Art Gym | Tate Liverpool | Liverpool (UK) | By Michael Gannon

If you find yourself in Liverpool anytime soon we'd highly recommend Circuit's Art Gym at the Tate Liverpool which launched on Monday 7th March, 2016. Curated by Tate Collective Liverpool and Turner Prize winners Assemble, Art Gym presents a three week programme of free, drop-in activities held within a new and specially designed space at Tate Liverpool.

Inspired by a traditional gym, Art Gym offers visitors of all ages and abilities the chance to devise a personal training programme, designed to learn new creative skills or develop existing ones. Substituting kettlebells and treadmills with a wide range of classes, lectures, workshops and art stations teaching everything from traditional craft work to digital art production.

Free and with no joining fee required, Art Gym is running at Tate Liverpool until 31st March, 2016. For further information and schedules visit the Tate Liverpool website.

The Old Blind School | Liverpool (UK) | By Emma Harrison

Established in 1791, the Liverpool School for the Blind was co-founded by local poet, writer and abolitionist Edward Rushton. First opened in two houses on Commutation Row, the school moved to its Hardman Street location in the late 1890s before closing in 1957. After the school shut its doors, the site housed Liverpool’s City Police Headquarters, the Merseyside Trade Union, Community and Unemployed Resource Centre and in the mid 80s, independent music venue, The Picket. With a colourful history, the building has retained the marks left by each occupant and what stands today is a blend of Neoclassical and Art Deco design flecked with crumbling trade union signage and Socialist Realist murals.

The building, designed by architect Arthur Hill Holm in 1851 and extended by Anthony Minoprio and Hugh Greville Spencely in 1932, presents a Neoclassical and Art Deco exterior. The once white Portland stone extension, charred with a over a century of city soot, sits on the site of John Foster Junior's now demolished Greek Doric chapel and boasts bas-relief panels depicting the work of the school. Opposite John Cunningham’s celebrated Grade II listed Liverpool Philharmonic Hall on Hope Street, if you look hard enough you can find a faded inscription etched into the Old Blind School façade that reads, ‘Christ heals the blind, for who denies that in the mind dwell truer sight and clearer light than in the eyes?’.

Inside, four rear wings sprout from a central rotunda and the original cast iron balustrade and tiled flooring remain intact, however the most arresting interior feature is Michael Jones’s 1986 mural that decorates the concrete dome (pictured). Son of trade unionist Jack Jones, the mural depicts Socialist Realist images relating to the Merseyside Trade Union, including marching Liverpool workers, the Halewood car factory, a dock crane, ship yards and a central image of Edward Rushton, co-founder of the school. 

The peeling paintwork now sits alongside fresh coats as the site plays host to the 2014 Liverpool Biennial, A Needle Walks into a Haystack. Otherwise largely unused, rumours of development have yet to materialise.

The Old Blind School will remain open until 26^th October as part of the Liverpool Biennial .

Tusk Journal Vol. 0 | Manchester (UK)

The latest in printed matter we have taken note of and look forward to reading is the debut publication by Manchester based Tusk Journal. Initially only to be found online, Tusk Journal who celebrate the best of a contemporary independent culture in the North West of England can now be enjoyed in printed form.

The highly commended free publication which can be found in Liverpool and Manchester’s finest cafes, art houses and clothing shops is occupies on-the-pulse articles and interviews with some of Tusk Journals “favourite movers and shakers in the North West”. Covering an array of cultural content, Volume 0 includes British alternative rock/pop band Everything Everything, Manchester’s The Warehouse Project and Channel 4’s ‘Utopia’.