About


The Salford Restoration Office was a curatorial and educational agency I established with Lesley Young in 2006, to explore and critique the visual arts infrastructure of Manchester. Through the production of projects and exhibitions, The Salford Restoration Office allowed museums and galleries to analyse their particular position and history within the ecology of the city. We proposed that it should last for a maximum of four years, thereby offering a snapshot of how the infrastructure functioned at a particular point in time and how it could be utilised as a kind of institution. Its intention was to offer an alternative position to the artist-run gallery, proposing a different kind of spatial structure that artists or other producers could operate in, and appropriate for their own purposes.

Its office was at 142 Chapel Street, Salford, just across the border with Manchester, on the edge of the city centre. The office functioned primarily as a meeting place and a site of production, but was also used for discussion groups, gigs and once, on the occasion of its closing, for an exhibition. Included here is a selection of The Salford Restoration Office’s activities from the period it was publicly visible – October 2007 to January 2010.