I got pretty good at knowing the Northern Rail train timetable to Blackburn last winter when I was shadowing Fast Fast Slow with Common Wealth Theatre in 2023 (see blog in June on Clothing Waste and Sustainable Fashion). The train to Blackburn leaves from Platform 5 at Manchester Victoria fairly regularly – well, regular for Northern Rail where delays and cancellations seem to happen as a matter of course. My destination in July was The National Festival of Making (NFM) in Blackburn http://festivalofmaking.co.uk. I got off the train this time, stepping not in winter cold and darkness but into daylight and (relative) warmth. The town centre had been transformed by flags and bunting, marquees and gazebos that housed workshops, performances, food stall and much more.

The National festival of Making was originally set up in partnership with Blackburn Council as part of a bid to regenerate the town and the surrounding region. Blackburn, Burnley and other Lancashire towns are typically associated with high unemployment following the decline of the textile industry and the official stats do show the north west as having a higher level of unemployment than the overall British average. But there is still a strong manufacturing base in the region.

When I first came across it in 2017 I was researching a dance piece called Traysway where a group of workers from Cherrytree Bakery in Burnley worked with choreographer Ruth Jones to produce a performance based on their work gestures and movements. This was part of a commissioning strand of NFM called Arts in Manufacturing. As part of this artists are commissioned to work in industrial settings in a bid to integrate arts and industry http://artinmanufacturing.co.uk As part of that research I interviewed Elena Gifford of Decopublique, a production company working on Arts and Manufacturing. She explained that, rather than follow the route of many post-industrial cities who opt for infrastructure projects or chase nationally and internationally recognized cultural labels, the strategy in Blackburn had been to work with what already exists and build on that.

So here we are several years later to see what’s happening this year. There were 75 workshops, street performance, exhibitions, talks and a maker’s market programmed over two days. The Festival of Making became an Arts Council National Portfolio organisation two years ago which gives it guaranteed funding. Arts in Manufacturing is also still going strong and I was able to see three exhibits that had been commissioned. Artist Margo Selby worked with 160 staff at Standfast and Barracks printing company to create ‘Breathing Together’. They constructed a multicoloured 100m textile sculpture that evoked a dep breath in and out again which was exhibited in Blackburn cathedral.

Also exhibited in the cathedral was the work of artist Horace Lindezey who collaborated with The Making Rooms on Blackburn. Lindezey’s whimsical work ‘We are Gathered Here Together’, took me into three rooms mapped across births, marriages and deaths. It was gently humorous and based on conversation with a strong sense of the importance of the everyday.

Finally, rounding off the day was a trip across the town centre to The Exchange. When I’d been there before the huge, semi-derelict space was dominated by Common Wealth’s catwalk for Fast, Fast, Slow. Now in its place was what looked like a factory created by artist Sam Williams and the Cardboard Box Company. Called ‘Fabula un Facto’, visitors could walk through it looking at it as both a factory and a huge machine.

Over the next few months I plan to go back to my earlier research on Traysway and reflect on that as well as more recent developments. I want to think about how Arts in Manufacturing compares with the Artists Placement Group (APG) set up by John Latham and Barbara Steveni in 1967. They believed that ‘the context is half the work’ and were interested in creating ‘event-based encounters between the practicing artist and those in a place of work’. Their work coincides with much of the thinking behind The National Festival of Making and maybe putting them together will reveal new connections and insights.