For most of the last two centuries it has been an anniversary marked with little fanfare, if at all. But next August, 200 years after 18 people paid with their lives at a protest in Manchester demanding parliamentary democracy, the Peterloo massacre will finally be remembered with a new monument.
Designed by Turner prize-winner Jeremy Deller, the permanent memorial will be a six-foot “hill” constructed of concentric steps made from stone sourced from all regions of the UK and other parts of the former British empire.
Costing £1m, it will be 11.6 metres (38 feet) wide and will be installed outside the Manchester Central convention centre, just 100 metres from St Peter’s Fields, the site of the protest that gave the massacre its name.
The names of the towns and villages of the 60,000 protesters – along with the names of the 18 men, women and children who died – will be engraved on to the vertical faces of the steps around the memorial in positions that are accurate to their direction geographically. On the top will be compass points recalling other public uprisings in history: Tiananmen Square, Cairo’s Tahrir Square and Gdansk in Poland.
“I want to show that Peterloo didn’t mark an end to violent behaviour from the state,” explained Deller, who in 2001 received a commission to re-enact the Battle of Orgreave, a bloody confrontation between Yorkshire miners and police during the 1984-85 strike.
“It’s not going to be a memorial that people look at and admire, but a civil monument that people actually use. That seems to capture the egalitarian spirit of Peterloo itself,” he said as he unveiled the design in Manchester Central Library on Wednesday. “I want people to be able to sit on it and have their lunch.”
Deller plans to drill holes in the steps to act as banner holders for future protests, and is currently thinking of designing a handrail in the style of a piece of mill equipment to echo the working class roots of the protesters. Architects Caruso St John are helping turn his ideas into reality.
A three-day public consultation begins in the Central Library and online on Thursday, and initial feedback was good. “I think it’s lovely,” said Denise Richardson, whose great-great-great-great grandmother, Mary Fildes, was truncheoned by special constables at Peterloo when she refused to let go of the flag she was carrying. “The design of it takes me back to ancient burial sites in Scotland and Ireland.”
Richardson was one of 100 interested parties from the Peterloo Network invited to get a first glimpse of Deller’s design. One man voiced concerns the monument could be colonised by skateboarders. “If you do any public monument, anything public, you are going to have some use that you don’t necessarily want,” said Deller, adding that he thought the curved design would make skating quite difficult.
Deller was approached four years ago by Maria Balshaw, now director of the Tate galleries, who was then running Manchester’s Whitworth gallery and was the council’s cultural lead. The brief was vague, the budget generous. “They told me to tell the story and to try and avoid a figurative interpretation, which is perfect for me. I’m not a figurative artist. And also figurative sculpture can date quite easily and can become quite kitsch as well, so it’s good to avoid that in public sculpture,” Deller said.
Early plans to put the monument on the Peterloo site outside the Central Library, had to be shelved following a major expansion of Manchester’s tram network.
Though he was born in London and lives in the capital, Deller has worked in Greater Manchester for more than 20 years. In 1997 he commissioned a brass band in Stockport to play a set of acid house tracks for Acid Brass. Last year for What Is the City But the People? he set up a catwalk in central Manchester and invited some of the city’s most interesting characters to strut their stuff.
Next year a Peterloo festival will run from June to August, put on by Manchester Histories, which recently won a Heritage Lottery grant to put together a Peterloo education programme for schools in Greater Manchester. The film director Mike Leigh, whose re-enactment of the massacre is released on Friday, called for it to be taught to all children. All manner of memorials are expected, including a graphic novel, a brick-by-brick reconstruction of the battle in Lego and a street party at the Sir Ralph Abercromby pub, the only building remaining from the time of the massacre.
The Guardian, which was founded as a reaction to reporting of the Peterloo massacre, is a sponsor of the Peterloo festival
