The Drake Street Observatory is an internet project by artist Clive Gillman.

The project began in June 2001 and exists as a website and a number of access computers on Drake Street itself. The project is due to run until April 2002, with images and texts being added continuously during the life of the project.

The project features images and texts from a street undergoing regeneration in Rochdale in Lancashire, England.

If you live or work in Drake Street and would like to take part in the project or would like to find out more about the Drake Street Observatory please contact Clive Gillman at clive@clivegillman.net.

Education Projects

(work from these projects will be featured on the site soon)

The Bolton, Bury and Rochdale Artists in Schools Agency is an organisation that works in schools to enhance pupils’ experience of learning through the involvement of artists - musicians, dancers, drama practitioners, visual artists and writers. – The Agency also works in other places where learning takes place within the boroughs of Bolton, Bury and Rochdale.

The Drake Street Observatory is the first of a series of temporary public art works commissioned as part of the Revitalising inner Rochdale SRB programme. The Observatory is an arts project that offers a learning and participatory opportunity for people of all ages. In collaboration with Artists in Schools, the project specifically involved two schools as part of its education activity – Heybrook Primary School and Falinge Park High School working with artists Isabella Lockett and Howard Fisher.

The Artists in Schools Agency is currently developing ways in which Citizenship, a new area of the school curriculum can be explored through the arts. Many of the areas of Citizenship, such as sense of self and the relationship between an individual and the community, are issues that are addressed by public art work within the Revitalising inner Rochdale SRB programme. This project is the first of many to come over the next few years that will provide an opportunity to explore aspects of the Citizenship curriculum and to develop an understanding of public art – What is its purpose? Who is it for? How do people respond?

Isabella Lockett and Howard Fisher collaborated with pupils and teachers to investigate these issues through creative activity that reflected Clive Gillman’s work on the Drake Street Observatory in terms of the process – interviewing and documenting; the media – digital imagery and text; the content – reflections on and responses to a particular place.

The air of this place is very good, the winds which chiefly blow here, come from the west and south west, and are often attended with rain, for sweeping in those directions over a large tract of the sea and bringing with them much vapour, they meet with little to obstruct them in their course, till they come to the high chain of hills, which not being able to surmount, the greatest part in that case falls in Lancashire, at other times it is forced over, when the electric fire with which the clouds are charged, being strongly attracted by these mountains, heavy showers of course succeed. In these high lands are more thunder and lightning than in low flat countries, which was remarked by the ancients as a general fact, though they knew not the philosophy thereof. The winds which blow from the east are not so apt to bring rain with them as the above, however it sometimes happens that what rain they do bring, continues to fall for two or three days together, which may be owing to the currents of air being weakened in their long passage, that they cannot easily drive the vapour over such high lands as part Lancashire form Yorkshire; this causes a kind of stagnation till the mass of condensed vapour is discharged, or a current sets in from the west strong enough to drive it back.
There is but little level ground in all this parish, so that the rain which falls here soon runs off, and in consequence the country in general is clean and dry ; a circumstance which contributes both to the health and ease of the inhabitants, for there are no standing pools to emit their noxious vapours, and the roads are travelled with tolerable satisfaction, not withstanding the unevenness of them.

Pp28-29 History and description of the Town & Parish of Rochdale by James Butterworth 1820