Back Then.

Back then the city was different; there was a market here and every morning you could buy fruit and veg for the kitchen, and flowers for the kitchen table. 

 

People still lived in the streets behind the Opera House, though they never went; the prices were too high, they didn’t understand it and they needed what money they had for the fruit and veg. 

 

If there was any money left over at the end of the week, they bought flowers.

 

You can’t go wrong with flowers.

 

And the people who lived in the flats back behind The Opera House had children who grew up and sometimes found work in the market, or stole what they needed to survive.

 

Very rarely, one would grow up and work on stage in the Opera House.

 

There was a police station on the corner, across from the Opera house, but none of the kids ever went to work there, though some of them ended up there overnight.

 

On the street below the flats there used to be a community art gallery; they hosted painting events for the kids and invited the parents to to see the results that were hung on the wall.

 

Not a lot of people knew about the gallery.

 

The director of the gallery was a woman who believed that art shouldn’t be in The Opera House, but free for everyone and available to the community in their own gallery.

 

Which was in fact a former betting shop.

 

One week she invited Alfonso to do an installation in the gallery; Alfonso was an Italian Artist she had met at a festival in Rome the previous summer.

 

Alfonso’s idea was to build a small wall around himself in the centre of the gallery, leaving a glass window on one side, and then to dig down through the floor and into the foundations. He set up a microphone so that anyone could visit, at any time of day or night, and talk to him; sometimes he would be in the tunnel, sometimes you could see him as he came out of the tunnel and heaped up rubble in his walled up space.

 

He spoke English with a very unusual accent, but the local kids fell in love with him and would often visit after midnight to see how he was getting on.

 

A local listings magazine picked up on the event and announced that at the weekend Alfonso would complete his event by tunnelling out into the basement of the neighbouring newsagent’s.

 

On the Sunday afternoon a small crowd of locals gathered in the basement and listened to the mechanical drilling on the other side of the wall; someone’s mother had made tea and cake and there was excited laughter and conversation.

 

It was about 6 in the evening  when suddenly a crack appeared in the wall, plaster and brick fell to the floor and Alfonso, covered in dust and looking manically tired stepped out of the wall.

 

Everyone present cheered and clapped and then someone passed him a cup of tea.

 

But this was a long time ago; shortly after the street was bulldozed and the community was moved out.

 

Today a shop selling expensive Japanese shoes to tourists stands on the site.