This interactive sound installation and SoundWalk, by artist Maya Chowdhry, invites you to listen in, as a conflict between the River Goyt and the forces that shape it reverberates through the vast network of tunnels hidden beneath Stockport’s streets.
Electric Echoes
Stockport Air Raid Shelters and town centre locations
19 February – 22 March 2026
Image credits: Branding designed by Zhen Yi Leong, and photographs courtesy of Stockport Heritage Trust and Science Museum Group Collection.
‘Electric Echoes’ explores the often overlooked and one-sided relationship between the River Goyt, the former Stockport Power Station site, and the town. For over 250 years this river has been central to Stockport’s industrial growth. More recently, the river supplied the power station through an underground network of tunnels drawing water to cool the machinery that generated electricity feeding homes and industry. While this infrastructure brought power and prosperity to Stockport, it also placed heavy demands on the river.
Sucked into tunnels, flushed back out at high temperatures, banks encased in concrete – the needs of the river, and its ecosystem, have been abused and neglected. Through a sonic excavation of the underground remains of the power station and the life of the river, Maya invites us to listen with her as the river speaks back.
Drawing on ideas of decolonial cleaning – practices of care, repair and re-attunement – the sound installation and SoundWalk are a means to listen to the echoes of the power station and the voices of the river, including the lives it has sustained through eons. Doing so, Maya suggests, is the first step in reimagining how we might reattune to and care for the River Goyt.
This sonic argument unfolds across two sites. At the first, located in the Air Raid shelters, you are invited to activate the network of industrial pipes and listen to echoes of Stockport’s power station dominate the airwaves. At the second site, a SoundWalk that follows the flow of the river and tunnels, the River Goyt raises its voice and has its chance to speak back.
Set within the underground spaces of Stockport Air Raid Shelter, the sound sculpture channels the electric pulse of the former power station. The currents form a score of an industrial past that has never properly been “cleaned up” and still resonates today through the course of the river and the hidden underground tunnels that fed the power station.
Featuring six touch-activated copper trumpets, their stems shaped to represent the network of tunnels, each uncovers a chapter in the turbulent relationship between the power station and the River Goyt.
The sound installation will be on display at the Air Raid Shelter 19 February – 22 March, 2026. Admission is FREE, with advanced booking required. Click the button below to book your time slot.
Created in collaboration with the local communities of Culture Bridge and the Hong Kong Fellowship, the SoundWalk is a sonic excavation of the river and forces that shape its contemporary form. Listen in as the river guides along its course, through the town’s post-industrial edges, the path of the tunnels, and the site of the former Stockport Power Station where the river and the town meet.
Using your mobile phone and the Echoes app, you’ll experience site specific sound compositions created in response to the unique history of each location – sonic textures of industrial drones, electrical surges, reverberations of underground tunnels, and the discordant rhythms of the river as it was heated and contracted.
Enjoy the Electric Echoes SoundWalk at your own pace, simply download the Echoes app HERE and the PDF map below to get started.
* We recommend using headphones to experience the SoundWalk in the highest quality.
Image courtesy of Stockport Heritage Trust, photographer unknown
“Electric Echoes tells a story of currents: river and electricity, and how human and more-than-human lives are entangled with these through the currency of living. To understand the former site of the Stockport Power Station I enacted a sonic excavation and cleaning by using recording devices beyond ordinary microphones. Decolonial listening requires ears and minds to listen beyond the ken, listen into the layers of time, place and the more-than human. In doing this I wanted audiences to imagine that they are participating in, and listening to, a decolonial cleaning – hearing sounds that signify the care, repair and eco attunement that is required to undertake this process.”
The sound installation and the SoundWalk has been composed by artist Maya Chowdhry and includes sonic excavations of the river and its course undertaken by local communities of Culture Bridge and the Hong Kong Fellowship.
Over several months, Maya worked with local communities using a range of recording devices, including hydrophones, photon smashers, and other electronic devices, to tune into the sounds of the former Stockport Power Station site and river. Together, participants took part in workshops including soundwalking, field recording, and biodata sonification; transforming the elements around them – light, water, earth, and air – into sound. This process helped Maya develop the soundwalk.
A huge thank you to all the participants who took part in this project, and to Stockroom for providing a space for the workshops.
Images from Maya’s Decolonial Cleaning sound recording workshops with members of the Culture Bridge and The Hong Kong Fellowship, Stockport
This programme of work forms part of the Stockport Creative Campus initiative. Funded primarily by DCMS via Arts Council England’s Cultural Development Fund (CDF), Stockport Creative Campus aims to make Stockport a centre for creativity and digital innovation in the North.
Special thanks to the Hong Kong Fellowship and Culture Bridge in Stockport for their contribution to this project, and to the wider creative team: sculptural fabrication sound designer Linda Devo, coder Billy Payne, mastering engineer Caro C, and lighting consultant Richard Owens; as well as Greenbrook Media videographer Simon Stec, author of Subterranean Stockport Emma Brown, and Stockport Heritage Trust for granting access to their archives and use of images.
