Mono: Cultural

The New Adelphi building opened on the Salford University campus last week, the new home for it's media and arts students. It has a 350 capacity theatre, two large TV acting studios, , rehearsal studios, industry standard recording studios, amplified performance studios .... etc. And that is on top of the amazing facilities the University has at Media City.

And outside - this bizarre climbing wall sculpture, celebrating Friedrich Engels "magnificent beard". 

Radicalism has long been a thread running through Salford's local culture, and this sculpture has upset a few people. Partly because whilst living in Salford and Manchester Engel's beard was more Jonny Depp than Brian Blessed (that was for Engels later years).

Engels' Prussian father sent him to work in the family mill in Salford in 1842 - he hoped the experience would help tame the rebellious 22 year old. It did anything but. On the way Friedrich met Karl Marx. In Salford he took up with local girl Mary Burns, and they stayed together till her death in the 1860's - they never married, marriage being a bourgeois  institution. Returning to Prussia in 1844 he wrote "The Condition of the Working Class in England", and later wrote the "Communist Manifesto" with Marx, before funding him to write "Das Kapital" (which he edited after Marx's death). There is an apocryphal tale that Engels and Marx drank at the Crescent pub - although the notion that the ideas that shaped the 20th century were plotted over a pint or two in a pub on Salford Crescent sounds just a bit too Citizen Smith !