On Sunday 18th June 2017, Manchester Friends of the Earth joined over 2,000 people taking part in the Manchester Day Parade. Keen to be creative and communicate an important message whilst fitting with the ‘Abracadabra’ magic theme of the year’s parade, we developed a magic Clean Air Machine.
At the front of our Bike Bloc were two large lorries bleaching fumes and pollutants. These were of course made from wood and cardboard and propelled by pedal-power by Mike and Phil. These were followed by the Pete-powered Clean Air Machine, sucking the dirty air and delivering pure, magically fresh bubbles and breezes behind to the mobile garden, thriving with wildlife and sunny, cheerful music from our pedal-powered sound system kept going by Graeme.
(For legal reasons we should probably mention that the function of the Clean Air Machine was largely symbolic and that actual solutions to air pollution tend to involved reducing car use and cleaning up the legal fleet – Ed).
Thanks to all those who helped us design and build the props and all those who came down on their bikes to take part. The weather was glorious so we were able to bring our clean air message to an audience of thousands.
Some photo highlights below. See more on our Flickr albums of our pre-parade preparation and the parade itself.
We’ve participated in Manchester Day Parade several times now: Going Dutch in 2014, Eureka in 2016 (Flickr album).
