Manchester Sunday January 1, 2006
It seems traditional to identify with the city where you live, and expound on its many delights. I’ve lived in Manchester for about 10 years, and I’ve never liked it and never will. It has too much industrial weight, reflected in ugly architecture from the Victorian era. And it’s in the North of England meaning it’s characteristically grey and rainy, much of the reason for the success of the water-driven cotton mills in the general vicinity. Manchester was where the Industrial Revolution began, was the home of the Madchester music phenomenon of the 90s and of Noel and Liam Gallagher, and is where you find possibly the most famous football team in the world. I don’t care; the Industrial Revolution happened a long time ago, was accompanied by Dickensian conditions exploiting the proletariat, I don’t go to music clubs and I’m not interested in football. So why am I here? Well, life is what happens when you make other plans. It’s not really the point – I can live here, and still not like it.
I went to university at Lancaster which I quite liked but was even more rainy, being close to the Irish sea, and cut off from the rest of the country. After that I lived briefly in London, then in Brighton for four years, although I spent my early life in Kent. The southeast is warmer, brighter, more comfortable and affluent. What it lacks, as does the south generally, is easy access to the fine mountain scenery of Britain. During my childhood we had easy access to rolling agricultural fields, and the view from my bedroom window expanded for miles across relatively open land. Brighton is spread long and thin along the south coast, with the Downs to the north – lovely, but consoling rather than dramatically beautiful.
One advantage of Manchester is its proximity to the Lake District, a place I love, and it’s also equidistant to Snowdonia in Wales, which is interesting but I like it less. And it’s an easy drive to the Peak District. I’m not fond of the Peak District – I understand it’s the most visited national park in the country, and that surprises me. It’s OK for an afternoon stroll, but those peaty moors are bleak and featureless.
Like every major city, Manchester has rich and poor areas; I live in one of the most desirable locales, more by luck than finance, but just a few miles away you find one of the most notorious parts of the country: Moss Side, plagued by gangs, guns, and the problems of insular and unemployed concentrations of ethnic people. In another direction you have Salford, equally notorious and deprived. Yet West Didsbury, my neighbourhood, is quite pleasant with decent residents: mostly a mix of students and young professionals. Not far away it gets even more salubrious and you find Cheadle, Altrincham and Alderly Edge, where Victoria and David Beckham had/have a home (?) and also Prestbury, renowned for the highest concentration of millionaires in the UK.
The development in Manchester over the last 5-10 years is astonishing. Drive around for thirty minutes and you will see new apartment blocks almost wherever you look, both in the centre and at the periphery, for the ostentatiously wealthy, for students, and for average people. It began with the IRA bomb in the city centre, and continued with the excitement of the Commonwealth Games – suddenly, developers realised there were vast areas of space previously ignored, because no one was interested in such a grim urban landscape. But it reaches a critical mass: if enough development occurs, the place improves, becomes correspondingly desirable, and more people want to do more development. However it remains to be seen what the long term prospects are, if this really is a major renovation or just property development that fails to convince people: yes, but Manchester’s still a crappy place and I don’t want to live, work, or move my business there.
The IRA bomb gave city planners the opportunity to clear away old and ugly areas, replacing them with bright, modern architecture and vibrant new spaces: the Urbis Centre, Cathedral Gardens and Millennium Quarter tempted Harvey Nichols to set up shop – one of the most prestigious retailers in the country, if you like that sort of thing. The Northern Quarter is supposedly the closest Manchester gets to an area like London’s Soho, or Hoxton, with some interesting galleries, craft shops and restaurants and expensive apartments, as people return to city centre living. Although as with the city as a whole, it remains to be seen if the area will realise its potential because most of the property there still remains unused, and there’s no entrepreneurial rush to move in and capitalise on profit potential. And I think you have to balance ‘estate-agent speak’ with the inevitable negative factors. The Northern Quarter used to be, and still is to some extent, a shabby city perimeter bordering yet another swathe of council house decay: the areas of Ancoats, Cheetham, Miles Platting and Beswick, which even an estate agent would struggle to eulogise. And then to the east of the city you have Openshaw, where a TV documentary recently investigated teenage pregnancy and sexual behaviour and I recall the words of one youth saying “there’s no romance in Openshaw”, indicating the squalid life of Saturday night drunkenness, drugs if you can afford it, and not so much casual as desperate sex, the progeny subsequently funded by the state. Longsight and Levenshulme are unpleasant, have guns and drugs like Moss Side. South of the city Chorlton and Didsbury are OK, even Withington is OK, although the high street sometimes attracts predatory people accosting you for money, and then further south you have Wythenshawe which is another council house wasteland with its own strategically placed police station. A few years ago an MP lived on a Salford estate for one week as part of a TV programme, and he was aghast at the wayward and uncivilised living. At one point, youths were tearing around in a stolen car and he couldn’t understand why parents and adults didn’t come out into the streets to stop it. It was the kind of place where ASBOs are the only hope, and I understand that Manchester is the number one ASBO city. These things are a fact, and since I don’t like it here I don’t mind mentioning them. It doesn’t mean all the people are bad; the defence of ostensibly squalid locales is often in terms of the ‘community spirit’, and there may be some truth in that. One of the girls on the documentary was incredibly sweet: living on a breadline existence with little hope of escaping it, she was concerned for the MP’s happiness regardless of his privileged and wealthy living – she noted he was single, could become increasingly lonely as he gets older, and didn’t have a close-knit family like hers.
But grim up north? Tell me about it. I know it’s possible to find micro areas relatively crime free, with a community spirit and nice neighbours who don’t live on chips and read the Sun, but it’s also possible to make macro generalisations that do carry some truth. If you consider the city as a whole, much of it really is grim. When I lived in London I was five minutes from Ladbroke Grove tube and close to Notting Hill which had their share of problems (drunks, drugs and crime), but the difference is the vibrancy and interest of the greater city ameliorates local disadvantages. I don’t – as I once did in the capital – look out my window to see a homeless drunk asleep on my doostep. But that London scenario was just a small part of a dense cross-weaving of enormous cultural excitement – so I would get up in the morning, note the drunk had gone, and in 45 minutes be in Trafalgar Square enjoying the National Gallery. I’ve seen quite a lot of darker Manchester by driving around it; seen the police cars, the drug-sellers, the vicious dogs leashed by feral looking tattooed people, the youths in hoodies with criminal dispositions. I’ve been assaulted, accosted, depressed, and frightened. It seems to me you have to mention this, if you offer an honest appraisal of the city as a whole. I can’t see the point of over-imaginative praise.
There are two decent galleries, the Whitworth and the new City Centre venue, each of them worth a trip but sadly so small and provincial you mostly just forget about them. There are some nice parks, and I enjoy them regularly. Nothing special, but a pleasant respite from concrete. Rusholme is famously called ‘the curry mile’ and I enjoy indulging my hot food passion. The central library is quite good and there are numerous local libraries in the different areas, although Wythenshawe used to be the best of them, but has been relocated into a tiny building with reduced stock, the former building now used as part of a sports and entertainment centre.
St. Annes Square and Albert Square are quite nice, the latter in front of an impressive Town Hall. There’s a good Waterstones in the centre of Manchester which a few years ago offered a café and reading area such that you can enjoy cake and coffee with a nice book, not worrying about snipey remarks that “this is a shop, not a library”. There are some fine orchestra places, and a theatre or two, that outside London are probably some of the best in the country. I quite like reading drama, or used to, but not – I realised many years ago – especially interested in watching it on stage. The same applies to music – nothing like basking in Bach, or luxuriating in Handel, but I will do that at home lying on a comfy sofa, not sitting upright in a public hall. I like film, and the Cornerhouse is worth mentioning as an alternative venue, as a counterpoint to several large mainstream venues in the centre, in Didsbury, Gorton, and a few other places. Although the Cornerhouse is uncomfortably cramped, and at a popular showing you will be joggling elbows with strangers, and the screens are not large, so it’s like having twenty people watch TV with you at home. For that reason – and also because I’m not a great fan of the ethos of ‘alternative film’, I rarely go there. I don’t like the Hollywood domination of the industry, the formulaic stuff they churn out, but I get bored with some of the pretentious movies described as ‘art’.
Manchester has an enormous student population, and although I did an MA at Salford University a few years ago, I can’t comment on it’s joys and attractions. I’m not a nineteen or twenty year old undergraduate, seeking alcohol, music and wild times. I understand that Manchester University is world class in some disciplines, and has recently amalgamated with UMIST and Manchester Metropolitan University. The latter used to be a Polytechnic and thus less prestigious, but was probably worthy of its new status unlike many institutions and, as far as I could see, it was more innovative and modern than its more traditional neighbour located literally just down the road.
Photographically, Manchester is uninteresting. You can’t walk around with your camera like you can in London; although it’s Britain’s second largest city it doesn’t have anything like the colour, vibrancy or anonymity of the capital. Candid work is restricted, because people will object to it and won’t understand what’s so interesting – and on the latter point, they may be right! Some of the architecture is worth photographing, but you capture it once and that’s it… nothing more to do. There are one or two BA degrees you can do here, although with the exception of a new MA starting at Bolton University (part of Greater Manchester), there’s not much support for postgraduate work. There’s a photography group called Redeye which is quite good, attracting lecturers, professionals, students and more, with regular meetings at a gallery in the Northern Quarter. People give talks about their work, and there’s a scant but interesting programme of workshops and feedback sessions, if you are unsure of your portfolio or want some advice. Redeye is a good resource. There are a few amateur photo clubs, notably the South Manchester one which I believe is one of the largest and oldest in the country. And finally, Manchester is a short journey to the National Museum of Photography Film & TV. Here’s the view from it, looking over Bradford:
