Nostalgia is a benign affliction, a symptom that can both swaddle in comfort and smother uncomfortable progression. We are told that turning a blind eye to the past condemns us to its repetition, and yet unduly staring at the bright glare of our history is surely to amble blindly rather than stride purposefully across the expansive hinterland of the future.
A few months back, I revisited Manchester for a weekend. I lived there from 2009 to 2010, on an industrial placement year for my degree and, as punitive as I found the working experience to be, in many other ways that year was a formative one. I find myself looking back to my Manchester days through that disconcerting but telling veil of nostalgia that has set in over the intervening years like a pleasant mist.
In a similar way, Manchester itself is a city that has become contaminated with the lethargy of nostalgia, mediated via the esemplastic powers of culture and industry.
I decided I would undertake a lengthy walk of the city, outwards from the centre along the loose knot of canals that lasso themselves around Salford Quays, my former home, before returning back into the city proper. In so doing, I hoped to gain a certain reappraisal of my time in, and relationship with, this city.
I started out from the top of Oxford Road that branches off from the city centre and away past the wonderful Cornerhouse Arts Centre, slicing through the university complex and on into the student quarter. It was this area, formerly known as ‘Little Ireland’, that Friedrich Engels in his seminal ‘Condition of the Working Class in England’ denounced thus:
‘…the race that lives in these ruinous cottages…in measureless filth and stench…must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity… Only a physically degenerate race, robbed of all humanity, degraded, reduced morally, and physically to bestiality, could feel comfortable and at home’.
Students may not, it could be agreed, be prone to hygienic living, but surely things have improved since Engels’ day?! Working conditions, pressed down under the palm of austerity, might be reminiscent, but now ‘Little England’ is also the ‘Curry Mile’ where the only atmospheric stench is that of baltis, vindaloos and masalas of varying degrees of appetisement.
I headed southwards towards Castlefield, passing the resplendent Georgian-era Midland Hotel, burdened down by the present rain, waiting for the sun to pump the blood around and enliven its red brick visage. By contrast, the priapic Beetham Tower swaggers high above the city like an architectural incarnation of Liam Gallagher’s microphone poise.
It is this high rise that typifies the dubious success of Manchester’s resurgence from the late-90s onwards. Whereas in London, a multitude of architectural tropes do continual battle for predominance and attention; in Manchester, there is a legible informality to the city – the Victorian-era terraces, the red-brick factories and mills of old ‘Cottonopolis’, the concrete high rises – that seem to sit uncomfortably with the brash migration of modernist steel and glass structures that have largely failed to integrate effectively.
Today, the Beetham Tower appears as a figment of the collective imagination, translucent against the grey and dreary sky, a ‘2001’ monolith subconsciously guiding the city of Manchester onwards in its redevelopment and assimilation for the ‘pseudo-modernist’ form.
The term is one coined by the writer Owen Hatherley, who wrote of Manchester in his book ‘The New Ruins of Modern Britain’, that it was ‘a flagship for urban regeneration and immaterial capitalism’, and ‘the ultimate failure of the very recent past, a mausoleum of Blairism’.
Whilst I myself don’t fully subscribe to these somewhat overwrought declarations, he does have an underlying point, that the spate of urban renewal and rejuvenation that grew out of the Blair-era neoliberal ideology of positivism fuelled by unfettered corporate and private wealth with scant regard for either taste or functionality. Hence, the Beetham Tower stands as the totem pole around which the property developers, landowners and market capitalists dance their fervent ritual.
As I headed away from the attractive enclave of Castlefield along the canal, I passed dozens of old red-brick mills and factories that have become appropriated and redeveloped as ‘luxury apartments’; part of the preliminary contractions in the ‘birth of the new Manchester’.
In many ways this can be seen as a necessary taxidermy, it being preferable to rejuvenate buildings whose purpose is now outmoded rather than let them sink into dereliction. Nonetheless, it does elicit one of those unavoidable pangs of solemn nostalgia and a sense of shame at how these dignified structures that served their productive and industrious functions are now seen merely as an in-vogue design aesthetic and a template for a uniform lifestyle choice, free to those who can afford it.
Maybe one day the shopping centres and entertainment complexes will also be transformed into ‘luxury accommodation’, with inhabitants giving meagre thought to the multitudes of people who once adhered to a defunct and technologically redefined pursuit. Speaking of which, the Arndale Centre sits centrally as the pulsing heart of commerce, and as hordes of Saturday shoppers traipse to and fro across Piccadilly Gardens, it brings to mind images of a Lowry painting for the 21st century – weather-beaten, down-trodden stick men and women lurching across a canvas of grey from River Island to Top Shop to H&M…
Continuing along the canal path, it struck me as to just how different Manchester is from London, in that barely 10 minutes’ walk can take you out from under the shadows of the built environment to bask in relative isolation. This stretch of edgeland between Manchester and Salford Quays, known as Pomona, is largely sparse wasteland and overgrown storage plots, with only the passing of a raised tram to sow together the opposing urbanities.
Before long, my former home, the Abito apartment complex, hoved into view; its ‘edgy’ design of a sail-cum-roof hovering above the main frame of the building giving it the appearance of having moored at the quayside. Perhaps this was the architects’ subtle way of evoking the docks, by designing modern apartments that appear to have foregone their sea-faring days in favour of static habitation, like the Queen Mary (now a hotel) in Long Beach, California.
Viewing the Abito complex from the opposite side of the dock, however, gave the impression of it being an open-plan office space hoisted by 90-degrees; rows of identical modular units for people to operate within. I well remember sitting on my balcony staring out over the cosmetic terrain of the Quays, with its high rises standing alone like Mayan temples, trying to superimpose the imagined past of the dockers, ships and machinery over the top of its manicured present.
The primary reason why I was grateful to live in Manchester was that I fully bought into the heady cultural (specifically musical) currency on which the city still seemed to trade quite shamelessly.
Manchester in the late-70s was the British equivalent of Berlin or New York; it was a cauldron of creative energy that seemed to grow its tonality in direct alignment with the bleak aesthetics of the urban space. The notorious (and now redeveloped) Hulme Crescents were the fermentation of industrial estate nihilism; together with the anonymous walkways, dilapidated warehouses and abandoned factories the only feasible backdrop for the monochromatic futurism of Joy Division and the abrasive abandon of The Fall. Harsh concrete and social decay beneath a sky of constantly rain-engorged grey.
This era is mythologised to great effect by, among other things, the photography of Kevin Cummins, the exuberant romp of Michael Winterbottom’s ’24 Hour Party People’, and the more refined Ian Curtis biopic ‘Control’ by Anton Corbijn. Indeed, if you know where to look, Manchester is saturated with pop culture signifiers – of course there’s the ‘Joy Division bridge’ straddling Princess Parkway; you can go and ‘gravely read the stones’ a la Morrissey in ‘Cemetry Gates’; there’s Mr Sifter’s record shop that ‘sold [Oasis] songs’ as recounted in ‘Shakermaker’.
‘You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist. The hacienda must be built…’ – Ivan Chtcheglov
Under the helmsman-ship of the civic-punk Tony Wilson, Manchester managed to shrug off its grim industrial shroud to become ‘Madchester’, the epicentre of Britain’s ‘rave culture’ during the 1980s, with his Factory Records championing the likes of New Order and the Happy Mondays, as well as the Hacienda becoming one of the foremost pioneering nightclubs in the world.
Reading Peter Hook’s memoir ‘How Not To Run a Club’, you can only despair at the scale of ineptitude that somehow sustained the Hacienda on a trapeze-of-sorts for so long, at the vanguard of the acid house scene, before finally imploding in a sorry miasma of drugs, debts and gangsterism in the mid-90s.
The whole ethos of the enterprise was of such an anarchic bent that its ultimate downfall ensured that similar ventures could probably never scale the commanding heights of the British music scene again. Too many safety nets have now been placed beneath the high wire, and in any case, no one really cares whether anyone falls off or not.
This is the paradox at the heart of Wilson’s Manchester; that his revolutionary tenacity, adrenalizing the limpid bloodstream of the city, tore down old barriers yet in so doing erected new but culturally bereft watchtowers of commercialised deference to the past that bear down on the city’s once progressive spirit. With his utopian vision of a re-born Manchester and his steely determination for progress, there are parallels to be drawn between him and Thatcher, in that the short-term success of their grand projects failed to herald in the long-term legacy that they had envisaged.
As Chtcheglov says in his ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’, which Wilson would certainly have been aware of – ‘you can’t take 3 steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends.’
Today, the site of the Hacienda has become the ‘Hacienda Apartments’, and along the canal-side is wrought in steel an inscription of the quote that gave it its name. Nowadays, any by-the-numbers Oceana or Tiger-Tiger ‘superclub’ chain, spewing out alchopopped revellers into the gutters of every major British city, are following beat-for-beat the free-form improvisations of the Hacienda.
During my year in Manchester, I was frequently beset with personal unhappiness, searing through both myself and my circumstances. Often it felt like I was attempting to construct a personal ideal from many separate component parts, the instruction manual for which was illegible, whilst under scrutiny several of the crucial pieces were found to be missing. On the positive side, I learnt to adapt to relative solitude, and instil a creative discipline that still informs me today.
Standing on the quayside of Salford, bristling at the insistent rain, I acknowledged that for me, Manchester will likely always conjure up these conflicting emotions. I felt an urge to reach out from my now more stable, content, yet still confused present to my former self and either put a reassuring arm around his shoulders or slap him across the face, or both at the same time.
In many ways then, my hike around Manchester did yield some cathartic qualities, and give me cause to consider that, similarly with the city itself, the successes and strife of our past should be balanced on the scales of nostalgic reverence; neither glorified nor lamented to the detriment of our appreciation of the present.
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