‘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.