Harcourt Road in Broomhill, Sheffield, is a quiet residential road. Travel from the top of the street and you’ll gently descend towards Crookes Valley Park, an undulating mound of green surrounding Sheffield’s Great Old Dam. The road is replete with hawthorn bushes and broadleaved trees, a leafy stretch home to a row of red brick Victorian terraced houses. In one window, a meticulously cut-out paper sign reads WELCOME. In another, a series of burgeoning houseplants battle for light behind thin veils of attic curtain. Further down, a red book-sharing box peeps out between adjoining front gardens. On a weekend in late September, residents pin their laundry on clotheslines in their sunny front gardens as students sleepily open their doors to Deliveroo orders.
Take Harcourt Road again, and this time a different road emerges. In Hong Kong, a road of the same name is a 780 metre major highway in the district of Admiralty. It is a vital route connecting central businesses to eastern districts, and in 2014 was the focal point for protests and demonstrations – most famously the Umbrella Movement. This protest was characterised by a 79-day peaceful occupation demanding democratic reform. When Hong Kong was handed back to China from British rule in 1997, it was granted a high degree of autonomy under the framework of ‘One Country, Two Systems’. The agreement allowed the city to keep its own legal system and civil liberties – a condition violated by Beijing’s 2014 decision to limit electoral reforms in Hong Kong, denying universal suffrage for the election of the Chief Executive. The demonstrations in 2014, and then again in 2019-2020 in opposition to an extradition bill – a law that would have allowed for the extradition of individuals from Hong Kong to mainland China – saw up to two million participants.
What’s in a name? Clara Cheung and Gum Cheng, an artistic duo known as C&G Artpartment, stage an exhibition at Bloc Projects that explores the diverging and converging histories of the two Harcourt Roads in Sheffield and Hong Kong, part of an expansive research and community engagement project that has been running for two years. In that time, Cheung and Cheng have collected and examined oral histories and artefacts from the Crookes and Broomhill neighbourhoods of Sheffield, presenting them here alongside stories from Hong Kong and its wider diasporic communities. The focus is on specificity – community activism as a way of addressing localised issues and fostering collective action. Part of this manifests through C&G’s Mobile Museum, an e-bike with parasol and fold-out box of exhibits attached, which throughout the summer has been stationed between Weston Park, Crookes Valley Park and Harcourt Road itself. On the final day of its pre-exhibition journey, I find the bike-museum on The Moor in central Sheffield, nestled between Café Nero and a closed pretzel shop. On display is a range of photobooks, neighbourhood plans and activity sheets.
In one leather-bound album, I find satellite images of Harcourt Road in Sheffield and photos of street parties. In the photos, children chalk colourful patterns on pavements as families and students coalesce around picnic tables laden with Union-Jack coloured cakes. ‘The goal is to reach out to the students, integrate them into the community,’ Gum explains to me. He nods towards the recent history of the street being dominated by student housing, prompted in the 1970s when the University began to buy property locally as a way to expand its campus. By the 1990s, with the rise of buy-to-let landlords, the majority of the road’s residents were students, pricing out and reducing the availability of housing for long-term residents and families. A milestone came in 2000 however, when the University decided to sell all its houses in Crookesmoor. The local community advocated for the exclusion of landlords in the sale process and managed to secure a permanent covenant on the properties. This enabled over twenty families to buy homes, ensuring that the neighbourhood retained its residential character while also fostering a stronger sense of community ownership. In the last image of the photobook, a row of glossy blue bin bags bearing the contents of a street clean sit on the pavement. Gum smiles, ‘It’s also so the students remember to clean up after themselves.’
Another album bears Google Map images of a hard-fought-for pedestrian crossing near Sheffield’s Harcourt Road, affectionately referred to by residents as ‘Penny’s Crossing’ after one of its most tireless advocates. C&G collates agendas, appendices and council reports, board notes and minutes from over a decade of toing-and-froing, telling the story of non-stop advocation before final, overdue approval by Sheffield City Council in 2017.
Also on display in the Mobile Museum is an album of Harcourt Road, Hong Kong. In one set of images we see a series of Google Map street views taken from 2009 to 2024. Each image depicts a highway, a glossy grey image populated with red taxis – apart from an image taken during the protests of 2014, which shows a series of protesters’ tents alongside food and medical provision, all set up in the middle of the road.
Gum has also created a set of paintings that recreate his WhatsApp chats during the 2019 protests. The oil-painted screenshots render messages of solidarity in addition to photographs capturing the mass demonstrations. Chalky black figures march together, stringing banners over footbridges, watching as helicopters loom above. These are startling and meticulous pictures – Gum could have used screenshots from his phone but instead chooses to depict them in paint, situating us in a world that is coded and buffered, that is conscious of acts of surveillance in light of the National Security Law.
Cheung and Cheng’s Museum reads like a scrapbook, an assemblage of data, marrying together found texts and photographs along with some slightly more unexpected items. One such addition is a jar with a label that reads, ‘Harcourt Hole meets Tennessee Blackberry Jam’. The recipe was submitted by one of the street’s residents, requiring berries from Harcourt Hole – an undeveloped plot of land that is currently an urban forest. And yet, if the jam feels like an incongruous appearance, it signifies a deeper tension between two narratives. It feels strange to think about foraging for ingredients, or to see photographs of street parties, alongside texts about and evidence of Hong Kong’s fight for freedom. This tethering together is, at times, jarring and uneasy. There is something we can recognise in the erosion of judicial independence and suppression of political expression – for example in relation to the UK’s own Criminal Justice Bill and Public Order Act of 2023 that saw the increased powers for police and local authorities toward protest activity – but the stakes are markedly different. The repercussions are not the same; we do not run the same risks of arbitrary detention. I am reminded of Hong Kong After Hong Kong, a photobook by Wong Chung Wai in which the photographer documents being forced to leave his home following the introduction of the national security law. His images tell a farewell story, documenting a city he loves but one he must say goodbye to. Empty apartment blocks, deserted warehouses and drained swimming pools dominate as the artist asks, ‘What do you want to stay with you if you are leaving a place?’
At the launch event at Bloc Projects, C&G attempt to answer this question. They choose to put value in community, in organised work and oral history. A series of performances and presentations are introduced by the artists and Bloc Projects Co-Director Sunshine Wong, ranging from a historical presentation of the ‘Occupy Central with Love and Peace’ movement to a protest ballad by Hui Lai Ming, as well as a recital by Juliana Day and Manon McCoy. Day and McCoy play ‘Glory to Hong Kong’ on the harp and Irish whistle, an anthem currently banned by the Hong Kong Chinese Communist Party government. Currently, music distributors refuse to put the song on their streaming platforms; the Hong Kong high court rules it as a ‘weapon’ that could trigger protests. Day and McCoy’s live rendition works around the restriction, much like Gum’s paintings of his WhatsApp chats. The immediacy of activism succeeds. We realise it is not the physical thing that matters but our memory of it – the weight of showing up and bearing witness to protest.
Having reached the end of its travels, the Mobile Museum is now stationed at the Bloc Projects site. It is accompanied in the gallery space with simultaneous timelines of the two Harcourt Roads, stretching from the founding of Hong Kong as a British colony in 1841 to the present day. Viewers move between parallel histories, where the intention is, perhaps, not to compare but to contextualise two histories irrevocably bound up with one another. In 1984, we learn that Margaret Thatcher and Zhao Ziyang signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration in Beijing. In 1997, the British government agreed to hand Hong Kong over to the People’s Republic of China. The citizens of Hong Kong, however, were never formally invited to take part in the discussions. Alongside this, the exhibition describes Thatcher’s Poll Tax, a system of local taxation in the UK where each taxpayer was charged the same fixed sum. The tax disproportionately impacted vulnerable groups, including the elderly, unemployed, and those on fixed incomes. From 1987-1992 we see that Harcourt Road established an Anti-Poll Tax Group in response.
Strung from the ceiling are tapestries that read ‘Towards a Common Struggle?’ and ‘Striking a Common Balance?’. On the floor, a projected aerial image places the two Harcourt Roads side by side, grey asphalt blending into blurred green. In Immortality, Milan Kundera writes, ‘We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it.’ Here, C&G point to an idleness in naming, as they exact a reflection on the Harcourt name’s colonial origins. The Sheffield street is named after Sir William George Granville Venables Harcourt, whose son the First Viscount Harcourt (1863-1922) was a Secretary of State for the Colonies, going on to found a town in Nigeria – Port Harcourt – named after himself. The Hong Kong road, meanwhile, is named after Cecil Clement Harcourt, a prominent British naval officer who, following Japan’s surrender in 1945, led the British fleet into Victoria Harbour to retake control of the colony from Japan. The two Harcourts, though unrelated, are both exemplars of a turbulent and forceful imperial administration, exacting control and shaping landscapes in the name of empire.
In one corner of the exhibition, an iconic yellow umbrella such as those present during the Umbrella Movement blooms from the wall. I’m reminded of a line from Kit Fan’s ‘How to be a Fern’ that reads, ‘The city I loved whose name I’ve erased / returns between me and the glass / as the thunder bends like saxophones / buried inside one of Keats’ urns’. C&G present an exhibition that bends and moves between places. To some extent we’re given a story of diaspora in a Western-shaped vessel. Between the story of these two streets, however, is a focus on a micro-history – that is, the individual works of community engagement that constitute a movement. We are invited to reflect on the boundaries between displacement and belonging. At the same time that Hong Kong was handed over to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, the campaign for the pedestrian crossings on Crookesmoor and Barber Road began. These two events can exist in the same space: we can hold both in our mind as we demand a future that recognises protest as a right, as a realisation of self-determination.
Chloe Elliott is a writer and poet based in York.
C & G Artpartment: Harcourt Road Exhibition is on at Bloc Projects, Sheffield, 28 September – 9 November 2024. The exhibition is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
This review is supported by Bloc Projects.
Published 25.10.2024 by Benjamin Barra in Reviews
2,056 words