Richard Hards: Strangeways at Moon Grove

The most significant object in Richard Hards’ exhibition at Moon Grove may no longer exist. On 1 April 1990, as several hundred prisoners gathered for Sunday service in the chapel at Strangeways, prisoner Paul Taylor grabbed the microphone and began delivering his own sermon, calling for resistance and reform. These were the opening moments of what became the longest prison riot in British history, and they were recorded by the chaplain Rev. Noel Proctor.

This audio recording, since ‘lost’ somewhere between the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice, is the absence around which Richard Hards builds this exhibition, following his doctoral research on the topic. A new sound work, heard in the living room of Moon Grove’s Georgian house, re-enacts the surviving transcript through the voices of a protesting prisoner, the chaplain, and prisoners shouting in the chapel.

Elsewhere, press photographs taken from outside the prison walls are enlarged until they dissolve into grain and dots. One captures Alan Lord, a prisoner who led negotiations from the roof, shouting through a loud hailer made from a makeshift cone. Lord is also the subject of a new moving-image work, Reasonable men might have acted likewise (2026), which takes a more balanced look at a man previously cast – by way of dramatic production – as a threatening figure in documentaries.

A commemorative badge from ‘Operation Bastille’, the police codename for the investigation, later found for sale online, points to a stranger afterlife of the protest: state violence recast as private memorabilia. Hards extends that argument to the present, referencing a property developer recently adopting the name ‘Strange Quarter’ for a large redevelopment north of Victoria Station – the Strangeways Protest now becoming useful to large commercial interests.

Freedom of information requests, transcripts, archives – Hards has worked through most of what survives from the protest. The original recording is not among it. But he’s still looking.