VARIOUS TIMES - INHABITING AN INDUSTRIAL
RUIN:
*
o
Acknowledgements
o
Maps
o
Introduction - no city fun
o
Theoretical and methodological
approaches
o
Part 1:
o
Part 2: Shudehill/Smithfield –
dream city
o
Part 3: Belle Vue – the consumer
dream
o
Part 4: Hulme – the planner’s dream
o
Part 5: Knott Mill – the planned
dream
o
Part 6: Regeneration – the dream of
capitalism
o
Part 7: Conclusion - inhabiting the
city
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Appendix: Documents
o
Bibliography
o
Discography
o
Sources
o
Interview profiles
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the help of Andrew Berry, Richard Boon, Michael Bracewell, Bob Dickinson, Dave Haslam, Ray Gosling, C.P. Lee, Jon Savage and Gordon Sharples – all of whom were kind enough to spare me time to be interviewed for this project and whose recollections and observations helped me to fill in a great deal of background detail.
I would also like to acknowledge the supervision of the
project provided by Morag Shiach at Queen Mary,
© Liz Naylor 2004
City Centre
tourist map, 2004
Districts of
Introduction
- no city fun
the city is terrifying; is frightening; is a prison. Just where do i go?…i think i hate the city. i think it hates me. i think i’m paranoid. i hate. i hate. i hate. i hate every product; everybody; everygroup everyshop everybus everyclothing: everyfad everyfashion.[1]
The city of
By the time I was fifteen years old, I
was spending nights in the city, staying in Hulme and experiencing the
primitive nightlife of
It was during this period that the city
seemed to slip away from me and I wrote what was to be my first piece of
published writing. This was published in a local fanzine, a crudely
roneographed newsletter, called City Fun. ‘No City Fun’ was written as I
was being expelled from school and was about to be sent to a locked unit for
disruptive teenagers in the countryside of Macclesfield. While I was in the
unit, the piece was published and subsequently made into a short film by
Charles Salem, who was a student in
By April 1979 I was living in a shared
council flat in Harpurhey, a mile to the north of the city centre, and was able
to resume my wanderings.
Theoretical and methodological approaches
History begins at ground
level, with footsteps.[5]
All cities are geological. You
can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of
their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly
draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding
perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this
vision remains fragmentary.[6]
This research project considers the ways
in which cities are inhabited and how cities are zoned and controlled. It
examines the part that (counter) culture might play in resisting these controls
and looks at the ways in which these cultural moves are incorporated into a
discourse of urbanity and regeneration. Beneath these propositions lie three
fairly basic assumptions. First, the most fundamental Marxist premise that it
is the social being and the production of material values that determines
social consciousness, second that architecture reflects certain class interests
(something that is especially visible in the commercial Victorian architecture
of Manchester which towers over the city streets) and, third that the city
affords a certain psychic readability[7].
Accordingly these three propositions are implicit in much of the work that
provides a broad theoretical framework for this research project – that of
Walter Benjamin, the situationist international (SI) and of Michel de Certeau.
Psychogeography, which underpins much of
this project, was of interest to the SI by way of Thomas De Quincey and
Surrealism. In Guy Debord’s Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography
he describes psychogeography as having ‘precise laws’ concerning the ‘specific
effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organised or not,
on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’.[8]
For the purposes of this project I employed the fairly basic psychogeographic
device of a mind map whereby, on a blank piece of paper, I plotted a series of
marks that represented locations that I associated with
The writing of Certeau and, perhaps more
critically, Benjamin provides much of the theoretical approach to the question
of history in this project. It is unwise to attempt to prise isolated aspects
of Benjamin’s thinking from the complexity of his legacy. Benjamin’s writing
reflects his own distinctive thinking but it is also an act of radical politics
in the face of the rising terror of fascism and any attempt to adopt a
Benjaminian approach to contemporary cultural history should be treated with
extreme caution.[12] However, there is much of Benjamin here. His
notions of myth, ruin, allegory, transience, porosity, the bourgeois interior,
a dialectical redeeming the past and the ambivalence of the dream state, are
all ideas that I have attempted to explore through this research.[13]
The locations that were identified through my mind map are primarily
investigated through the Benjaminian notion of the (ambivalent) dream filled
sleep of capitalism. And so the site specific occupations of the city can be
seen as being both enchanted by the dream of capitalism and disruptive of that
dream. One of the earliest places within
I explore a darker and more troubling
interpretation a dream state at Belle Vue - itself representing a
phantasmagorical reproduction of nature with its artificial lake, ornamental
gardens and caged animals – as a site of the consumer desires of the 1960s. As
I show, the dreams of superabundant capitalism that ensnared so many also had
dreadful consequences.
Another manifestation of the post Second
World War of Britain is illustrated by the rationalized vision of mass housing
that is epitomized by Hulme. Hulme estate was quickly dubbed a living nightmare
by the local press and its original tenants, whereupon those with lower
expectations of capitalism colonised the estate and détourned[16]
the planner’s dream. What had once been an idealist humanist vision for new
forms of rationalist communities in the sky, became that in a way that could
not have been anticipated by the city planners: ‘This is Hulme’, writes Sarah
Champion, ‘the end of the earth. One mile wide and eight miles high’.[17]
It is within this moment of détournement, of historical consciousness reflected
in the nature of historical and modern ruin, that represents the revolutionary
potential of the dream state. In some ways it was the unconventional community
who occupied Hulme that gave impetus for the Haçienda nightclub - whose
designed interior of exposed girders and factory aesthetic offered an
architect’s interpretation of
The ushering in of a regenerated
Manchester also suggests that history becomes in some way incontestable – a
theme that is also identified in the time period chosen for this research. May
1979 marks the first term of a Tory government under Margaret Thatcher and
signals a breach with post Second World War welfare state Britain that
effectively set the past adrift. This period was the beginning of the end for a
certain identity-based form of political protest - for Margaret Thatcher
history is neutered into a series of exemplars in which any class or regional
identity is obliterated. [18] As the Tory government set about curbing any
regional opposition the impact upon cities such as
Capitalism was a natural
phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep came over
A sort of black smoke covers
the city. The sun seen through it is a disc without rays. Under this half daylight
300,000 human beings are ceaselessly at work. A thousand noises disturb this
damp, dark labyrinth, but they are not at all the ordinary sounds one hears in
great cities….[20]
The choice of Manchester as the city in
which to explore the theoretical approaches outlined in the previous section
seems natural given my own history with the city and its status for many as the
world’s ‘first modern city’.[21]
That
View of the River Irwell, 1860
No other city had surrendered so much to
the requirements of the factory system. The landscape was literally remodelled
in accordance with the demands of technology as ‘hills were flattened, trees
cut down, farms and fields replaced by town squares and factory buildings’.[24]
And thus at the very moment
when the engines are stopped, and the counting houses closed, everything which
was the thought – the authority – the impulsive force – the moral order of this
immense industrial combination, flies from the town, and disappears in an
instant. The rich man spreads his coach amidst the beauties of the surrounding
country, and abandons the town to the operatives, publicans, mendicants,
thieves, and prostitutes, merely taking the precaution to leave behind him a
police force, whose duty it is to preserve some little of material order in
this pell-mell society.[32]
The formation of the borough of
The Peterloo Massacre, 1819
By the second half of the nineteenth century
Victorian Manchester offered little improvement on the grim reports of the
1830s and 40s. By the 1870s, poverty, ill health and high mortality were still
associated with the working class districts of the inner city such as Ancoats,
Hulme and Chorlton-on-Medlock. By the turn of the century the city centre was
still heavily populated, with numbers rising dramatically between 1901 and
1931.[35]
For those who worked in the many warehouses, mills, factories, the markets at
Smithfield (the biggest single employer of Irish migrants) and the heavy
engineering works to the east of the city, the streets of the city represented
work, home, and ‘for those who had little or no wages to spend’[36],
the main site of working-class sociability. Through the early part of the
twentieth century the modern geography of wealth and poverty followed the
historic patterns of the 1870s and a ‘significant number’ of the inner city
poor ‘carried on their daily life’ in ‘depressing squalor’ that was ‘little
improved since Victorian times’.[37]
It
was not until the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919 that decisive
legislative moves were made to provide public housing.[38]
That Act made local authorities responsible for meeting the housing needs of
their areas but despite this, very little was done to alleviate
There remained however an inner core of
slum housing (Harpurhey, Beswick, Ancoats, Hulme) that remained occupied until
well after the Second World War. Then, a combination of damage sustained during
the heavy air bombardment of 1940-41 (particularly in Hulme) and post war
optimism kick-started a clearance and building programme in Manchester that
resulted in the building of almost quarter of a million new dwellings by
Manchester City Council between 1953 and 1973. As part of this extensive period
of building a series of “planned” inner city housing estates were built on the
same sites as existent communities such as Hulme, Ardwick and Harpurhey.
Most of the estates built during this
period succumbed to the usual problems associated with the high-density housing
built under the “cost yardstick” controls of central government during the
1960s and early 70s. Soon after they were built, many of the inner city estates
began to fail. This failure of social housing, coupled with the final death
throes of the manufacturing and shipping industries, led to a massive
residential and commercial depopulation of the city centre. By the late 1970s
the centre of
Shudehill/Smithfield – dream city
But they who would see
Shudehill aright must not merely get up early in the morning, but even at that
uncanny time known as the middle of the night.[41]
Shudehill marks the northern boundary of
an area that expanded eastwards from a medieval town centre that had grown
around the Parish Church of St. Mary (subsequently the Cathedral). Long
Millgate, that runs north from the Cathedral, was an important medieval site
from around the fourteenth century.[42]
The surrounding area, known as the “old town”, remained the focus of
Looking toward Withy Grove from
This warren of cobbled streets and
alleyways provided space for an array of venues that housed the coffee bar
clubs of the early 1960s and a second wave of nightclubs and shops - such as
the ‘Don’t Know unisex boutique’ on New Brown Street which was touted as
Manchester’s answer to Carnaby Street - in the mid to late 1960s.[45]
Prior to this, the main focus of (illegal) all night clubs had been the
Shebeens, or West Indian drinking clubs in Moss Side.
However, with the beginnings of
Pharmaceutical amphetamines such as
Drynamyl and Dexedrine still available on prescription as slimming pills
dominated the scene that grew around the nightclubs. This ready availability of
drugs was cited as the main reason for the police clampdown that followed Chief
Superintendent Alan Dingwall’s ‘Coffee Beat Clubs’ report which was included in
the Manchester Chief Constable’s Report of 1964.[50]
Dingwall’s report focussed on several specific venues, such as the Beat Club,
which occupied the ground floor of a dilapidated warehouse on
New
The area adjacent to the Arndale Centre
managed to escape the ravages of redevelopment and even now appears to have
remained untouched by the twentieth century. This area, Shudehill, was well
known for its many second-hand stalls and street markets such as the retail
poultry market (The Hen Market), and
Smithfield ceased trading in the mid
1970s It became a ghostly presence of the area’s Victorian heyday, alongside
such other relics as the numerous unreconstituted spit and sawdust pubs,
remaining second hand book stalls and Tib Street, ‘cluttered with the cages of
its innumerable pet shops’.[59]
This area was an unlikely location for a
new club venture dreamed up by a group of people who gathered around the
offices of the New Hormones record label at
Through my research for this project, I
have discovered that it was not the first club to be sited in this unlikely
location. A rather seedy nightclub called the Grand Pigalle[63]
appears to have occupied the site during the 1960s. Certainly by 1971 it was a
gay[64]
club called The Picador, the first club owned by Frank ‘Foo Foo’ Lammar, a
well-known
Belle Vue – the consumer dream
There is the supreme irony of
a gleaming post-modern shopping complex in the heart of Manchester’s rebuilt
city centre displaying a slogan lifted from a song by Morrissey about the Moors
child murderers, ‘Manchester – so much to answer for’.[67]
Belle Vue lies to the north east of
central Manchester, between Gorton and Longsight, which were essentially
villages until the second wave of Victorian terraces were constructed in the
latter half of the nineteenth century to accommodate the workers for the heavy
engineering, transport and chemical industries that were established nearby.[68]
Built on 36 acres of what had been lime pits, Belle Vue first opened in 1836.
During its 145 year lifespan it was home to ornamental gardens, dancing halls,
a funfair, a concert hall, speedway and stock car racing, boxing matches,
greyhound racing and a zoo.[69]
In many ways Belle Vue rivalled the Saturday night markets of Shudehill as a
destination for the working classes. However as many of the attractions at
Belle Vue charged admission it functioned more as a family destination, along
the lines of
Through the first half of the twentieth
century Belle Vue gradually began to reflect the move away from the street
activity of Shudehill and the localised “monkey parades”[71]
which had previously been a feature of the city, to accommodate the demands of
the growing number of young working class wage earners. In 1910 Kings Hall
(concert/dance) was built at Belle Vue. In 1929
the
Belle Vue, early 1960s
For
the young working classes of the surrounding districts such as Gorton,
Longsight, Ardwick, Longsight and Bradford, who had job security and regular
wages, Belle Vue was an important destination on a Saturday night. By 1962 the
self-styled first “DJ”, Jimmy Saville had opened his Top Ten Club at The
Elizabethan Ballroom in Belle Vue and teenagers such as the 19-year-old Myra
Hindley from nearby Bannock Street in Gorton regularly wrote of going dancing
at Belle Vue in her diary.[72]
The Hindleys had lived in West Gorton all
their lives. Ian Brady, who lived in nearby Longsight had moved to
The Mayflower Club on
The Southern Sporting Club (Mayflower Club),
early 1970s
Deborah Curtis recounts visiting The
Mayflower Club with Ian, who had begun ‘to infiltrate the places where white
people didn’t usually go’.[77]
Ian Curtis returned to The Mayflower Club with his band Joy Division for a
one-day event called Stuff The Superstars Special, promoted by Andy Zero,
Martin X and members of the City Fun collective in July 1979. The
concert marked the beginning of a series of live events (The Fall, Scritti
Politti, Crass) promoted under the name of ‘The Funhouse’ that ran for a few
months to the end of 1979. By this point The Mayflower was little more than an
empty shell with rudimentary toilets and no permanent bar. For most of those
making the journey to West Gorton, it was an area of the city that would
previously have been off limits, ‘a terrifying area, especially on Saturday
nights’.[78]
Ticket for Stuff the Superstars at The Mayflower
1979
Hulme – the planner’s dream
The all night party just goes
on and on and on and on.[79]
A great many of the post WWII slum
clearances in
Hulme
crescent, around 1974
From the very beginning the problems of
the Hulme estate were notorious. The reports on Hulme that highlighted
malfunctioning drainage systems, causing ‘the formation of stagnant pools on
walkways, stairs, pathways and roads’ and ‘foul discharges within or adjacent
to homes’,[84] and the
under floor ducting for water pipes, wiring and heating that ‘allowed mice,
cockroaches and other vermin to spread’[85]
could quite easily have been written by Tocqueville or Engels. Hulme quickly
gained a reputation for ‘lawlessness, drug dealing and prostitution, mugging and
random violence’.[86]
By the time that the Hulme People’s Rights Centre had published its report in
October 1977, it was very clear that the dream world of rationalist urban
planning was a nightmare. Just seven years after it was built, Hulme was a
modern ruin. The 1977 report described a ‘violent and frightened community’ and
urged that most of the crescents and housing blocks ‘should be flattened and
‘real homes’ built in their place’.[87]
Alan Roberts, Chairman of Manchester’s
housing committee responded immediately to the report by promising that the
crescents would ‘soon be transformed into luxury flats for single people and
childless couples’ and that two million pounds of ‘design improvements’ would
‘banish the stigma of Hulme and make it a “desirable” community on the fringe
of the city centre’.[88]
The official council policy of offering flats in Hulme to single, childless
tenants became a semi-official policy of offering tenancies to “no points”
applicants – the young, single or unemployed who had previously been
disqualified from or were extremely low priority on council housing lists. In
the wake of Alan Roberts premature and somewhat unfounded statement, Hulme
became occupied by a mixture of original tenants who had been unable to move on or had elected to
stay, and a young transient population comprised of those no longer able to
live in the parental home and of students who had dropped out or stayed on
after completing their studies. This diverse social and ethnic community
contained many of the social problems customarily associated with the inner
city tripartite of poverty, unemployment and crime - all of which impacted upon
Hulme. It would be naïve to ignore the issues of mobility and privilege since
many of those living in Hulme were able simply to move away during particularly
unpleasant periods of increased crime and violence which coincided with the
first major influx of heroin, and later on, crack cocaine. From the early 1980s
onwards there was a commonly voiced accusation that those living in Hulme were
merely middle class students slumming it. To some extent this was true and yet
the community as a whole that formed in Hulme is much more interesting than
this would suggest. The unique and shifting social mix of Hulme, when it
worked, generated a remarkable amount of cultural activity. Countless bands,[89]
writers, magazines, record labels and recording studios (such as Adam Lesser’s Out
of The Blue studio which occupied a flat in
Since 1973 there had been, somewhat
improbably, an art-house cinema called The Aaben marooned in the middle of
Hulme.[92]
And yet it was the opening of The Factory night at The Russell Club in May 1978
that gave the first real identity to the new community that was in the process
of occupying Hulme. The Factory night was launched by Tony Wilson, Alan Erasmus
and Martin Hannett (all of whom would go on to form the Factory record label)
to put on live bands at a shabby venue that had originally been built as the
social club for Public Service Vehicles (PSV) employees. This meant that
clientele of the PSV club was predominantly made up of West Indian bus drivers
and, as with The Mayflower, the club became mostly associated with reggae.
Quite how local “businessman” Don (or Dom) Tonay, came to own the PSV/Russell
Club by 1978 remains something of a mystery, along with much of his business
dealings.
In
his voluntary memoir, 24 Hour Party People, Tony Wilson recalls The
Russell Club:
The Russel [sic] was a big
black room, low ceiling rising over a rudimentary dance floor in the centre,
and a fair-enough stage diagonally cutting the far corner; peeling wooden
stools and tables, the bisexual perfume of stale beer and dope smoke. There was
an upstairs, but you wouldn’t know it. ‘No Tams allowed’ was the dominant motif
throughout the club on half a dozen signs. What the fuck does that mean? If you
have any friends who are Yardies, I suggest you ask them. [93]
The PSV Social Club (Russell Club), 1970.
The Factory night, that ran until
September 1979, brought numbers of young people into Hulme at a highly
significant transitional point when most of the families had moved away from
the estate (1976-77) and there was a large number of visibly empty properties.
After the closure of The Factory night, the Russell Club was used off and on as
a live venue throughout the 1980s and complemented meeting places such as the
White Horse Pub in the middle of Charles Barry Crescent, Blues clubs (illegal
West Indian drinking dens) that took place on the edges of Hulme and the
frequent all night parties that took place in people’s flats. By the early
1980s the Greater Manchester city council who were being starved of funds by
central government, had all but given up on any attempts to carry out repairs
or collect rent in Hulme. This further emphasised the transience and
untraceable nature of those who occupied the flats:
Jake’s flat was
Hulme became almost an independent city,
another town within a town with a shifting stream of young, single people with
their own dress codes.[95]
This was a different kind of community, like that envisioned by Richard Sennett
in his earliest exploration of the body in the city, The Uses of Disorder. Sennett imagines a
Bottletown had only been
around for ten years or so. Some kind of urban dream. Pretty soon the wholesome
families moved out and the young and the listless moved in, and then the blacks
and the robo-crusties and the shadowgoths and the students. Pretty soon the
students moved out, sick to the back of mummy and daddy’s car with too much
burglary, too much mugging. Then the blacks moved out, leaving the place to the
non-pure – hybrids only need apply.[97]
From around 1978 to 1992 Hulme
represented a unique occupancy not only within the self-contained limits of its
site but also, thanks to its proximity to the city centre, of the city itself.
Hulme felt as if ‘you were in the heart of the city’,[98]
and an increasing number of cafes, pubs, office spaces and nightclubs in the
centre of the city were colonised by those living (rent free) in Hulme. Bob
Dickinson writes of these spaces being ‘small and cheap enough for participants
to recognise each other, socialize and argue’[99]
– an important point in light of the rental premium attached to space in the
regenerated city centre.
Knott Mill – the planned dream
You’ll never see the hacienda.
It doesn’t exist.[100]
‘The most horrible spot’, writes Engels,
‘lies […] immediately south-west of
When the management of the Haçienda[103]
first visited the site the surrounding area held little to recommend it,
When we found the site for the
Haçienda, that part of town [….] was a ghost town, derelict. None of the
railway arches were in use for anything apart from some garages. No one could
understand why we wanted a place there.[104]
The Haçienda opened its doors in May
1982. However, it wasn’t until 1987/8 that the Haçienda’s fortunes took off.
The availability of MDMA (ecstasy) brought about the full integration of black
dance music into a poorly conceived live music venue that had confounded its
clientele with its pretensions to be a
axonometric of The Haçienda
From the start the Haçienda was a highly
conceptualised project, its name being taken from a line in ‘Formulary for a
New Urbanism’, Ivan Chtcheglov’s article that had been published in the first
edition of the Situationist journal, Internationale Situationniste in
1958. Declaring that ‘The Hacienda must be built’, [105]
Chtcheglov proposed to create an ‘architecture of tomorrow’ that aimed to
utilize technology in a playful realisation of dream space. Chtcheglov’s text is
nothing less than a revolutionary call for the creation of new spaces that
might create a new consciousness.
The first membership card issued (numbers
started at #051) for The Haçienda.
Regeneration – the dream of capitalism
Development on
The regeneration of
It was during such an experiment in
municipal socialism during the early 1980s that many of
As the city council’s current cultural
strategy document makes clear, the role of popular culture in the regeneration
of
Sex
Pistols play Free Trade Hall +Joy Division + Factory Records + Haçienda + The
Smiths + Stone Roses + Acid House ÷ IRA Bomb =New Selfridges & Harvey Nicks
= Queer As Folk = warehouse living = Commonwealth Games = URBAN
REGENERATION.
In common with so many of the prominent
speculators in Manchester’s future, former Factory/Haçienda supreme, Tony
Wilson, appears to be suffering from Nietzsche’s ‘consuming fever of history’.[115]
The place has history, and now
it’s In The City’s future and we know our delegates will love it.
And who else has a hotel named
after a radical 19th century political movement.[116]
Presumably he is referring to the
debatable interests of the Anti-Corn Law League and their mercantile heirs. It
is clear that the counter cultural orthodoxy that has emerged not only feeds
directly into the present regeneration of
Urbis, 2004
Many of the permanent exhibitions[118]
in Urbis are symptomatic of the regeneration of
The regenerated
Walls of the wholesale fish market with
development inside, 2004
The way in which the Northern Quarter is
presented as a “funky” bohemian zone resembles the gentrification that took
place in
All the old rag shops in
There is no new name for West Gorton,
just acres of mean looking yellow-bricked public housing built during the 1980s
and 90s. On the site of the Corona/Mayflower there is a new cheap hotel. Its
name, Quality Hotel, is somewhat unconvincing.
Site of Mayflower Club, 2004
Belle Vue feels like an amalgam of
Benjamin’s ‘dream houses of the collective’, which he listed as ‘arcades,
winter gardens, panoramas, factories, wax museums, casinos, railroad stations.’[125]
These days Belle Vue is a vast wasteland of railway sidings and goods yards
with greyhound tracks and a giant multiplex cinema standing at the edge. In
July 2004 plans were announced for a giant £270m
Hulme has changed beyond recognition
since the much-trumpeted Hulme City Challenge £37.5 million government
regeneration package that began in April 1992.[127]
Manchester City Council managed to re-write its own history when the crescents
and flats of the 1960s/70s were demolished and a carefully planned mixture of
public, private residences and co-operative social housing (Homes For Change on
Knott Mill has also been the site of
intensive regeneration with the more expensive new build private apartment
complexes, such as Will Alsop’s Urban Splash[128]
projects, situated around Little Peter Street and Castlefield. The Haçienda
that had once been occupied by Factory Records was eventually demolished. Yet
in keeping with its monumental status the new development was named “The
Hacienda Apartments” which boast one-bedroom standard flats costing £218,000 up
to penthouse apartments costing £685,500.[129]
“
Conclusion - Inhabiting the City
Nightclubbing, we’re
nightclubbing
We’re walking through town
Nightclubbing, we’re
nightclubbing
We walk like a ghost.[130]
We know what cities are/the
monuments, the tombs.[131]
The stated aim of this research project
was to consider the ways in which cities are controlled and zoned and to
examine the part that a counter culture might play in the resistance to this.
Although it would initially seem that the most obvious form of opposition would
be through a counter cultural production of difference - and Manchester has a
well-documented history of cultural and political nonconformity, often
overlapping at sites (St. Peter’s Field) or through personalities (Tony
Wilson)- as I have shown, in Manchester
such cultural moves have been successfully incorporated into an established
rhetoric of regeneration that positively feeds upon the unorthodox nature of
its recent cultural past. The recent cultural past of the city often
accommodates its own assimilation through its reliance upon Certeau calls
‘mythifying’[132] and
its uncritical acceptance of those ‘cultural treasures’ that Walter Benjamin
warns against.[133]
Rather than accepting the formula (myth)
of counter culture (see page 51), this research project has instead looking at
a series of cultural occupations of city locations from 1979 to 1982. Many of
these are seen as being too brief to warrant much investigation, being ‘pockets
of activity’ that required ‘searching out’,[134]
or in the case of Hulme, representing a rather nebulous form of cultural
activity. However the significance of these occupations is not their longevity
or impact, but rather that they were willing to follow the traces of
a past occupancy of the city. I have also shown that such historic
occupations of the city were often contested.
Manchester is not unique in its unease
about who populates its centre. From the “masses” of the nineteenth century
poor, the first wave of West Indian migrants in the 1950s and the “youth” of
the 1960s to the black “rioters” of the early 1980s and the “feral” children of
2004, there is a historical pattern of anxiety that is traceable through most
UK cities. Yet Manchester is unique in its status as the first modern city,
created by the productive force of the working classes who inhabited it.
Manchester also provides a historical pattern of anxiety and suppression of
working class bodies. The suppression might use the metaphor of disease; or be
bound up with the religious fervour and moral guardianship of Chief Constables
McKay and Anderton; these responses can be veiled by idealistic moves to
improve the working class “condition” through the dispersal or containment of
the population in rationalized housing schemes. And crucially, the rhetoric of
regeneration, the ‘aseptic, generic and surveilled’[135]
city of today, must be recognised as just another historic form of social
control. What these historical responses rely upon is a notion of progress – be
it sanitary, moral, utopian or ambient. The past cannot be tolerated outside of
the museum space.
Yet for many who lived in the ruins of
Manchester during the late 1970s and early 1980s it felt as if the industrial
past of Manchester had invaded the present. For writer Jon Savage who first
moved to Manchester in April 1979, the city spoke to him through the ‘dark
spaces and empty places’ and ‘vacant industrial sites – the endless detritus of
the nineteenth century’,[136]
and he recalls ‘getting stoned and driving around finding the weirdest and most
derelict bits’.[137]
The occupation of the city centre during this period not only followed the
traces of previous occupations but also recognised the ‘potential not-yet
reality’[138] of the
dream of capitalism. Between 1979 and 1982 history was not something that you had
(as in ‘the place has history’), but rather thronged by its vociferous dead the
past spoke of unknown pleasures and of possibilities rather than progress. And
although this project has suggested a certain sealing off of history, as long
as regeneration is recognised as a discursive process, the possibility of
redeeming history is always present.
These occupations or resistances are
theorised through Benjaminian notions of ruin (Manchester/Belle Vue/Hulme as
industrial ruins), where the street runs counter to the bourgeois interior, and
through Benjamin’s dialectical appreciation of the dream both as the Marxist
phantasmagoria of capitalism and the revolutionary potential of the surrealist
dream. History becomes something contestable.
And Certeau writes of ‘urban life’ allowing ‘what has been excluded’
from the socio-economic and political totalising discourse of the ‘urbanistic
plan’ to ‘interact outside the purview of the panoptic power’.[139]
According to Certeau:
Beneath the discourses
ideologizing it [the city], there is a proliferation of tricks and fusions of
power that are devoid of legible identity, that lack any perceptible access and
that are without rational clarity – impossible to manage.[140]
This project has attempted to give an
account of those oppositions that have on the whole been overlooked by the
narrative of regeneration. There is of course the danger that in presenting
tangible instances of such fleeting occupations they are merely formatted in a
way that makes them more easily assimilated into the suffocating pot pourri of
heritage that sweetens the air in the post-industrial, postmodern city of
Manchester.
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Web Sites
For a vision of Barnsley, Yorkshire as a Tuscan hill village.
For decent translations of situationist texts.
Lowell Boleau’s The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit site that offers an extensive tour of the decaying centre of America’s first industrial city.
Ray Gosling and Allan Horsfall’s site that contains details on the proposed esquire club project partly backed by Reg Kilduff
www.lwtua.free-online.co.uk/shadowplay/joyd
Joy Division online resource, “Shadowplay” with more information than you could ever need such as venues (with dates) that the band played. This site along with a similar one for The Fall, www.visi.com/fall/gigography/77-82, helped me to date the opening and closing of some of the venues I was looking at.
Tourist focused site that promises ‘a virtual Encyclopaedia of Greater Manchester’.
Used as a general resource.
The site of the Manchester Institute for Popular Culture.
Discography
A Certain Ratio – ‘All Night Party’, 7” single, Factory Records, 1979
The Fall – ‘Various Times’, b-side of ‘It’s The New Thing’, 7” single, Step Forward Records, 1978
Iggy Pop – ‘Nightclubbing’, LP track from The Idiot, Virgin Records, 1977
The Passage, ‘Lon-don’, LP track from For All and None, Virgin Records 1981
Sources
Manchester Local History Unit has a large
photographic database, which houses thousands of images from the mid nineteenth
century onwards. The images on pages 19, 23, 26, 27, 28, 32, 33, 35, 38, 42,
and the back cover are from this magnificent resource. I also spent a
considerable time poring over photographs of cobbled streets and dark alleyways
(often too dark to reproduce) as I was researching the area that now lies
beneath the Arndale Centre. Since I had no memory of the physical appearance of
this sizeable area of Manchester the images I looked at helped me to visualize
the area as I was writing about it. I also used photographs to piece together
history of on Oozits and the Mayflower and to jog my memory of Hulme, Harpurhey
and Gorton during the late 1970s. Unfortunately many of the images were
somewhat vaguely dated (“the 1960s”), wherever possible I have attempted to
date the images a little more precisely.
On page 16 the photograph is taken from Manchester
by Alan Kidd (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002) and the illustration
on page 47 is taken from The Architectural Review (CLXX11, 1982).
The maps of central Manchester in 1900
and 1971 are from the map collection at Senate House, University of London
Library.
The map of Manchester districts is taken
from www.manchester2002-uk.com
and the tourist map of Manchester is taken from the ‘Lonely Planet’ online
guide.
I took the photos on pages 49, 53, 55 and
56 during my research trip to Manchester in July 2004. The ticket for the
Mayflower Club and the Haçienda membership card on pages 36 and 48 are
surprising survivors from my past.
The recollections quoted from interviews
are unpublished elsewhere.
Interview
Profiles
Richard Boon – managed the Buzzcocks who released the first independently manufactured record, Spiral Scratch (1977) on the New Hormones label that Boon ran from an office shared with Nico’s management on Newton Street in Manchester. During mid 1980s moved to London and worked at Rough Trade records. Now lives with his family in Stoke Newington, London where he works as a librarian. [Interviewed 29 July 2004]
Michael Bracewell – writer, novelist and cultural commentator whose first book was the novel The Crypto-Amnesia Club (1988). This has been followed by several novels and non-fiction works such as England is Mine: Pop Life in Albion From Wilde to Goldie and most recently, the nineties: when surface was depth. He has presented two TV documentaries for the BBC – a profile of Oscar Wilde and a film about architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner. [Email correspondence 11 August 2004]
Robert (Bob)
Dickinson – moved to Manchester in the late 1970s
in order to experience punk and worked as a journalist for many publications
including alternative papers such as The New Manchester Review
and City Fun. Wrote Imprinting the Sticks: The Alternative Press
beyond London. Formed The Manchester Area Psychogeographic (1996-98). Now
works for BBC Radio in Manchester where he produces many arts programmes
including Front Row. [Interviewed 8 July 2004]
Dave Haslam – author of Manchester, England and Adventures on the Wheels of Steel: The Rise of the Superstar DJs. Arrived in Manchester as a student, and lived in Hulme from 1981-88 from where he produced his Debris fanzine which ran between November 1983 and June 1989. Wrote for various magazines including The Face and worked as a DJ at the Hacienda and The Broadwalk. Currently writing a book on the 1970s called Not Abba. [Interviewed July 2004]
Ray Gosling – journalist and radio/TV broadcaster who made over 100 television documentaries for Granada and the BBC and over 1000 radio documentaries, many looking at the minutiae of everyday life. In January 2004 Ray Gosling was the subject of a BBC4 documentary exploring the consequences of his bankruptcy. Gosling has also been a long-standing campaigner for gay rights. [Telephone interview 22 July 2004]
C.P. Lee – was the front man and founding member of 70s rock satirists Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias. Since the band broke up in the 1980s he has written two books on Bob Dylan - Like the Night: Bob Dylan and the road to the Manchester Free Trade Hall (Helter Skelter) and Like a Bullet of Light: The films of Bob Dylan (Helter Skelter) – and a history of Manchester’s music scene, Shake, Rattle and Rain: Popular Music Making in Manchester 1955-1995 (Hardinge Simpole). Started Manchester Area Psychogeographic with Bob Dickinson. He is currently writing a memoir, When We Were Thin. He is a lecturer in popular culture at Salford University. [Interviewed 8 July 2004]
Jon Savage – author of what many consider to be the definitive book on punk, England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. Also author of The Kinks: The Official Biography, The Faber Book of Pop (with Hanif Kureishi), The Haçienda Must Be Built! and Time Travel which collected together his journalism from Sounds, Melody Maker, The Face, The Observer and many other publications. [Telephone interview 1 June 2004]
Gordon Sharples – works at the local history unit at Manchester Central Library. During the 1960s he worked as a printer on Withy Grove and knew the area between Shudehill and Market Street well. [Brief interview 7 July 2004]