by Bob Gaunt
The second of two entries to this blog in which writer and curator Bob Gaunt reflects on how his research into Michael Danyliw’s photographs of Brinksway, Stockport, has helped spark new conversations, public events and local interest in a lost working-class neighbourhood.
In my previous post for the Open University Design blog, I wrote about Michael Danyliw’s photographs of Brinksway, Stockport, and about the essay I published in the Open Arts Journal on memory, place and the creative life of a lost working-class neighbourhood. There I was mainly concerned with the photographs themselves: what they preserve, what they reveal about community, and how they help us think again about a place largely erased by redevelopment. I also noted the encouraging local response from Stockport Museum. Since then, however, the article has already led to some further very welcome developments.
On Friday 13 March 2026, I gave a very short talk at the WhatIf? Community Café in Stockport on the social and cultural importance of the Brinksway Sunday School, especially the Rose Queen fetes. I was pleased about that, because the café has become one of those present-day places where conversation, care and local curiosity come together. It felt right that Brinksway’s history should be discussed in that sort of setting rather than only in formal academic spaces. The photographs and memories connected with Brinksway belong in scholarly discussion, certainly, but they also belong in places where people meet, talk, remember and reflect together.
Then, from 23 to 29 March 2026, Michael Danyliw’s daughter, Marika Anders, and I curated a week-long exhibition at the Pop-Up Shop in the Merseyway Shopping Precinct in Stockport. We wanted it to be a friendly, welcoming event where people could come in, see the photographs and, I hoped, talk about what they remembered. Some visitors recognised themselves or members of their family. Others recognised streets, rituals or names that had almost slipped from view. The photographs were not simply being looked at; they were being reactivated in memory and conversation.
The Pop-Up Shop exhibition has far exceeded our expectations. On one recent day alone, attendance was about 250, counted with a hand clicker, and there have been busier days than that. But even those numbers do not quite capture what has been happening, because the exhibition has not simply been a matter of visitors coming in, looking and leaving. It has become a space of conversation, recognition and exchange. People have not only been talking to me about the photographs; they have been talking to one another, sometimes as strangers meeting for the first time through the memories the images have stirred.
That has made me think that the exhibition is not simply an outcome of the research. It has become part of the research itself.
One of the most striking things has been the range of people who have come through the door and the kinds of interest they have brought with them. I met a social anthropology PhD candidate looking for visual material relevant to her work, and I was able to give her a copy of my essay and my contact details so that we can talk further after the exhibition. I also gave copies to a woman who had just completed her MA studies in Museum Studies, to local college students, and to a BBC reporter who happened to be passing and wanted to know more about the story behind the photographs, she came back next day with talk of a short documentary TV programme. A woman from Stockport Museum came to see us already holding a copy of the essay. Encounters like these suggest that the photographs are beginning to circulate in ways I had not anticipated, across academic, curatorial and local community contexts at once.
When I wrote the Open Arts Journal article, I hoped to bring the Brinksway photographs to a wider audience. What has happened since publication — the talks at WhatIf?, the Pop-Up Shop exhibition, and the conversations they have generated — has shown me that the work can move quite quickly between academic research and local public life. The article has not remained fixed on the page. It has begun to move through the world, prompting responses and opening up new lines of thought.
The exhibition has also made me reflect on what it means to curate a show for the first time, more or less on my own, and with a decidedly DIY aesthetic. I had been slightly anxious about that. Yet nobody seems to mind. In fact, the informality may be part of what has made the space feel open and usable. People do not seem intimidated by it. They come in, they linger, they talk, they point things out, they tell stories, and sometimes they bring things with them.
That has led me to think more about relational art: about the idea that the meaning of an exhibition does not lie only in the objects on display, but in the relationships that form around them. At Pop-Up Shop, spectators have held a central position in that relationship with the photographs and with me as curator. The exhibition has not been complete without them. Its real life has emerged in the conversations it has generated: between me and visitors, certainly, but also between visitors themselves. There have been moments when one person’s recognition of a street, face or occasion has prompted another person’s memory, and then another’s. The photographs have operated less as static images than as social catalysts.
This seems especially appropriate given the subject matter. Danyliw’s photographs are rooted in family life, neighbourhood intimacy and the shared customs of Brinksway. The exhibition has sharpened my sense that family photography and family albums do not belong only to private households. They can also speak to wider forms of belonging. In this context, neighbourhoods begin to look a little like extended families, and museums a little like neighbourhood albums: places where lives are gathered, revisited and made available to collective recognition.
At times the visit to the exhibition has felt almost like a kind of pilgrimage, or an act of devotion. People have come not just to view the photographs but to seek something through them. Some have brought their own photographs, which we framed and put on the wall. Others have taken photographs away with them. The exhibition has therefore not simply displayed memory; it has invited participation in its making and remaking.
One moment in particular has stayed with me. Beryl Clayton, now aged 80, came into the exhibition and spotted a large portrait photograph of herself from about 60 years ago. It was an image she had never seen before because, as far as we can work out, Michael Danyliw had never printed the negative. Suddenly there she was, confronted with a younger self that had in some sense existed all along, but without her knowledge. We were able to give her a copy. It was an extraordinary moment, and it has left me thinking about photography in terms of recovery and even resurrection. An old negative, left dormant for decades, can return a person to herself. That is not just documentation. It is a kind of reappearance.
This question of spectatorship also reminds me of the debates around the Manchester Art Gallery exhibition of the 1960s street photographer Shirley Baker a few years ago. Some reviewers were critical of it as ‘poverty porn’. But when I saw it, that was not what I found happening in the gallery. I saw spectators relating to the photographs, interacting with one another, laughing, recognising details, taking pleasure in the vitality of the scenes before them. That memory has come back to me during Pop-Up Shop. The ethics of displaying working-class life are always important and should never be treated lightly. But the response of viewers matters too, especially when they are not consuming the images from a distance but entering into relation with them, sometimes through their own lived experience.
One conversation from the exhibition brought that home with particular force. An older woman came in looking rather hesitant. At one point she took my hand and began to tell me about her childhood experience. She wanted someone who might understand to listen. She said she had come in because she saw the photographs in the window. After speaking, she thanked me and went on her way.
That encounter has stayed with me because it brought together so many of the things I have been trying to think about: memory, class, recognition, vulnerability, and the ways photographs can create a space in which difficult histories can be spoken. Museums and exhibitions are often discussed in terms of preservation and interpretation, but I find myself thinking increasingly about sanctuary and restoration. A modest exhibition space can sometimes offer a temporary shelter for memory, and perhaps also for feeling.
All this makes me think that there is a further stage to this work. The first phase was the recovery and interpretation of Danyliw’s archive, culminating in the article for the Open Arts Journal. The next has been its public afterlife in Stockport itself: first through talks and local discussion, then through the Pop-Up Shop exhibition, and through the many conversations, memories and new contacts that followed. What may come next is new research based on those interactions: on what people have remembered, brought forward, recognised and shared. There is now the possibility of gathering oral histories, tracing responses to the exhibition, documenting the social life of the archive in the present, and thinking more systematically about how photographs move between private memory, public display and local cultural identity.
The proposed display at Stockport Museum may become an important next step in that process. If the Pop-Up Shop exhibition has shown how alive this material can be in direct public encounter, the museum display may help give that renewed interest a more lasting form. What began as an amateur photographer’s record of a neighbourhood under threat, and later became an academic essay, is now beginning to generate an expanded field of public memory, conversation and research.
That seems to me one of the most interesting things about this whole experience. It suggests that publication is not necessarily an endpoint. Research can continue to unfold after publication, especially when it enters into public circulation and begins to draw responses back towards itself. In this case, the Brinksway photographs are not only telling us something about the past. They are helping to create new social relations in the present.
Readers interested in the background to this project can find my earlier Design blog post, and my article, ‘Memory and place in the Brinksway photographs of Michael Danyliw’, in the Open Arts Journal. What the recent talks and the Pop-Up Shop exhibition have made clear to me is that the story does not end there. The archive is still working. The photographs are still making connections. And Brinksway, in that sense, is still unfolding.
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