I was encouraged to move onto the Bentley House estate, more commonly known as the ‘Redbricks’, back in 1999, in order to help with the Redbricks Online community internet project that was then being rolled out. Back in the day, a visionary called Nigel Stewart had a plan to provide Manchester with high broad band internet, using short wave radio. Although he was unable to make it happen back then, MDDA, with a little help from the EU, have plans to do something very similar now, a decade later. Here is the story ..

In ‘99 some friends of mine purchased a ‘leased line’ from BT, and installed a server in a flat on the Redbricks estate. Leased lines were a pre-runner to broadband, providing a 24/7 connection, but costing a small fortune, for a comparatively small bandwidth, relative to a modern home broadband connection. Still, the plan was that by squeezing 30+ flats through a single line, it could be made cost effective. So recycled PCs were bodged together, and flats across the estate were networked with 100s of meters of blagged ethernet cable, and servers hacked up with Linux free software ...

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This is a short Voxpox made by residents of the Redbricks housing estate, as part of their successful bid to Groundwork Northwest's Great Estates Innovation fund. This unique one-off grant for £40K has been matched pound for pound by the estate's new landlord, City South, making a total grant of £80K. The idea of the grant is to develop Redbicks as a 'Green Zone', and they will be building on much of the innovation that has taken place within this innovative place over the last 10 years.

Art by Adele Myers (low res version).