park
 
Doing anything upon such a naturally beautiful place would have been like gilding the lily in my opinion.
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Am I imagining that great big bus shelter on the top of the coppice and that broken tumbleing down monument? You can't mean that your happy with those being just left there? You need something wow on there such as the spaceship, which I didn't like at first but i've come round to.
Gayle, does it have to be modern materials? doncaster had a great big full size train engine and tender built out of bricks, on the outskirts of the town. Could they design something with traditional materials on a local theme. Surely accy is famous for something? put that on the coppice.

The reason I think it's a good site is that it can be seen from the main road and it makes a statement to people passing, it would say look, this is accrington.
 
Madhatter said:
Am I imagining that great big bus shelter on the top of the coppice and that broken tumbleing down monument? You can't mean that your happy with those being just left there? You need something wow on there such as the spaceship, which I didn't like at first but i've come round to.
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Nope I`m not happy with the state of the shelter or monument, but the Coppice is the only piece of easily accessable moorland within walking distance of the town. You can easily find yourself on your own with only the wildlife and the breeze for company. Thats why I like it as it is and I suspect why other people feel the same.
 
garinda said:
Bloody Nori bricks.

We could build a stairway to paradise.
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well there you go then build a new shelter on the coppice out of bricks but design something into perhaps even using light like the spaceship one. you could do something then on the ground to link that across to the monument which would be refubished and perhaps raised on a new plinth. or encircle it with twelve monilith stones to represent time and have scenes of accy carved in to them. brick lines radiating out from the centre to each stone. or have chrome steel carved and outlined in black, each uplit at nite with colour changing lights.

or a stairway to heaven that leads up to a new shelter thats bricks and metals made to be gates to heaven clouds and cherubs with white light reflecting of the polished metals at night and shimering white lights on the statues.
I find it unbelievable that you've got this opportunity to make a statement from accy to every passing vehicle and don't want anything. That monument was origanally put on there to make a statement and that hasn't stopped it being a nice peacefull place. the train at doncaster isn't packed with crowds, its in parkland, locals don't really notice it much, its just there, lit up at night to passing cars on the bypass, and in the day nut nuts like me stop to take photogrpahs now and again.
 
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