Levenshulme Life

Original post by: Real Mancunian
We all know Levenshulme has seen better days, it still has its good points, but it also has its fair share of problems.

Reading a BBC article about the esteemed architect Sir Norman Foster, I discovered he was from Levenshulme. In the article Levenshulme is described as the " run-down Levenshulme district ".

Norman Foster was born in 1935 and would have grown up during the period when Levenshulme was far from 'run-down'.

Is anyone who posts on here or is reading this old enough to remember Levenshulme from the 1930's through to the 1950's and if so; was it fair to describe Levenshulme at that time as being run-down?

Lord Foster: Stormin' Norman
Architects are a strange breed. No other profession stamps its personal style on our lives in the way that theirs does. Most of the time, though, their buildings go unnoticed: they are functional, workaday, unsexy. When, from time to time, more radical designs do make the headlines, it is usually to face a tirade of abuse and popular scorn.

Architects are seen as either nerdish draughtsmen or crackpots bent on moulding society in their own chaotic image. Not so Norman Foster. Together with his great friend, and fellow peer, Richard Rogers, Lord Foster of Thames Bank has stamped his own, defiantly modernist, style on cities from London to Berlin to Hong Kong. His is the most accessible and popular face of contemporary architectural design: ambitious, outrageous even, yet endearingly human.

Born in Manchester in 1935 and brought up in its run-down Levenshulme district, Norman Foster was a bookish youth, fascinated by Meccano and, in particular, by two books. One was a work about the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the other Le Corbusier's modernist bible, Towards a New Architecture. Lloyd Wright's maxim "Form and Function Are One" and Le Corbusier's theories of space, light and minimalism, have influenced Foster's outlook ever since.

Leaving school at 16, he initially worked in Manchester's City Treasurer's office before National Service in the Royal Air Force. But Foster's ambition would not be denied. Once out of the RAF, he went to Manchester University School of Architecture and City Planning, working in a cold store, selling ice cream and even acting as a bouncer at a local cinema to pay his way through college.

After graduating in 1961 he won a Fellowship to study for a Masters degree at the Yale School of Architecture. It was here that he met Richard Rogers and the two young men travelled the country, as he says, "by thumb, by car, and by Greyhound bus" to see as many Frank Lloyd Wright buildings as possible.

Click the link for the rest of the article. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk/2000/newsmakers/1796173.stm

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Original Post by Nick Leeson:
you really do reminisce the good old days, hey old boy!!

Or are you suffering from severe nostalgic disorder.....hehee!!

Cheer up real manc, lets hear something positive for a change.

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Original Post by: John Flynn
Didn't he design the 'wobbly' bridge accross the Thames?
I wonder which part of Leve he was from?

I would have to guess at Grange Ave because that was always considered the posh part of Levenshulme.