ASHTON – UNDER – LYNE. Art In The Street.

ASHTON under LYNE. The Miner’s statue on a corner of Market Street. This one frightened the whathoosis out of me the first time I came across it. Not often you see someone, or something, coming out of the pavement like that. It must make life interesting for anyone making their unsteady way home after an evening of convivial company and drink.

I’ve mixed feelings about public art, not against it as such but some of it leaves me feeling a bit underwhelmed. I suppose it depends on what you see as public art. Many a town centre of a certain age has it’s stone flocks of statues to the great and good, local worthies and benefactors. Or commemorations of local events. At least they look like something. I’m not that inspired by a collection of twisted steel plates on a street corner that are supposed to be the fires of local aspiration, or a wall of brightly coloured tiles under a bridge. Still trying to work that last one out.

I’m by no means a fuddy duddy about these things as one instillation I do like is a sequence of statues through the town centre of Ashton under Lyne, a market town to the east of Manchester. The statues are in the form of a gang of street urchins and a miner.

They’re inventive and cheeky, not in the same vein as grand Victorian celebratory but a bit of fun. There are more of them dotted around the town so I will have to go a hunting the next time I’m in the area.

ASHTON under Lyne. Street urchin statue. Oddly I can’t find a great deal of information about the statues, or perhaps I’m not looking at the right “Statue For You” websites.

ASHTON under Lyne. At least they look like something, not just an ethereal concept of an indefinable end point still in progress. I can work at understanding an impressionist artwork but some civic art, not all of course, falls into the trap of being like something someone’e seen somewhere else once. There’s not always an obvious link to the town where it is. A little bit identikit anonymous.