This paper examines a single wall opposite Manchester City’s stadium as a contested site where football culture, menswear branding and working-class masculinity are continually rewritten. The gable end of the Maine Road Chippy has been repeatedly repainted by the club, brands and media companies with imagery drawn from terrace dress, local identity and the visual codes of the match-going crowd. While the chip shop remains an everyday business, its wall has become valuable as a surface for projecting authorised images of football culture. A sequence of rapidly overwritten murals, including Stone Island, C.P. Company and Lidl, renders the wall a kind of temporary monument: one that celebrates working-class identity only once it has been abstracted into image and redeployed as branded content. The paper draws a parallel with Rachel Whiteread’s House (1993), a temporary monument to a demolished working-class home, to argue that such spaces acquire cultural value only when overwritten, erased or aestheticised. |