Re/Place
Re/Place – stories that are right up your street
Re/Place is led by writers Nicholas Royle, Sarah-Clare Conlon, and David Gaffney, who specialise in commissioning new writing related to place, and staging live literature events. Re/Place projects also expand audience participation by offering other activities: place-themed workshops, panel discussions, Q&As, guided tours, creative writing competitions, sound installations, and other artistic interventions in the public realm.
Re/Place has delivered creative projects in several towns and cities with dozens of respected and well-published writers and artists. The projects are enquiries into places, spaces, history and heritage, using psychogeography and urban exploration, and are rooted in communities and local culture. Recent projects have focussed on the town centre of Macclesfield (Macc Stories), obsolete technology (FaxFiction) and Manchester’s Victoria Baths (Weekend of Words).
Original commissions by Re/Place have gone on to be published in magazines and anthologies, including Salt’s Best British Short Stories series and Dostoyevsky Wannabe’s Cities: Manchester, and to win prizes; in 2020, Abi Hynes’ story ‘The Savage Chapel’, a commission for Macc Stories in Macclesfield, won first prize in the Cambridge Short Story Prize.
Here are a few of the writers commissioned:
Socrates Adams, Jenn Ashworth, Elizabeth Baines, Jo Bell, Sarah Butler, Claire Dean, Kate Feld, Tom Fletcher, Rosie Garland, Abi Hynes, Tom Jenks, Anneliese Mackintosh, Stephen May, Phil Olsen, Valerie O’Riordan, Fat Roland, Nicholas Royle, Reshma Ruia, Adrian Slatcher, Joe Stretch, Peter Wild, Lara Williams
…and artists:
Dan Berry (illustrator), Darren Cunningham (illustrator), Gary Fisher (sound artist), Alison Erika Forde (painter), Daniel Hopkins (composer), Sara Lowes (composer), OLA (electronic music producers)
Coming up in 2026 - ROCH-TALES a creative writing project for Rochdale
Re/Place – previous projects
A few of the previous iterations of the Re/Place project are listed in more detail below.
All projects were supported by Arts Council England.
SLEEVE NOTES 2025
New writing and music for Record Store Day
Sleeve Notes was a collaborative performance response to coincide with Record Store Day 2025. Ten writers teamed up with ten musicians to offer their take on how records have shaped their lives and thinking, each pair creating a brand-new track combining spoken word and music.
You can listen to the tracks, download them and order a limited edition cassette here
The pieces were performed live by the writers and musicians at the International Burgess Centre in Manchester on the evening of Record Store Day - Saturday 12 April 6.30 - - all precisely timed to coincide with you being able to queue and procure those all-important discs and hotfoot it over and grab a drink and take the weight off and chill out.
All tracks are available as a limited-edition cassette and a free download on Bandcamp
The authors are writer and electronic music journalist Fat Roland, surreal poet Vik Shirley. ex-leader of the band Performance and novelist and lecturer Joe Stretch, poet Lauren McLean of the band Locean, novelist, and short story expert Nicholas Royle, short story writer David Gaffney, musician and writer Adrian Slatcher, poet and lead singer of the March Violets, Rosie Garland, UNESCO city of literature writer Dave Hartley, and experimental poet Sarah-Clare Conlon.
Composers are Andy Hodson of Warm Digits, ex Ultravox singer and musician John Foxx, Billy Fuller of Beak>, artist Jez Dolan on double bass, Joe Cross from the Courteeners, record producer and DJ Fritz von Runte, The March Violets, electronic musician Rickerly, Tombed Visions label head David McLean and Minimums.
Tootally Wired 2024
Manchester Histories explores the impact and meaning of the Tootal scarf, with new live commissions from seven writers and artists.
Tootal scarves, distinguishable by their silky texture, bright colours, tassels and repeat designs of paisley, dots or other patterns, have long been an iconic fashion item for working class men with a taste for music and culture. Dating from the 1940s the firm had an office in the Tootal building on Oxford Road Manchester and also factories in Bolton and Rochdale and Ashton. The scarves became popular in the fifties and sixties with mods and other cool kids and remain popular today, with a big market in the vintage sector and a thriving business selling new scarves as well. The scarf has many a famous wearers such as Paul Weller and Liam Gallagher, John Cooper Clarke and Martin Freeman and its popularity, particularly the paisley patterned version, runs through punk, ska, mod revival, and psychedelia. As well as music the scarves have a strong place in visual arts, film, and theatre culture as well.
Working with Manchester Histories, Tootally Wired delivered seven brand new live commissions based on the scarf and its social history, its impact on fashion over the last few decades and what its place in society is now, its significance to working class men through the ages who have always wanted to dress up and look smart yet look cool and distinctive too.
The seven artists were
Emily Oldfield writer/poet
Nicholas Royle - Writer
Sarah-Clare Conlon – Writer/Poet
Gary Fisher – sound artist
Wendy Allen writer/poet
Tom Jenks – Experimental writer/poet
David Gaffney – writer, artistic lead and project manager
The commissioned works were performed live at Manchester Central Library as part of the Manchester Histories Festival and in addition to the commissioned pieces there were writing workshops for the community who were encouraged to produce pieces of writing about their own favourite items of clothing, and five short films about the Tootal factory from the north west film archive were also screened.
Stockport Stories 2024
Stockport was the Town of Culture in 2024 and to celebrate this, five writers were commissioned to produce new piece of work inspired by Stockport.
The writers were Sarah Butler, Sarah-Clare Conlon, David Gaffney, Joe Stretch, and Emily Yates and they produced prose and poetry on a variety of themes – rivers, hats, music, low flying planes, suburbia and many more Stockport infused topics.
The work was performed live in April 2024 at Rare Mags, Underbanks, and at Mura Ma Gallery, Marple
The Whitehaven Whale 2022
In May 2022 David was writer in residence for The Whale project, an interactive live theatre installation in Whitehaven Cumbria that gives us a strange real-but-imagined encounter with a beached whale.
The Captain Boomer Collective created The Whale sculpture with Zephyr Wildlife to be a hyperrealistic sculpture that sparks debate about our relationship with the planet, our fellow inhabitants and the earth's resources. The Project was an Eden Arts commission.
During his residency David produced a series of short stories inspired by the whale and people’s interactions with it.
These stories were published by Osmosis press in 2024 in a small pamphlet called Whale - see more here
and buy a copy here
Macc Stories for LIT Macclesfield 2019
Macc Stories was a set of six brand-new short stories commissioned especially for the LIT festival in Macclesfield in November 2019. Six acclaimed, published and award-winning writers from Manchester were invited to Macclesfield to create pieces of fiction from the point of view of outsiders, arriving on different days during early autumn to poke about the place and find out about its history and inhabitants. They learnt why it’s called the Silk Town, discovered what’s behind the Treacle Market, explored the Forest, chatted to Maxonians and generally found inspiration in the mills and hills. All kinds of details and interpretations fed into the stories, resulting in all kinds of styles and themes – everything from fashion and football to worshippers and woodlands, with some intriguing and unplanned interlinking moments. The writers – Sarah-Clare Conlon, David Gaffney, Abi Hynes, Nicholas Royle, Reshma Ruia and Joe Stretch – performed the six short stories as part of Macclesfield’s LIT festival. For an extra layer of intrigue, each story was set against its own backdrop of specially commissioned visuals by Not Quite Light photographer Simon Buckley, who captures on film the half-light of dawn and dusk, including the now-famous Stephen Fry-praised Lowry-esque Manchester Rainstorm, Deansgate featured in the Observer.
Re/Place for Chorlton Arts Festival
Always wanted to go behind the scenes in Longford Cinema or Cosgrove Hall? Ever wondered what the Sedge Lynn used to be or why Chorltonville is unique? Never knew about the Chorlton Park paddling pool or what happened to the Chorlton Green church whose graveyard and lychgate still remain? As part of Chorlton Arts Festival 2015, six critically acclaimed and award-winning writers each sharing an interest in psychogeography and urban exploration penned pieces about ghost places and the re-appropriation of spaces. Sarah Butler, Sarah-Clare Conlon, Claire Dean, Kate Feld, David Gaffney and Nicholas Royle performed their site-specific short stories and presented postcards from the past at a special event, which included a screening of private home movies shot in Chorlton in the fifties and sixties, provided by the North West Film Archive.
Re/Place(d) for Didsbury Arts Festival
From the Gates of Hell to a grand Victorian railway hotel, DAF goers were invited to take a tour of local places through the site-specific short stories of critically acclaimed and award-winning writers Elizabeth Baines, Sarah Butler, Sarah-Clare Conlon, David Gaffney, Nicholas Royle and Adrian Slatcher, set against a backdrop of archive film and photography. To bring audiences “stories that are right up your street”, the six Re/Place(d) writers explored places and spaces from around Didsbury, including a grand railway hotel gone to the dogs, a Victorian villa with unique stained glass windows and an Art Deco block of flats with a mysterious safe. The writers explored the locations, found out about their history and chatted to current users. Partners such as North West Film Archive, Manchester Modernist Society, Loiterers’ Resistance Movement, Didsbury Parsonage Trust, Didsbury Open Gardens, the area’s residents’ associations, and local history and reading groups all played a part in contributing.
Re/Place(s) for Victoria Baths Weekend Of Words
Audiences were invited to dive into the public places and secret spaces of this historic building with six specially commissioned short stories inspired by Victoria Baths performed in the middle pool. Illuminated by magical projections, this atmospheric, entertaining and social evening, during the Baths’ first-ever Weekend of Words festival, saw the bar open and the writers in their midst. The Re/place(s) project incorporated an interest in places and spaces, history and heritage, psychogeography and urban exploration, and in this case, the act of swimming – linking to a renewed interest in public and community swimming – in municipal baths, lidos and even wild water. The six commissioned writers explored “Manchester’s Water Palace”, found out about its history since 1906 and chatted to current and former users, working with the Victoria Baths Archive Team to tap into the extensive on-site archive material as inspiration for the stories.
Station Stories for Manchester Literature Festival
Station Stories was a unique site specific live literature promenade event using technology and live improvised electronic sound. From platform to platform, café to café and shop to shop, six writers guided audiences on a tour of Piccadilly Station and read specially commissioned stories inspired by the hub and the people who use it and work there. A unique live literature promenade performance, it featured live improvised sounds using samples of ambient station noises as they happened. Audiences were linked to the writers’ microphones by headsets using wireless technology, making the event unobtrusive and ensuring the audience heard every single word, while still experiencing the live ambience of the location. A musician accompanied the writers and improvised music using sampled live sounds from the station, manipulating these sounds and playing them into the audience’s headsets between and underneath the text. The writers interacted with passing members of the public unaware that a performance was taking place. Station Stories explored the day-to-day life of the station – its platforms, its workers, the journeys people take, the waiting, the encounters, the thrill, the loneliness, the joy. It expressed the peculiar, unique qualities of this marginal, in-between world, where anything can happen – and often does. "Absolutely knocked out by the @stationstories performance in Piccadilly Station today. Spellbinding and inspiring. 2 more days to see it. Go!!” Guy Garvey via twitter
FaxFiction for Refract:19 festival
FaxFiction saw six writers produce six brand-new pieces of text which focussed on old technologies – think the music cassette tape, the personal calculator, the floppy disc, home recorded video tapes, analogue cameras, instant Polaroids, 35ml slides in a carousel, acetate slide projectors, dial-up internet modems, ansamachines, old WEM tape echo machines for singers, part work magazines, vinyl records, megaphones, Myspace websites, CB radio, viewmasters, dictaphones, Ceefax, reel to reel tape, and dozens of others. The project ended with a performance which utilised some of these technologies to bring the works to life. The project was engaging – there is a fascination around how we functioned with these old machines, and how these “modern” artefacts will become the relics of the future.
The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head for Lakes International Comic Art Festival
A live graphic novel performance with specially commissioned music, The Three Rooms In Valerie’s Head by Dan Berry and David Gaffney was a Lakes International Comic Art Festival commission. Experimental and original, it featured a live performance at the globally renowned festival in Kendal of the graphic novel with projected images and specially commissioned music by acclaimed recording artist Sara Lowes. The piece explores relationships, memory, loneliness and obsession in a darkly humorous way, and was also published in book form. Dan Berry is an illustrator, designer, cartoonist and lecturer. David Gaffney is an acclaimed short fiction writer and this was his debut comic art collaboration.
Men Who Like Women Who Smell Of Their Jobs for Manchester Literature Festival
Alison Erika Forde creates daydream-inspired paintings and misleading twists on reality with a pinch of mischief and dark humour. For Manchester Literature Festival 2014, she produced a set of works based on the short stories of David Gaffney. Called Men Who Like Women Who Smell Of Their Jobs, it was exhibited at the John Rylands Library in Manchester. The exhibition was launched at the John Rylands Library, and featured an introduction to the work by Alison, a reading from David Gaffney, performances by short fiction writers Socrates Adams and Anneliese Mackintosh, and ended with an intimate sharing of specially commissioned music based on the texts from electronic/ambient two-piece O>L>A.