Liquid History: Thinking with the Gulf of Suez

Visiting family in Egypt was intended to invite stillness, however visiting water of any sorts nowadays nudges my mind and I am invited to think with it. Waves and fish move around my submerged body and mind which often still romanticises my time with nature. New knowledge has different ideas and leads me to consider the Gulf of Suez not just as a salty waterbody for my skin, nor a corridor for shipping containers and oil tankers to move through, but as a vessel of liquid history ~ a body of water that remembers empire, extraction, ecology, and endurance.

Much of my current work centres on the River Irk, a once-visible urban waterway that runs from under Victoria Railway Station and up through North Manchester. It flows beneath layers of infrastructure, industry, and neglect - its waters diverted, culverted, and partially erased by waves of continuous development. Through creative workshops, sound mapping, and archival exploration, I’ve been collaborating with communities to unearth submerged histories and ask what the river remembers that we might have forgotten. This work is nudging me to think more widely, wondering if the Irk, a small urban river, holds so many untold stories, what might a body like the Gulf of Suez be carrying?

Empire, Extraction, and Human Cost ~ The Suez Canal, connecting the Red Sea to the Mediterranean via the Gulf of Suez, is celebrated as a marvel of modern engineering. It’s on my mind a lot lately, filtered through from news streams playing a big baby president’s plans to own more toys, earth and water. But its origins are soaked in exploitation which still bears relevance to today’s desire for ownership and growth. Between 1859 and 1869, tens of thousands of Egyptian workers were conscripted, often forcibly removed from their homes to dig the canal under harsh, deadly conditions. Their labour, and in many cases their lives, were offered up, against their will, for the ambitions of the European empire. This too is liquid history. The flow of power, built on the backs of those long forgotten. Today, the canal - and by extension the Gulf - remains a critical artery of global capitalism, its banks lined with ports, tankers, and petrochemical refineries, but beneath this surface lies a sediment of human cost.

Industrial Waters, Fragile Ecologies ~ The Gulf’s industrial profile conceals a fragile marine ecology. Coral reefs, seagrass beds, migratory birds, and marine life all depend on these waters ~ yet their stories are rarely told. Like the River Irk, where local flora and fauna once flourished before being displaced by mills and development, the Gulf is marked by environmental tension ~ the conflict between extraction and survival, ‘progress’ and preservation.

Movements and Memory ~ My work along the Irk aims to trace these tensions. In one project, participants described the river as both ‘disappeared’ and ‘alive’, both past and present - a contradiction that felt deeply resonant with other geographies shaped by silence and sediment. 

The Gulf of Suez has always been a site of movement ~ not only for ships and commodities, but for people. Ancient trade routes, colonial campaigns, and modern labour migrations have all passed through these waters. Each left traces ~ some visible, and many dissolved over time forming part of the Suez’ social, cultural and ecological fabric; its Liquid History.

The River Irk, too, has borne witness to waves of relocation, housing reforms and displaced generations of families. These social displacements are echoed in the Gulf’s long history of population shifts caused by war, industry, and climate.

Through an ongoing project with Many Hands Craft Collective, residents of Ancoats and surrounding neighbourhoods, we’re asking how water acts as both witness and boundary ~ how it holds what we try to build over or forget. Conversations that have arisen through sessions with Many Hands and with participants from the Liquid History series at Manchester Central Library, have led to developments of Audiovisual postcards that reflect a wider community of the Irk, including: ecologists, council workers, anglers, industry workers, activists and friends of the river, all of whom want to communicate an experience of and with rivers.

Rethinking the Narrative Flow ~ Both the Gulf of Suez and the River Irk exist at the edge of perception ~ one hidden by global abstraction, the other by local redevelopment. Liquid history offers a way to reframe them. It urges us to consider water as more than a backdrop or resource. Rather, it becomes a co-author in our histories ~ shaped by us, and (re)shaping us in return.

These are not neutral waters, they are thick and heavy with stories of loss and life ~ from Manchester’s culverted tributaries to the politically charged channels of the Gulf, Liquid History invites us to listen, to look differently, and to ask what kind of future might emerge if we truly attended to what flows beneath our feet.

Recommended Reading - Sinews of War and Trade, Leleh Khalili (2020); The Organic Machine, Richard White (1995).

Listening with the River Irk: A Liquid History Sound Walk

This summer, I’m launching a series of sound walks along the River Irk, beginning at St Michael’s Flags and Angel Meadow Park. Once a densely inhabited working-class district, now a site of rapid regeneration, this landscape holds stories that move beneath the surface & I’ve been working in this space for so long, I can hear through earth ~ stories waiting for new ears; of migration, labour, displacement, and quiet forms of resistance.

This first walk is an invitation to listen ~ to the flows we no longer see, and to those we often fail to hear.

What is Liquid History?
‘Liquid history’ is a phrase that recognises rivers as vessels of more than water, as vibrant forces, as lively archives. As environmental historian Peter Coates describes, rivers carry political memory, ecological change, and social tension ~ they are witnesses to extraction, enclosure, and continuous transformation.

In my practice, Liquid History has become a method: a way of engaging with post-industrial waterways as sites of memory, care, and re-imagining. Through sound, conversation, and collaborative creative mapping, I explore how rivers shape (and are shaped by) people, policy, and place.

I’m particularly influenced by the work of environmental historian Stefania Barca, whose research on the River Liri in Italy emphasises rivers as active agents within socio-political landscapes. Barca’s use of creative, community-led methods foregrounds voices often excluded from dominant narratives of urban change ~ highlighting care, relational knowledge, and situated resilience.

This approach has guided my own work with the River Irk, where I’ve been collaborating with local groups to explore overlooked environmental legacies, public access, and the everyday poetics of river life via light.

Listening as Practice
During the walk, we’ll move slowly through Angel Meadow and adjacent areas of the Irk, tuning into the river’s sonic textures using hydrophones, contact microphones, and field recordings. We’ll also engage in guided listening ~ moments of stillness, memory, and reflection.

This is not about producing data or documentation. It’s about cultivating presence. About asking:

• What does the river remember?

• What remains beneath the surface?

• Who speaks for, and with, the river?

Amidst the noise of development, attentive listening becomes a subtle form of resistance ~ a way to honour what’s been buried or erased, and to imagine alternative relationships with urban space.

Why the River Irk, and Why Now?
The River Irk is one of Manchester’s most obscured and fragmented waterways ~ its course interrupted by development, its voice muffled beneath concrete and infrastructure. Yet it remains a witness: to cycles of displacement, to neighbourhoods erased and rebuilt, to ongoing struggles over land, ecology, and memory.

At a time when rivers across the UK face mounting ecological stress, the Irk also faces social and spatial silencing ~ access is limited ~ histories are scattered ~ regeneration unfolds without always remembering what came before.

To walk with the Irk now is to ask:

• Whose future is being imagined?

• What forms of knowledge do we value?

• How might creative listening help us recover ~ and reimagine ~ relationships with the river and each other?

The River Irk is being reshaped by major urban developments, yet access remains fragmented and public dialogue limited. This sound walk is the first in a longer series that will trace the Irk’s journey north ~ mapping its currents, disruptions, and communities along the way.

An Invitation
Join us for a quiet act of listening. The river still speaks ~ but not always in ways we expect. By walking together, we might begin to hear what it has to say.

I’ll be posting the Eventbrite for the first Liquid History Sound Walk during the week of 21st July, so keep your eyes peeled & place Saturday 23rd August in your diary.

I am so excited for us to meet in person for a listening session with River Irk. If you want to know more about the area we will meet in, I made a 12 minute film about it as part of my Masters in 2021.

Liquid History: Material River

‘Liquid history’ was the phrase used by MP John Burns when he described the River Thames - recognising rivers as vessels of time, politics, and power. In A Story of Six Rivers, environmental historian Peter Coates draws on that metaphor, expanding it to show how rivers carry more than just water: they embody memory, infrastructure, class conflict, ecology, and imagination.

I experience ‘liquid history’ as both metaphor and method. It has grown to become how I work with communities to explore the often submerged stories of rivers - particularly in urban and post-industrial landscapes - where water has been redirected, enclosed, or erased. It’s about finding and recovering lost entanglements between people and place, nature and policy, grief and growth.

For me, rivers are both personal and political. My grandmother, Polly, was born in Collyhurst, North Manchester, to Mary and John - Irish immigrants who made their home there. As a young girl, she was relocated to Wythenshawe during the 1930s slum clearance programme that reshaped much of the city. Decades later, at the age of 82, she was rehoused by the council once again. In response, she wrote a poetry collection called The Flowering, about finding light during immovable circumstances. Her words - rooted in resilience, memory, ecology, and place - have shaped my artistic practice and, in many ways, led me back to Collyhurst and the River Irk, whose surrounding landscape is now undergoing colossal urban regeneration. I have been working closely with communities along the River Irk - exploring its layered histories and uncertain futures through creative collaboration. I’ll be sharing more about this project later in the summer.

Earlier this year, I ran a Liquid History workshop series at Manchester Central Library with Archives+, focused on the River Irk and its overlooked socio-environmental legacy. Participants explored how water shaped the city’s fabric, not only through its mills and canals, but through the displacements and developments that followed. Using archives, creative writing, sound, and embroidery, we asked: What has the river seen? What does it remember? And what do we need to remember with it?

Now, at the Rock Mill Centre in New Mills, the project continues with Reimagining the River Goyt: A Sustainable Future - a workshop series supported by High Peak Borough Council’s Climate Change and Nature Fund. Together, we will explore how creativity can open up new ways of relating to the Goyt, its ecology, and its future. Through tactile making, speculative storytelling, collective mapping, and sound walks, we’re imagining the river not just as a site of the past, but as a potential agent of social and ecological repair.

Why Rivers? Why Now?

There are over 240,000 km of river channels in the UK, yet fewer than 14% of English rivers meet good ecological status (Environment Agency, 2021). This crisis is not only environmental - it’s social. Decisions about rivers are decisions about land, access, infrastructure, housing, and whose voices matter.

As Leona Skelton writes in Tyne After Tyne, rivers are not only shaped by overlapping human pressures and ambitions, but by the people who live and work beside them. Stefania Baci’s work with the River Liri in areas of regeneration in Italy offers another powerful example of using creative and participatory methods to understand rivers as active agents in urban futures - not just resources to be exploited or landscaped. Richard White’s The Organic Machine underpins both Skelton and Baci work, calling rivers ‘natural systems altered by culture and cultural systems affected by nature’. Liquid History and my practice live between those flows: of a river as a site of tension, of potential, of layered time.

In areas of social housing, rivers often mark the boundary between regeneration and erasure. Working with natural materials - stone, water, sound, and with voices of residents themselves, we ask: Who are these developments for? Who are rivers for?

Creative Method, Social Material

Liquid History is a conversation, a set of tools for listening to water, land and people, and for creating space for what doesn’t usually get heard: sounds of play, memories embedded in local knowledge, the beauty and the grief of changing environments.

This work centres the socio-material history of rivers: not just the flow of water, but the infrastructures, bodies, and systems it flows through. It invites participants to see the river as collaborator and witness - something to speak with, not just about. In doing so, it reclaims rivers as common ground: a place for co-creation, care, and resistance.

Hayley Suviste’s River Irwell

From The River’s Mouth

In 2024, The Guardian published an article titled ‘Would you swim in that?’ written by Alex Clark. The piece highlighted the severe pollution of the River Irwell, noting that in 2023, the river experienced the highest rate of sewage spills in England, with 95 spills per mile, totaling 11,974 spills. Residents and visitors expressed concerns over the contamination, emphasising the need for greater public involvement in sewage discharge decisions and increased investment in infrastructure.

In contrast, Arthur Ransome's 1926 article portrayed the River Irwell as a ‘magnificent’ waterway, lamenting its transformation into a ‘sewer’ due to industrial pollution. He expressed hope that future generations might witness the return of trout and salmon to Manchester's waters, emphasising the need for factories to manage their waste responsibly.

These articles, separated by nearly a century, underscore the persistent environmental challenges faced by the River Irwell. While Ransome's piece reflects a vision of hope and potential restoration, Clark's 2024 article highlights ongoing concerns and the urgent need for action to address the river's pollution.

As an artist and lover of natural waterways, it was music to my ears that in 2025, Manchester-based sound artist Hayley Suviste would reimagine the River Irwell through a residency at UoS Acoustic Laboratories, resulting in three stages of sound and image installation titled ‘From The River’s Mouth’.

A gift from Hayley to the City of Salford, to SFTOC festival, to river lovers everywhere.

I wanted to communicate my experience of ‘From The River’s Mouth’ to Hayley and have chosen a medium I adore to do so - thinking through the written form as a method to understand a visceral embodied experience of rivers, and of this artwork.

I. in the shallows (anechoic chamber)

There is a room whose movement I feel beneath my feet. Bouncing floors separate cushions of sound - I feel like I am inside water. This is an anechoic chamber, a space designed to absorb all sound reflections, where silence becomes a presence in itself. In the River Irwell, it becomes a kind of listening vessel, isolating the layered textures captured underwater - currents, debris, the distant hum of city life - from any outside interference.

This first room allows for eight bodies, meaning my group is separated into two. I am in the second group and before going in we have some time with Hayley while the first group experience something I later learn is all encompassing.

Hayley explains she has filled all of the speakers with underwater sounds from her time with the river over the last three months. That in the second room, winter frost will be present with images of sunlight, all of which I forget once I am in each act of the river.

Someone asks Hayley about the hydrophone devices used to record the water and I later research this so I am firm within my own knowledge. I am in love with hydrophones, underwater microphones that are used to capture otherwise inaudible worlds beneath the surface of a body of water.

Underwater objects (such as boats, the feet of ducks, or even the walls of culverted rivers) produce sound waves that travel through the water, creating subtle pressure changes as they move. Hydrophones, often made with piezoelectric materials, translate these changes into electrical signals. When a sound wave encounters the hydrophone, the pressure causes the material to vibrate, generating a voltage that mirrors the frequency and intensity of the sound. These signals are then amplified and recorded using audio equipment, revealing a rich tapestry of textures. Both active and passive hydrophones are used in fields like marine and oceanographic research, underwater communication, and monitoring noise pollution. For Hayley, they offer a different yet resonant purpose: a sonic portrait of the Irwell, connecting scientific method with artistic imagination.

Hayley is full of imagination. She tells us we can pretend to be underwater creatures if we like and I prepare to metamorphose into a star fish, with a layer of city smog.

Layered is a good word to describe this first room. My chest is vibrating and I am encouraging myself to breathe into the space. In the shallows I become unaware of the dryness of the room. My sentient body takes over and I refrain from lying down on the netting that separates me from the speakers and foam material below, I close my eyes and imagine myself floating with underwater sounds - natural rhythms of water rippling alongside creatures - tadpoles, the feet of swans paddling, my fellow star fishes and currents of time. The hydrophone recordings are suspended in pure clarity, as if the river has been lifted from its banks and poured into the air around me.

I am speechless as I leave and am led towards the listening room. Please no one touch me or ask me what I think in this moment. I am not ready to be human again. Later I reflect on the room itself, reminiscent of those foam pools I used to spring into during gymnastics as a youth.

II. at the river’s edge (listening room)

There is a dark room with seats lined at the back and beanbags on the floor. I lingered in the first room too long to find a seat so sit cross legged on the floor. Two screens play beautifully composed moving river images - two swans swimming together, reflections of their bodies pull them into frame moving from the right image through a portal (a gap between screens) into the left. The images and sounds feel intimate - we have been invited to sit and listen and watch the river through Hayley’s gaze and ears. Ethereal sounds pull me from natural waters, the breeze and a woman’s voice calling ‘Reggie’ so many times you realise it’s a dog. I laugh raptured in light, I cannot believe this is the river Irwell until a shopping trolley appears. I feel relief, not that there is rubbish in the river, but that a river’s reality is being played out for an audience to see. This work is special, it is beautifully gentle yet electrifying.

III. outflow (reverberation room)

It is in the reverberation room that the spell fully takes hold. The sounds, of the River Irwell murmuring below the surface, of a clarinet weaving through its currents, fill the space like breath. Reverberation is the lingering of sound after its source has stopped, a resonance that bounces and blends as it meets walls, water, and air. Here, echoes become tactile. Each note or ripple of river sound sends vibrations across the shallow pool at my feet, causing the water to tremble in response, tiny waves pulsing outward in time with the sounds. A star-shaped pattern of light dances on the floor, reflected from a glass bowl of water lit from behind, as though the night sky has been pulled down and scattered across the room. I sit at the front, where my legs rest in the water, feeling each sound, as though the space itself is breathing. It is here I realise that Hayley is not just an artist but a magician of sound, wonder, and subtle humour. I know this is the final room, but I don’t want it to end.

Hayley has transformed all three rooms into worlds entirely her own, each one a carefully tuned space where sound, light, and water blur the lines between the real and the imagined. I find myself telling her how amazing she is. I use the words special and awe inspiring and we giggle. Her talent is unmistakable, but it’s her playful and precise spirit that’s infectious. We go to the toilet together, and she laughs, calling it the fourth room. We imagine recording our own water sounds there, pretending to inform an imaginary stranger of our watery delights.

A River Framework

A river is a watershed. We don’t know where a river begins because it comes from so many different places…just like an idea.

Last year I heard news that Robert Macfarlane was writing a new book about rivers titled ‘is a river alive?’ This news came a few months after I had asked that same question in a workshop held at Paradise Works when thinking of the River Irwell who had recently been named the no.1 most polluted river in England and Wales.

A year later I am sat between two strangers at the Royal Geographical Society whose academic conference I have just been accepted into and who have recently given me a grant towards my fieldwork. The grant is slight but ‘important on my CV’ (it is mostly going to the people who will help me to transcribe interviews/edit material), the conference means I am welcome into the geography discipline - sounds, images, text, blurry interdisciplinary included.

I don’t know at which stage I began to believe in myself this much, but I do know the roots of this research and why it is important that I do it.

Recently on a tired-overthinking lull I looked to its origins for support - a research proposal from 2019 about processes of social housing in Manchester told through documentary film and community engagement, and an arts proposal from 2020 about working with communities along the River Shannon - exploring my own heritage and collecting stories, sounds and images from different communities along its banks. Both went through processes of rejection and enlightenment, both merged into one proposal and became the work that I am now carrying out full time.

Work that feels like a river - its source being mine and my families experiences of social housing processes in Manchester at the hands of gentrification, along with a lifelong love of rivers and the earth, of sound, image, poetry, and history that often falls between the margins; usually told in retrospect through someone else’s words.

On arriving at the RGS last night I refrained from telling myself this place is too fancy for me. Instead I say that I belong here as much as the next. By the end of the night I have exchanged details with the stranger to my right and the stranger to my left holds my hands, looks into my eyes and wishes me luck. I somehow have both names etched in my mind. There is much to say about the talk and about these interactions. I later wish to myself that each of my encounters with strangers and non-strangers are as gentle and nurturing. That only softness, openness and support exists in my life and in all of my interactions, in all my collaborations.

‘Hope is a discipline’ says RM last night. I am deciding to crystallise my wishes into hope.

I am also deciding that I am presently in the body of the river, working with brilliant people and water whose life lives on through our creative encounters. The different elements of this work feels like tributaries and I am wondering if at some point it will feed a new river, move through an estuary and join forces with an ocean.

Writing Rivers

It is my pleasure to have an article published in Volume 4, Issue 1 of ‘A Row of Trees’. I had a wonderful time developing work as part of Sound Diaries Open Call - encouraged endlessly by the brilliant curatorial team at The Sonic Art Research Unit within Oxford Brookes University.

Introduction to research/er

Hello!

My name is Fiona Sinéad Brehony, and I am an artist and writer, working within spaces between Geography, documentary film, sound art and performance. I am currently working on a project that investigates possibilities of rivers as Cultural Heritage, with a specific focus on the socio-material history of River Irk in Manchester.

My research project is using participatory documentary filmmaking practices and Socially Engaged Art as a way to examine a relationship between Regeneration, Environmental River History, and Industrial Heritage in Manchester in the years between 1500 and 2026 – the point at which this study ends. It seeks to draw together these three elements, to establish a tripartite relationship in relation to ways people have experienced this area of Manchester, past and present. The time frame chosen for this study is significant in itself, as it spans pre-industrialisation, industrialisation, and post-industrialisation. The River Irk is a manufacturing hub of industrial Britain and the study takes place in an area beside the river that is currently undergoing a colossal transformation.

This research will contribute new knowledge to Environmental River History scholarship.

For this section of the research, I am drawing on Tyne after Tyne: An Environmental History of a River’s Battle for Protection, 1529-2015, by environmental historian Leona Skelton (2017). Skelton ‘offers a template for a future body of work that dislodges the Thames as the river of choice in British environmental history’, and I would like to join her – establishing the River Irk as another ‘river of choice’. I will be using Skelton’s research along with other river history literature (Peter Coates, Stefania Barca, and Richard White) as a guide to develop a practical framework for how I am approaching this research and adds the River Irk as an option of British environmental history. My aim is to add to environmental history works that ‘rightly obfuscate and complicate the artificial boundary that many people draw between the human and the natural’, demonstrating the historical magnitude of the shifting styles of these connections over time. I will be contributing new knowledge to this field using documentary filmmaking practices and creative engagement with river heritage. My aim is to use these methods to investigate the interaction between human and River, thus developing a socio-material history of the River Irk.

Environmental River Historians have studied the tangible material flows of rivers using intangible evidence such as oral histories and archive records as a way to (re)construct the past, make sense of the present and to (re)imagine possibilities for future rivers. My work aims to expand these studies by looking at material flows of the River Irk that no longer exist, establishing documentary filmmaking as a method in this field.

Documenting advertised Riverside apartments in the centre of Manchester, overlooking a river that is visibly in need of protection, is a vital part of this research. For this, I am intervening in scholarship relating to regeneration beside rivers and industrial heritage, questioning: to what extent does a river and its surroundings make a new building appealing, regardless of current sanitation levels?

My hope is that by engaging a wide community of residents, employees, and members of the public in the history and heritage of the River Irk, new insight of socio-material histories of the river will be revealed.

Why this area of research?

(In a nutshell) : I grew up in Wythenshawe, Manchester, where members of my family still reside. It was and is a Council Estate where many people thrive, some struggle, and others find pockets of imagination to hide inside before reaching an age of independence. I was not a happy young person, like a lot of people both from and not from a Council Estate. However, I found solace and freedom in creativity at my Grandmother’s house. This same Grandmother, who, at the age of 82 was handed a note from Manchester City Council informing her (side of the street) that they were bulldozing the prefabricated ‘social’ houses she and her family had lived in for almost 60 years (having moved into the new housing from Collyhurst in North Manchester, beside the river irk). By chance, my Grandmother moved over the road and watched as her home was demolished. A tremendous and exuberant writer (right up until her departure in 2016), she wrote a poetry collection entitled ‘The Flowering’ about finding light during immovable circumstances. This was and still is, to me, is a true act of resistance. Of working with creativity and natural environments to overcome an experience entrenched with sacrifice and loss. This experience was in 2010, and in 2019, I made a short film using an edited version of the poetry pamphlet to explore human experiences of regenerative urban processes. Following this, was a film about St Michael’s Flags and Angel Meadow Park, and a desire to work with ‘hidden’ histories of a rapidly evolving city, whilst also finding my place within it. Around this same time, I developed a four-week course on the topic of light where participants from any subject collaborated using creative methods to explore their own relationship to light. For two years after then, I worked on intangible heritage projects as a filmmaker and writer, that eventually resulted in the development of a project about tracing intangible heritage of the River Irk and its human and more than human inhabitants. As an adult, I am much more at peace and incredibly passionate about using collaborative and artistic methods to look at ways we can interact with the agency of natural and urban environments, as to liberate the past and present history of the spaces we inhabit.

A practice in paying attention.

Autumn is here again and I am using nature, again. As soothing balms for skin eyes and mind. I watch leaves clapping together move my body in rhythm. Discotheques everywhere. River rages behind with birds above producing a natural surround sound experience. Unwashed I am happy counting ripples in the water there must be millions in this river, the Goyt. I sometimes notice an arrogance in seeming-knowing. When something is to be enjoyed and something else documented for pleasure of sending to a sister in a far away land or using it to convey experiences of being with water and other natural friends at a later date. Nature has become my work lately and occasionally I worry it’s no longer home. When this happens I say no on weekdays, never not recognising my privilege, to spent minutes sometimes hours with it. Allowing it to run over me while I watch and listen. Sometimes wondering if I am paying enough attention before falling asleep beside trees or dipping my feet into soggy earth we’ve named dirt. I am finding the more I record on devices, the more I am imagining an experience of sitting on a bench listening to my environment being presented through speakers. There is a lesson here (somewhere) in longevity and trust. To record some things, to write about them, and to set a date months from now playing them back if I choose. The immediacy of everything needs to be addressed. The immediacy of everything but peace, that is.