Living in Manchester

It was while I was living in the centre of Manchester and teaching at the University that I realised that the way we perceive urban space is incomplete. Walking in this city was a perplexing experience. Within a one-mile radius of my flat I crossed a diverse range of urban zones. Going to the University involved heading down Whitworth Street where I would immediately pass by my local branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland and the Grand Casino. The former textile display rooms and offices of Lancaster and Asia House, now converted to Housing Association flats, were flanked by the Palazzo-styled Refuge Assurance Building – which had been converted to an opulent hotel. At the corner of Whitworth and Oxford was the Cornerhouse – the only contemporary art gallery and cinema complex. Turning left up Oxford Road there was the Theatrehouse and the BBC of the North, followed by the British Computer Centre, Manchester Metropolitan University and The Royal College of Music. Where the Manchester Museum arched over Coupland Street I would turn for my office. Opposite the University was the Manchester Royal Infirmary and beside it the Whitworth Gallery and Park.

Amongst these bastions of Victorian civic pride were numerous shops – Patel’s newsagency, the Student Travel Association, the pimple-popping Pyramid Pizzas, the anaemic Seventh Day Vegetarian Cafe, and the ubiquitous SPA, in which over ninety per cent of the shop floor was given to soft-porn magazines, chips, chocolates and beer, thereby successfully reducing the idea of a cornershop to the same level of nutrition as McDonalds. The ritual of takeaway food, which came with the Great Industrial Revolution of the North, is imprinted nightly on the already greasy, vomit-stained and littered pavements.

Behind and between these buildings large tracts of land, to which no specific function could be attributed, lay empty. This vacant land seemed to echo the other forms of waste and decline in the city. The countless warehouses which were abandoned long ago. The strips of desolation under the pillars of the recent motorway overpass. The blank entrances before the vault-like modernist towers. I was told that this empty land was where the workers from the textile mills once lived. The infamous back-to-back terraces may have been ‘cleared‘ by the 1960s, but well into the 1990s the space was far from being ‘regenerated’. Between the already dilapidated tower-block apartments and the University there were a number of grassy fields. Students crossed them regularly. This use of the fields as a short-cut, a daily practice which had left well-trodden earthen paths which ran perpendicular to the pavements, was the only sign of energy in a space that was actually in the centre of the city.

It is this juxtaposition between the monuments of a Victorian metropolis and a modern wasteland that provoked questions about the history of Manchester, and about the structure of cities in general. Where is the heart of a city? Is density and value exclusively linked to the centre? Spaces in cities are usually defined in negative or positive terms. There are ‘no-go’ zones and exclusive suburbs. There is the central business district and the sports complexes, the shopping malls and churches with public squares. These spaces have both a functional and a cultural value. People live and work in them. They are shaped to express aspirations and fulfil needs. This division and use of space is obvious in Manchester. However, there are significant spaces which neither express a cultural value nor are used for any commercial enterprise. I call them parafunctional spaces. They exist in all cities, sometimes on the periphery, in the gaps between railway tracks where weeds grow and rubbish blows, in the sites of abandoned factories where children dream.

I think it was Georg Simmel who wrote that the tram stop was the first public space in history where people gathered, waited together, and stared. ‘People had never been in the position of having to look at one another for long minutes, or even hours without speaking to one another.’ The anonymity of strangers and the blasé attitude towards otherness created a new urban form. However, even in these spaces of silence the modern subject was overwhelmed by signs. Advertisements were invented to capture attention from drifting during the moments of being in-between. One way of seeing how this project of modernity has reached its limits is to note where our consciousness can drift, when space no longer seeks to direct our actions towards a given goal. Here we wait. To return home. To arrive at work. For reality to begin. And yet in this waiting there is also the yearning for an elsewhere.

In Manchester the existence of parafunctional spaces does not follow the logic of centre and margin, whereby value and density is concentrated as it approaches the epicentre. There has always been a semi-chaotic process of dispersal and fragmentation in the history of this city. It is the classic example of ‘uneven development’. What is generally true everywhere is particularly evident here. The parafunctional spaces lurk and erupt unpredictably as you walk around the city-centre. Remnants of bomb sites from the German Blitz to the IRA, empty offices, colossal warehouses partly used as carparks, ‘slum clearances’ still waiting for regeneration – all lie cheek by jowl with the University, the BBC and the City Hall.

Parafunctional spaces are not just signs of economic decline. They are also the result of cultural collisions and tangential social ambitions. If architecture and urban planning are like languages which communicate belonging, then the parafunctional emerges when the languages multiply into a cacophony or are exhausted by their disconnection from lived experience. Parafunctional spaces are neither meaningful nor meaningless, we pass by, merely indifferent to, or ignorant of, the precise measure of their possibility. Just as contemporary architectural rhetoric is increasingly stripped of its original ideological impulse toward social redemption and becomes entrapped in a vacuous or defeated self-referentiality, so such spaces have already invited their own premature mortality. Intentions peel, lines blur, the lustre dulls as attention is trapped like the faded Coke cans caught in the protective grills of buildings that no closed-circuit camera can defend.

Manchester is a hard city. Of course, we all know about the darkness and the perpetual dampness which soaks into your bones. The old industrial city, bombed and abandoned but still waiting. So much hard music has come from here, but if you listen you will also hear the soft Irish ballads. The migrant’s cry for home. It is a difficult city to describe, not because it is contradictory and extreme, but because of the deep sense of tenderness that it provokes.

Most of my colleagues and, in general, acquaintances from the middle classes, thought that I came to Manchester to improve myself, but people from the working class just thought I was mad. ‘What are you doing here man? Why did you leave Australia?’ Manchester is hard on itself. It is not that people don’t care for the city. But there is the exhaustion of having to keep living with broken promises. ‘Oh, Manchester, so much to answer for.’ It is a hard city to love, and an impossible city to hate.

I have never felt so ambivalent about a place as I did about this city. There were times when I felt that I was too old for Manchester. The energy that drives the centre of its culture is ephemeral and confined. Fleeting and abrupt. It is presumed that at a clear point in your life the music ends. What then? You are meant to sober up and get a mortgage for a two-up two-down semi-detached house in the suburbs. What if children and a garden are not your reason for being in this city? Where do you go when you are not at work? You were left as a strange observer, watching from the balcony, those girls with impassive eyes dancing with boys with sullen bodies. The nights passed as an enigma but in the day, when Manchester United played, your whole soul was hung out in red. I adored Eric Cantona, with his indomitable straight back and the baffling poetry of his foreign tongue. All the Mancunian kids wore his red shirt with the number seven and the word DIEU printed on its back. I loved the faint whiff of cosmopolitanism that this team brought. I became desperate for every victory.

In this city I did not feel alone. There was a strong community of intellectuals and artists. But in a strange sense we were not provincial enough. Few of us were in any sense local. Our conversations were about the here and now, but their setting could almost have been anywhere else. Even our personal problems, the restructuring of universities, the rise in street crime, the hopeless state of hospitals and schools and the lateness of trains were no longer just civic matters. They now seemed beyond our control. Manchester is not a global city but it is subject to all the tensions of globalisation. We could see the injustices and the breakdowns happening right there before us, but just as bad was the hollowing realisation that the real decisions were made elsewhere.

Writing about it now reminds me of how often I felt like a ghost. For most of the time I was sure that people saw right through me. It was not that people deliberately tried to make me feel unwelcome. I never felt outright hostility. It was rather the feeling that they already sensed that I didn’t belong, I would never settle and even more fundamentally, that there was no necessity to my being there. There was never the feeling that the city needed a stranger like me, and that brought a peculiar kind of solitude. No matter how long I stayed, I would always be greeted with the question: ‘What are you doing here man?’

Perhaps that is the wrong question with which I should retrace my steps in Manchester. It is not whether a city needs strangers, but rather, what do strangers need from a city? Looking into the gaps within the city-centre is like opening up the disjointed fragments in a stranger’s narrative. Are those grassy fields like those anxious spaces between work and sleep? Away from home, and beyond the call of family obligations, there is a sense of time which both fills and threatens your individuality. A nostalgia for domesticity starts to rip into the dream of mobility. There is that hot memory of a time when a stroll in the cicada-filled night was also an epiphany of openness and stillness. My skin tingled under a light shirt. Here the shields never came down. After work, the silence of home awaited. Neither a greeting nor a curse. Just the tremulous pulse of disquiet. You knew that the momentum for the daily resurrection must come from within. And there was that tyrannical guard, always there reminding you of the distance not yet travelled, of the promises you pledged and which were unfulfilled. The gaps in a stranger’s narrative can be exposed in any city, but in Manchester the constant projection that occurs between the landscape of the soul and the architecture of the city is a cutting mirror. This is not a city that I would claim as mine, nor could I reject it, remain indifferent, aloof. I oscillated between fascination and repulsion, awe and sorrow. Of course cities change. However they don’t always grow, they can decline and even drift. Smog and the computer were first invented in Manchester. Now the chimney stacks have cooled and the stock market is a theatre. The skies have cleared but the streets are far from dead. How would you describe a city that is neither living up to the fullness of its historical identity, nor conveniently relegated to the heritage industry?

My first vision of a monument in Manchester was The Britannia Hotel. I remember seeing it lit up at night when I first arrived. It posed with such silly grandeur. After the little fortresses of Cambridge this pleasure palace was such a relief that I laughed. This is where rock stars from independent labels and middle-level businessmen stay. If a man is to get picked up by a lady, who will take him back to his hotel room, tie him to the bedposts and then walk out with his wallet, then it will happen here. The Britannia was built in 1857 as the prized showroom for the cotton manufacturers S&J Watts. A friend of mine gave me a spare set of blankets which her grandmother had bought here. It was a luxury. When the city nearly gave up and died the building lay empty. It almost got knocked down in the 1960s. The entrance was converted into a shrine of remembrance for the employees who died in the wars. The First World War was a turning point in the history of the Manchester cotton industry, disrupting the supply of raw cotton. Countries such as India and Japan increased production of cotton cloth for their own home markets and stopped importing. The decline in British cloth after 1920 was catastrophic. The roll of names on the cenotaph for the First World War is ten times longer than for the Second World War. The building’s conversion to a hotel in 1979 was a masterpiece: somewhere between a French palace and a Chinese brothel. The entrance is guarded by a leopard, zebra, Buddha and Sambo. There is a quiet bar with a beautiful mahogany drinks cabinet. This used to be our headquarters when Pavel Buchler came to town to plan out our next volume of Random Access and we went record-hunting. In the bar the floral wallpaper matched the tapestries and the curtains. The basement bar was famous for its Friday night all-girl singalongs. An obliging DJ played all the worst tracks from the 70s as leering men, avoiding their own gaze in the surrounding mirrors, stared hopefully into the swimming pool deliciously positioned at the end of the bar like a fish bowl.

Behind the Britannia Hotel is where the rent boys work at night and it is also the heart of the gay village. It has a tired feeling about it first thing in the morning, especially on a Sunday when the Central Club is still pumping out Saint Etienne. On Sackville Street is the Napoleon Pub, which is one of the most famous drag venues in England, and on the corner with Bloom Street, after the Clone Zone and my friendly hairdresser, there is the cleanest greasy spoon shop that you will ever find. I love the way the old couple who work here have a gentle smile for everyone. Leatherboys, truckdrivers, and foreigners, we all get called ‘luv’.

A block back from the caf is the Chorlton Street bus station. I used to walk my friend here when she was taking the late bus home to her village in the Pennines. We were careful not to get too drunk because the bus-stop directly behind hers was the one and only international service in the station. It went express to Kraków and then all stops to Kiev. It was at this bus station that I greeted my mother when she came to visit during my first year in Manchester. She had made a mess of her ongoing flight from Greece and it was impossible for me to collect her in London. Nevertheless she felt very proud of herself for managing to land at Heathrow, ‘Anglia, Anglia’ she kept chuckling, as I gave her instructions on the phone about the bus service to Manchester. Six hours into the journey, and stuck up the intestinal motorway lanes that link the dark orifices of the former industrial towns of Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Stafford, she was not so sure of where she was. By the time she arrived it was dark and the hookers were out greeting the passers-by with their friendly ‘business luv’ invitations. Many of the old warehouses would have reminded her of the sweatshops she once worked in in Melbourne – the only difference being that these ones in Manchester were not only still blacked-out from the war, but stuck there, decayed and somehow working on. The narrow winding street and the summer drizzle didn’t help. Although seated in the front, she got off the bus slowly, and with tears in her eyes slapped my face and cried out: ‘What are you doing here!’

At the end of Bloom Street where it comes to a T-junction with Princess Street is the Trade Hall and the Mechanics Institute where in 1868 the first TUC meetings were held. It is no coincidence that this city, which was the epicentre of the industrial revolution and which pushed aggressively for the repeal of trade laws and tariffs, was also the birthplace of trade unionism. On 16 August 1819 a crowd of sixty thousand people gathered on St. Peter’s Field to demand the right to vote and the freedom to read the Manchester Guardian. Sabre-rattling yeomen charged on horseback, killing twelve people. The Free Trade Hall was built on this site and for over a century it was the home of the Halle Orchestra. A friend of mine, whose mother’s PhD took over ten years to write – as long as Thatcher’s dark reign – because of her involvement with the miner’s strike, showed me around the museum and lovingly described the pride that was embroidered into the local banners. If self-presentation and the recognition that comes from a parade was a rare pleasure for these communities when they were working, imagine what is left of their identity now?

Parallel to Bloom Street is Canal Street. In the last few years, thanks to the resources of the ‘pink pound’, and the resignation of Chief Constable Anderton whose mission from God included flushing away the ‘sewer’ of homosexuality, there has grown a café culture which is one of the more heterogeneous and inclusive spaces in this city. You can get quite a decent meal at either Manto, Metz, Via Fossa or Prague 5. The names are not very Mancunian but alas the coffee is. I used to hang out at Metz quite a bit. Had lunch there with Stephen Snoddy the curator from the Cornerhouse and the American conceptual artist John Baldessari who was having his first retrospective in England, and we sat on the little bridge over the Rochdale canal, swapped jokes, and lost count of how many hypodermic needles floated by.

Opposite Canal Street is the Rochdale canal. The path beside the canal takes you towards Castlefield. There has been an effort to tidy this section up. The brickwork has been relaid in various sections and the odd flower beds inserted. Alongside the canal are the two famous textile companies, Tootles and St. James. These huge office buildings, with sheer glass sides to allow maximum sunlight before electrification, and their heavy neo-classical facades, are testament to the former importance of the canal. In those days to say ‘ornate warehouse’ was not a contradiction in terms. The formal opulence of the Italianate palazzo style combined with the latest technologies of scale created an image of unbounded confidence. When the ‘navvies’ (Irish Navigators) dug out the canal system in Lancashire that linked Oldham, Manchester and Liverpool, this was the factory of the world. The mills worked day and night. Angular warehouses, which are now rotted through and ready to crumble, once hugged every inch and contour of the canal. The competition was intense but the stakes were high. Global domination was a reality. Big ocean liners came in all the way to the Salford Docks. The engineering of the bridges was as intricate and as solid as the spine of a whale. In the 1850s four-fifths of the world’s manufactured goods left from the port of Liverpool. They must have thought that their empire was forever.

Today, you can’t even catch a ferry to Ireland from Liverpool. Arriving at Castlefield now is like entering a reclamation zone, not very imaginative but better than the relentless rusting and decay. The first artificial breath was given to a pub called Dukes 92. The name refers to the numbering of locks along the canal. Here the Granada television mob can be found drinking and shmoozing. On the other side, and elegantly tucked into the arches of what is now called ‘Catalonia Square’, there is Barca, the latest venture by the international pop star and local entrepreneur, Mick Hucknel. Further to the right is one of the most comprehensive science museums in the world, which includes the platform and the train of the very first passenger rail service. Incidentally, the first fatality was the Minister of Transport. What did Virilio say? ‘Invent the train and there at once you have invented the train crash.’ Amidst this complex network of canals, arches, bridges and side streets you find the ruins of a Roman fort (all English city names with chester or caster at the end are derivations from the Roman castro, garrison). Here, in the first century, the Roman governor Julius Agricola established a defensive site, naming it Mamucium, the ‘place of breast-like hills». Between the canals and its tributaries and below the railway arches there is now a labyrinth of Morris Minor garages, and a motorbike mechanic who issued me with my annual MOT certificate while I watched those crazy old guys fishing in the rain.

In the opposite direction along the Rochdale canal there is another bizarre intersection of canals. Warning. This is a ‘no-go’ zone. Going in is one thing, coming out another. A large section is covered by the enormous Foyles building and the roadworks that lead up to Piccadilly station. There is a forest of concrete pylons that support these structures, and it is poorly lit. At night, rent boys service their clients, buy drugs and are often bashed. Coming out into daylight you see the backs of some of the earliest mills in a part of town called Ancoats. Of the back-to-back terrace houses and cellar-dwellings that surrounded these mills Marx wrote, that the poor man remains trapped in a ‘dwelling which remains an alien power and only gives itself up to him insofar as he gives up his own blood and sweat – a dwelling which he cannot regard as his own hearth – where he might at last exclaim: “Here I am at home” – but where instead he finds himself in someone else’s house, in the house of a stranger who always watches him and throws him out if he does not pay the rent.’

Those dwellings have all been levelled and long grassy fields now bear silent witness. To the left are some beautiful and well-kept buildings. Many are operating as Asian sweatshops and the cheapest curries can be found in little streets like Hanging Ditch, which until the late 1950s was precisely what its name describes. The surveillance tower of the Strangeways jail stands above. It was on these rooftops in the summer of 1989 that the prisoners rioted, overpowered the authorities, took control of the prison and sent messages to the media by painting on their sheets. In an effort to silence this protest the police attacked with water cannons. For a time the prisoners fled inside, only to return naked and armed with soap.

There is a secret entrance to Piccadilly station at the top end of Whitworth Street. At the T-junction Monroe’s pub is on the right, and the magnificent, but abandoned, fire station on the left; across the road is the entrance for the trams (one of the positive spin-offs from Manchester’s failed Olympic bid was the reinstatement of part of the tram network), and to the right of this is a small pedestrian entrance that leads up to the station along a vaulted passageway. This short-cut is laced with the smell of urine and uninhabitable sleeping bags but it saves walking the two much longer legs of the triangle. As I surfaced in Piccadilly station I would often try to imagine a grand Victorian station. A civic space where the bourgeoisie would parade its modernity and its wealth. With intricate steel and glass ceilings, vast lobby area, sumptuous waiting rooms, telegraph facilities, shiny porcelain in the bathroom and brass handles on every door. A glimpse of such facilities is still visible at the smaller and now provincial Victoria station. But Piccadilly is the brut-moderne mainline station for Manchester. Seating is reserved for the consumers of Wimpy Burgers and Boddington’s Lager. The handful of seats that are now available for the ‘public’ have been redesigned with the appropriate handrests that make sitting uncomfortable and sleeping for the homeless impossible. The train to Oxford station goes along the back of Whitworth Street and splits a part of the University of Manchester in two. The only campus in the world with a national railway running through it.

The public face of Manchester University is guarded by the Gothic facade of the administration buildings and the huge twelve-storey maths tower which is equipped with closed-circuit surveillance cameras. Apparently the security guards use them to watch the Manchester City games at Main Road. Between the arches of the Manchester Museum (which by the way has an amazing butterfly collection, living crocodiles and two authentic Egyptian mummies which, when analysed, revealed traces of cocaine, thus proving the existence of ancient trans-Atlantic links), you will also find a plaque commemorating Rutherford’s splitting of the atom. This was the entrance to my department. There was a similar plaque outside my former department in Cambridge. Is this a universal warning to all social scientists? Just before the entrance to the building there is a darker strip of bitumen. When I first arrived there used to be a flower bed there. It was a precarious little space because the delivery trucks would give no regard to it and few flowers lasted beyond the day of their planting. The planners decided to reward the aggressors with a slightly wider access, but the faint scar left by the bed is still visible.

Behind the University Library there is an old pub called the Ducie Arms. It is a rather dirty pub. I am not sure how they clean their glasses. They probably just dip them in warm water. I was always wary of the publican’s cigarette ash as it drooped delicately between the edge of his lip and the top of my glass. After twenty-five years of pulling the Guinness he pours very slowly. There are lots of old photos and memorabilia celebrating the good old days of Manchester City Football Club. There is no jukebox, no bistro, no karaoke, no theme nights, just an old-fashioned selection: one lager or one ale on tap. A thousand different keyrings hang from a fishing line that loops the bar. Above the top shelf there is a black and white reproduction of a Courbet painting of two peasants, husband and wife bowed as they bury their child at the edge of a field. Beside it a copper relief of the current Pope. There is also a few small bottles of juice in the cupboard, and packets of plain crisps.

When the slums that surrounded the University were cleared and the disastrous housing estates of Hulme were erected, the one thing the developers couldn’t touch was the pubs. All around this area you will see the remnants of the concrete crescents, the infamous ‘Bull Rings’ and high-rise towers surrounded by vast tracts of vacant land. No shops, no services. Only the occasional old pub, The Salutation, The Gamecock, The Junction, The Sir Henry Royce, standing out like a joke. As if these people need to be reminded that Sir Rolls met Sir Royce in Manchester. In the Ducie one night I met an Irish roadworker who sang ‘Waltzing Matilda’. All twenty verses, not just the colonial verses, but also the haunting anti-First World War and Vietnam War verses. His drunken heart and lyrical memory left me in tears. He was working on the demolition sites, and the squatters and tag artists were the last to leave, spraying their farewells to ‘the playground in the sky’.

Back in the centre of Manchester there is St. Peter’s Square with a war memorial at the foot of its cross. All around are the neo-classical institutions that display the founding fathers’ vision of civic pride, but there is none of the coherent structure that you witness when you exit from Lime Street station in Liverpool. Facing the square is the Midland Hotel which was built by the railway barons as one of the finest hotels in its time. At the back of it is what is now the G-Mex Centre, a venue for concerts and boxing matches, but which was once the main railway station to London. The vaulted archway is what you would expect of a major station. Coming out of the station you would have faced the back of the hotel. The small walk was once under a stretched canopy. The Library and the corner of the Town Hall would also have been visible. Adjacent is the Bridgewater Concert Hall. Further up the hill is the Art Gallery. The symmetry is not quite right but all the symbols are there. Behind the cenotaph, at the foot of the cross that marks the spot where St. Peter’s Church stood, you will also see a small marble square with the following words carved onto it: ‘To Our Italian Comrades 1915-1918’. The French-German artist Jochen Gerz, while visiting Manchester for the opening of his exhibition at the Cornerhouse, told me that this blood reminder was erected during the Second World War, to head off any reprisals against members of the Italian community in Manchester.

If there is a symbolic centre in Manchester it must be the site of the original Stock Market, the Royal Exchange building. This was where the IRA parked their truck filled with semtex in the summer of 1996. Every building in the vicinity was severely damaged, even the Catholic church in St. Ann’s Square, where for a second you might feel like you were in an Italian city, and the John Dalton Library and the Chetwyn Library in Cheetham Hill, where Karl Marx did some of his research. The Exchange has shifted on a number of occasions and was reconstructed after the Blitz in the 1940s. The trading area under the central dome has been invaded by an extraterrestrial-looking theatre, above it are the old boards which displayed share prices from around the world. Prices and dates are still standing like a broken clock. The old axioms of power are there before you: New York, London, Paris. During the American Civil War the Manchester unions boycotted the import of cotton from the slave plantations of the South and found sources in other colonies. Manchester was known as ‘cottonopolis’ and Khartoum and Alexandria were key links in the drama. Jews and Greeks were busy working here. Cavafy, the Alexandrine Greek poet, had an uncle with an office in Manchester, and was sent to Manchester Grammar School. Global trade ceased in the 1960s. The last reaches from centre to periphery in British colonialism can be seen on these boards.

Just to see this name ‘Alexandria’ on the old stock market board sets me dreaming. When does the journey to other cities begin? When is the call from home strongest? In dreams, rumours and fantasies? After leaving Manchester, Cavafy returned to Alexandria. He settled in his native city but that permanent sense of homelessness never left him. Perhaps Cavafy, approaching old age, was remembering his youth in this once booming industrial city when he wrote:

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighbourhoods, turn grey in the same houses.
You’ll always end in this city.