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Peter Carr/Liverpool Biennial

Mitchell's Bakery. It has become theheart of a community project to helpdetermine the fate of Anfield.

DESIGN

A Corner Bakery and a Town's Rebirth

Liverpool Biennial

Closed-up houses in the Anfield suburb of Liverpool.

By ALICE RAWSTHORNPublished: November 25, 2012

LIVERPOOL — For 85 years, Mitchell’s Bakery in Anfield, a northern

suburb of this city, sold bread, cakes and pies to local people and the

soccer fans flocking across the road to Anfield Stadium, the home of

Liverpool’s famous soccer team. Since the bakery closed for business

early last year, it has fulfilled a new function as a community design

studio where groups of high school students and campaigners have

been planning the future of their neighborhood.

Mitchell’s was a casualty of a

moribund government regeneration

program in Anfield. Since the area was

designated for redevelopment in

2002, the occupants of more than

4,000 homes, mostly small terraced

houses, have left them. Some of those

homes were demolished and replaced

by new ones only for construction to stop when the

recession struck. Entire streets of houses have stood empty

for years, their windows and doors “tinned up” with metal

sheets. The surrounding area has been paralyzed, as

residents have waited for demolition orders to arrive and

businesses, like Mitchell’s, have died.

The disused bakery is now the hub of 2Up 2Down, a

community design project initiated by Jeanne van

Heeswijk, a Dutch artist and activist, with the support of

the Liverpool Biennial 2012, the city’s contemporary art

festival. Its aim is to enable members of the local

community to redesign the old Mitchell building and the

house on each side into a new bakery and affordable

housing, and to raise the money needed to build them.

“People around here have been living in limbo for so long,

not knowing what will happen to their homes or the area,”

said Lynn Tolmon, one of the residents who is involved with the project. “We all remember

Mitchell’s Bakery. Reopening it would prove that something good can come out of this.”

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A Corner Bakery and a Town's Rebirth - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/arts/design/a-corner-bak...

1 van 2 18-05-13 19:27

A version of this article appeared in print on November 26, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.

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2Up 2Down, which is named after a typical Anfield terraced house with two rooms

downstairs and two upstairs, is one of the new genre of projects that are using the design

process to address the type of problems traditionally dealt with by social scientists and

economists. Rather than bringing in professional designers to tackle those issues, it is

using them to teach residents how to do so, thereby enabling them to drive the process. “If

a project like this is going to work, the local people must be responsible for it, especially in

a place like Anfield, where they have felt powerless for so long,” said Laurie Peake,

program director of the Liverpool Biennial.

Anfield is one of the poorest but, thanks to the stadium, most evocative areas of Liverpool,

a spirited city, which is famous for music, soccer, radical politics and its sumptuous

Georgian architecture. When Anfield was designated as part of the government’s Housing

Market Renewal initiative, Mitchell’s Bakery was among the first buildings to be slated for

demolition. The couple who owned it were then in their 60s, and considering retirement.

Unable to sell a business whose building was threatened with demolition, they waited for

the local council to buy them out, losing custom as the surrounding streets were emptied.

By early 2011, the Mitchells were in their 70s but as the renewal program was frozen and

the demolition order remained in place, they had no choice but to close the bakery and

retire without compensation.

No sooner had they done so than Ms. Van Heeswijk asked if she could rent the building for

a project she was planning for the Liverpool Biennial, which had commissioned her to

produce a long term program in Anfield with a lasting impact on the local community.

“Seeing the ‘Closed’ sign on Mitchell’s door seemed like fate to us,” Ms. Peake recalled.

“We’d failed to persuade the council to let us use the rows of empty houses, even on a

temporary basis, and Jeanne had always wanted to combine housing with a social

enterprise. What could be better as the heart of the project than a bakery?”

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