English Journey Part 3. Minninglow - Sheffield.
Cycling round England.
3.8.2023 Minninglow – Stoke-on-Trent – Manchester
I wake up slowly, to my relief the wind had died down and the sun was out. I ate another sandwich from my co-op haul the previous day and slowly packed up as I heard a solitary walker trudge past. The hill was beautiful in the morning sun, streaming down through the gently shuddering leaves casting dancing shadows onto the tent. All the grass was soaked in the night’s rain, and it still dripped from the leaves and branches with every gentle gust. I remembered to take a picture of my camping spot before taking down the tent. Then I went back to the other side of the hill to see the view over The Dark Peak and the festival wreckage. Kinder Scout loomed over all the other gentle features of The Peak District, Loose Hill, Mam Tor, Winn Hill, Stanage Edge, Higger Tor, Derwent Ridge. I identified them all as I looked out in peace over the hills and thought of how often I’d spotted this little feature on the horizon from over there, without visiting it until now.
In the morning sunlight the festival wreckage was there, less jarring and bizarre in the clear light of day than in the twilight of the previous evening, but out of place, nonetheless. I strode back to my bike and prepared to embark, cycling down the steep footpath through an empty field, the goat and sheep all gone. Along the cycle paths that led away from Minninglow I kept stopping and climbing up fences to try and get a proper view of the festival site, the eerily silent wreckage of a party in these tranquil fields. I saw a few temporary car park signs ‘To Femme Fest’, as their website explains, ‘Femme Fest is a music festival for LGBTQ women and female allies who support our community.’ The sense of dissonance in the landscape that the wreckage had created dissolved with this realisation, it was just another mid-summer celebration in the English countryside. I push on through the limestone hills and stop a few times to admire the shape of Minninglow on the horizon before plummeting down a valley to the village of Hartington for breakfast.
The ancient monuments on Minninglow consist of a neolithic chambered tomb dating back to 3,400 BC and 2 bronze age bowl barrows. Excavations of the chambered tomb in the 19th century revealed human bones and Roman bronzes, coins and pottery. In the bronze age barrows; 2 flint knives, a bronze razor, and a bone tool. The distinctive shape of that hill served as some point of reference, culturally as well as geographically, for at least 3,400 years. Most equivalent monuments of our age have lasted just a few hundred years. Even the most sacred places of worship, very few are older than a thousand. It’s no surprise that Minninglow, still catching my eye as I cycled away, drew me through the steep hills in that evening of exertion and determination. Although it is silent and solitary; I think it has a heavy, dignified presence. The figure of Minninglow bears over the clutter of modernity, the clutter of history. Adorned in neolithic bones, clutching flint knives and bronze earthenware, scattering effete Roman coins into the mud, portents of an avalanche of decadent affluence and detritus in a modern age that would disregard it, as it treads imperceptibly through time. A crown of spindly beech trees.
In Hartington I stopped at a farm shop and café for breakfast. Full English and 2 americanos. I connected my phone to the Wi-Fi and tried to make some calls, looking for a new place to live in Manchester as our tenancy agreement at our current terrace house next to Salford Precinct was about to end. I was crashing back to reality. This wouldn’t be easy. my flatmate was working full time, and I couldn’t arrange this while cycling, I’d have to go back to Manchester and stay until I found somewhere. I decided to aim to arrive in Manchester that evening, via the long bike ride to Stoke-on-Trent. I tried in vain to do some house viewing in that little café and the harsh reality of Manchester’s rental market hit me. This would be a full-time job. I had a pleasant interaction with the café workers and set off down the Manifold trail.
At the start of the trail a man with his family asked where I’d come from, and I told them the story of my journey so far. It was good motivation to see leisurely weekend day-trippers’ vaguely impressed reactions to my elaborations of the journey and the length of its route. Especially to get your mind off the Manchester rental market. This cycle path follows an old railway line that weaved up the steep gorges. There’s footage of it from 1930 with intertitles that read ‘Hidden away in the heart of the Manifold Valley, Derbyshire, runs a queer little railway, whose traffic is just milk. For over four miles the railway winds its way through this fertile valley. Thor’s cave, where the old legend whispers the great god lived.’ I pass the dark shape of Thor’s cave etched into the stark limestone cliffs along this steep dale. The cave is another feature of ancient humanity, with evidence of habitation from 10,000 years ago. I emerge onto a main road, then rejoin tracks and winding little roads that take me far through Staffordshire. As I rise over the moors again, I get a brief glimpse of Minninglow one last time on the horizon, then thunder down towards Stoke-on-Trent along very hilly roads and a canal towpath.
As I emerge into the suburbs of the city, the housing estates remind me of those around Sheffield. Hilly with plenty of open green space, knackered parks dotted around, swings out of reach, their chains wrapped up around the top bar. Lots of St. George’s Crosses, lots of Union Jacks. Sparse run-down houses, the Staffordshire moors in the distance, footpaths weave around bland housing. Suddenly a horrible shopping centre looms over me and I’m in the centre. I cycle around the handful of streets this centre consists of, studying the city maps I discern this is some kind of centre, though it appears there are other little centres dotted around. I remember from Priestley’s book, the city of six towns, I’m in Hanley. This is the commercial centre, but the feeling that Stoke-upon-Trent is a sprawling conurbation rather than a homogeneous city is palpable as you explore it. Priestley emphasises that it is diminutive, it has a ‘universal littleness’ as a result of its true form as towns in accidental proximity rather than city. I come across a square, its centrepiece a statue of figures holding pots and the city museum beside it. It’s worth taking the risk to lock up the bike with all my things left vulnerable to thieves in its pannier bags to visit the museum. It stands testament to the city’s rich history while its high streets gather dust.
Priestley skips from Nottingham to Bradford and back onto his original route to Stoke. He is unfamiliar with the city. He claims to see it with a mind like a blank sheet of paper, but he does have a literary reference to the town in Arnold Bennett, a popular early 20th century writer from Hanley whose stories were often set in ‘The Five Towns’. Such a reference and his assumption of readers’ familiarity with the man seems distant today. Priestley decries the city’s lack of recognition for this prolific writer, I saw no sign of any monument or memorial or reference to him of any kind. Perhaps he has been left behind by history on account of his realism, perhaps his stories were belittled by the adherents of the next generation of better-memorialised modernists such as those of the Bloomsbury Group. It is important to note that Priestley doesn’t depict the city in some prelapsarian golden age of pre-post-industrialisation – ‘that anything even vaguely decorative should come from these places seems a miracle.’ He depicts a city (or collection of towns) entirely dominated by its industry with no room for anything else, creating an isolated sense of provincial remoteness despite its geographic centrality.
I feel a keen sense of curiosity about this city, once an industrial giant of a conurbation that ate up all the towns around it, now a vague, unknown and peripheral place but still with a large population. The first exhibition I come across is about the discovery of a Mercian treasure hoard. This hoard consists of war gear from the 7th century, over 4000 objects, one of the greatest discoveries from the early medieval era. Many of these pieces are ornate and meticulously decorated but damaged as they have been stripped from the objects they were attached to. They may have been ripped off as an offering to pagan gods or as a symbolic stripping of the previous owners’ identity after defeat in battle. Left in the earth to reemerge to the fascination of modern archaeologists.
I wander through the permanent exhibition on Stoke’s industrial expansion and international significance, its lavish and ornate ceramics. In its art gallery I focus on two paintings. Stoke Moon by Arthur Berry is an urban streetscape, the bright moon illuminating roofs and sooty brick walls with pale light. Look again and it’s the Staffordshire moors, bleak rock formations illuminated, shades of mud brown. Kitchen Chimneys by Maurice Wade is a monochromatic rendering of the geometrical shapes of terraced housing. Even in the brightest days of summer these two minimal paintings, drained of colour, are instantly recognisable as the image of a familiar England. Far from the England of thatched cottages and blazing chalk white horses, this is the England of an urban and melancholy post-industrial land under a stable and dull maritime climate.
Outside the museum there’s a bottle kiln chimney, tucked away and hidden behind a car park. The city was once full of these, serving different purposes in the pottery industry, now there’s a few dotted around, their distinctive shape still an emblem of the city. Priestley describes their bizarre proliferation, above rows of cottage houses, guzzling coal to fire up the temperatures to bake clay and fill the sky with soot. This one seemed forgotten and left to fall to ruin. I pass through a little square on the way back to the commercial centre of Hanley, ‘Mercian rain god laughing’ emblazoned in stark white capital letters across a brick wall overlooking a less forthright sculpture. The sculpture is a mother and child, signifying rebirth and new life. An arrangement of contrasts in the urban landscape, framed against the backdrop of a struggling high street. For a city of 256,375 there is not much there. Some 1960s concrete modernism expresses a jaded optimism. But it seems forgotten. There are a lot of homeless people, I pass by a man shouting in the street, jabbering aggressively in some unreachable distress.
There’s little choice as I scour the shops for places to eat, ending up in an Esquire coffee shop where the only worker is preparing to close but says I’m welcome to eat and sit inside for a while. I tell her about my journey, that it’s my first time in Stoke-on-Trent and that I was interested in the city. She just says it’s a shithole in a strange accent – a mix of northern and Brummy – that I’d noticed from passers-by. I tell her that I went to the museum. In her honesty she betrays not a glimmer of civic pride. She puts up with me as I finish my coffee and closes the shop. I earnestly thank her “Thanks for introducing me to Stoke” and set off with a feeling that despite its grim impressions, there is more to the city, there is a frayed soul to it.
That empty feeling in the city could be attributed to what Priestley observed – ‘as a district to do anything but work in, it has nothing to recommend it.’ He notes the men already idle in the decline of their ‘fine old craft’ due to pressures from competition abroad. Now there is no sign of that industry at all, outside of the museum and the sparse kilns, dilapidated ornaments of a lost past. That industry’s decline must have left a void. ‘Civilised man, except in his capacity as a working potter, has not arrived here yet, just as the real city of Stoke-on-Trent, which will no doubt be a monument of civic dignity, has not yet arrived.’ The potteries have left but the monument of civic dignity has not arrived. There were traces of it in that museum and square with its modernist sculpture, a sincere homage to the potteries.
Priestley’s faith in progress is hard to resuscitate, it’s difficult not to fall into the soft grip of nostalgia for old futures. In his own words again – ‘if you are not working there, if the depression in America or the triumphant competition of the cut-price countries has thrown you out, then God help you.’ Of that industry itself he’s enthralled, watching the ‘new big transformer’ of the emerging electric kiln technology send 500,000 volts jump over copper globes in blue lightning. This vision heralds a momentous electrified future to him. He’s guided around various factories admiring the trades of the potters with fascination and admiration as he does in the industries of other cities. His writing exalts the skill and creativity of the pottery industry and the rich culture that develops around it. He describes stages of production, terminology and nimble feats of craftsmanship. He doesn’t hold back from criticising some of the aesthetic results of this industry – ‘dreadful elaborations of cupids and roses.’ A tendency I’d noticed in the twee saucers and teapots that the museum displays.
The strongest impression is that of a rich creative culture that contrasts the dreary life outside the potteries, as the showcases of centuries of Staffordshire pottery in the museum contrast the dreary streets of Stoke-on-Trent today. He describes the silence of an audience leaving the city’s only theatre after watching a mediocre touring revue as the national anthem played. He describes dirty canals and sententious guides. He describes the manipulation of clay by worker, kiln and tool at various stages of production and adornment. He describes his own attempts to make vases and throw as he’s shown around the industries by attentive guides, casting my own spontaneous wanderings in the light of these well-organised trips that utilise good connections in a light that shows how superficial it is, just cycling through a place and noting impressions without engaging properly. On the other hand, I don’t know if I would have witnessed any illuminating visions of the city’s soul by clumsily mishandling a blob of clay on a spinning wheel in eulogy of an ancient art that has moved away. In another flurry of optimism Priestley ends the chapter referring to that blueprint of civic fulfilment that he sees emerging over the horizon of the future Stoke-on-Trent. A mirage, all you can see on the horizon today are the cold heights of the Staffordshire moors. The monument of civic dignity is still agonisingly far out of reach.
I weaved up a cycle path, through a steep valley north, past old industrial shapes, a few chimneys, abandoned warehouses, drab suburban housing. Then I climb up, the moors coming closer into view. I notice Sutton Common BT Tower on a hill that looks out over the south of The Peak District. Suddenly I’m at the summit and Manchester is all sprawled out before me. I bomb it down into the city’s huge basin. Past Alderley Edge and Jobril Bank. Into Cheshire where the thatched cottages come back with the gangs of lycra-clad cyclists. Winding roads, enormous hedgerows, churches and villages. I drink a pint at a pub called The Frozen Mop and push on, one more push. Then I’m onto the long straight canal that cuts through the suburbia of Sale and south-west Manchester. I pass over the shipping canal at Salford as dusk falls, past the shining blocks of the quays and the still, empty waters of a once busy port. Soon I arrive home in the heart of Salford, my friends laughing at my wild-man state and the manic glare in my eyes as I tell them stories of ancient hill forts, deluges of rain, mysterious forgotten cities, the enigmatic heart of England, Mercian rain gods, crazed lampers, thatched cottages and steep hills. “You look like Tom Hanks in Castaway” they respond and offer me a huge plate of food as I settle into the unfamiliar and jovial comfort of a sofa in a living room.
II
4-10.8.2023 Manchester
Priestley’s journey was subjective and informal. He repeatedly reminds us that he is not conducting an analysis of England’s social and economic situation but capturing a snapshot of the country at work and play. It is also a personal journey; he dwells on his hometown of Bradford for some time and his commentary is coloured by personal biases, stubborn opinions and sometimes by crude prejudices. His choice of guides, objects of interaction and points of commentary are predetermined by his values and his overall ideology, defined by a struggle against injustice towards the creativity and solidarity of the working class. Albeit a narrow, masculine and white conception of what defines that class. My own journey is equally as personal and informal, it is also probably defined by certain characteristics and limitations that arise from my own solitary perspective on a complex world. Although I have taken Priestley’s journey to plot my route, anchor a historical reference and form a kind of dialogue, I also take the liberty to cut myself loose from his trajectory at times.
So that’s what I’m doing now, what follows is an elaboration of the two cities in England that I know best. Two cities that I can dwell on for a while, they are central to my identity, and they are central to that of England, but they are also stubbornly themselves. No English journey would be complete without them, but a full exploration of the country would necessitate much broader forays into its sprawling personalities. Manchester and Sheffield stand side by side in the centre of the country, separated by the moors of the southern Pennines. I had to spend a week in Manchester, struggling with that totem of our modern predicament, the sad frenzy of the money-soaked yet cruelly exclusive rental market. Although I only spent a weekend in my hometown of Sheffield, I elaborate it as it enhances its meaning through my years of experiences and through the feeling of home that powerfully projects a city’s significance beyond the confines of its physical characteristics. Back on the chronological plane of time, I settled back into domestic life and woke up fresh one Friday morning in a Manchester summer.
Friday
I sat in the living room, house searching on my laptop all day. I sat waiting for new adverts to appear on various rental property and Estate Agent websites, poised with my phone in hand ready to make the call and snap up the elusive and sought-after viewings, competing with thousands of other drifting customers playing this vast game to snatch the rewards of a reliable roof over the head and a safe bed to sleep on. I managed to fill a week’s itinerary of viewings by ruthlessly exploiting my one great advantage over the desperate multitude, the teacher’s expanses of 6-week-holiday time that left me to focus on the appearance of property adverts with the complete engagement that would be hard to find for people with any other commitments or the demands of a normal job. I’m sure that Priestley would point out the tragic nature of the housing predicament that we find ourselves in. Thousands of apartments are springing up in the skies around us with a mechanised ease that is both futuristic and alienating. These structures of glass are more like hives built to harvest energy for parasitic alien overlords than comfortable dwellings for the vulnerable and needy corporal demands of the human being. Whatever kind of energy these greedy alien colonists want to feast on, they aren’t harvesting it from the sheer accumulation of laborious working people, as most of these are pushed out of the city into its cheaper suburbs while the luxurious open space of the expansive luxury apartments – space so scarce elsewhere – goes empty and neglected.
Still, a good number of young professionals like me and my flatmate, ready and able to commit to the full-time demands of modern professions, fill up the less extravagant yet hideously overpriced options these endless blocks of flats offer. Inadvertently pushing out whole communities of working-class people into suburbs and housing insecurity, feeding the endless cycle of poverty. Maybe Priestley would have pointed out that the parasitic alien overlords that have colonised our cities are symbols of the same market forces that demanded the desolation of the northern industries in the 1930s; international fluctuations of wealth that the government refuses to regulate for the sake of stock markets and corporate profits. But he would probably have rather waxed lyrical about the admirable masculine skills of the binman or the firefighter. I tear myself away from the Matrix of the Manchester rental market with my full itinerary of viewings for the week and head out with my housemate to watch Oppenheimer and drink some pints in the Peveril of the Peak. This pub deserves recognition as a great Manchester institution, standing dignified between the congested streets and hasty developments of the city-centre, where you can relax in the comfort of a construction built in relation to the human form, offering the cosy protection that is conducive to an environment to chat and drink pints in. We made friends with a lad from Lancaster called Niall and played pool, later venturing into the night to the Soup Kitchen nightclub where some DJs we knew were playing. We stumbled home late in the night, and I encouraged my flatmate to write a drunken contribution to my journal notes for the English Journey, he wrote:
‘The families lay the land and words are passed down, hand to mouth, hand to mouth, people relay this information back and forth, back and forth (broken record) the law of the land is quite specific, pass down knowledge, feed your kin, the troubles are ongoing, look after loved ones.’
Saturday
Force myself to the viewings in the storm. Of all the unseasonal Atlantic weather fronts that swept over Britain from the southwest that summer, this was the worst. In the cold rain it felt like a land of perpetual winter. I saw a crap house in Crumpsall and a posh flat beyond our budget in Ordsall. Miserable steel towers and construction sites.
Sunday
Day of rest. We drive to the hills over the Goyt valley and walk along the ridge, then down the valley to the old ruin of Errwood Hall and back to the car. We just miss the old shrine to St. Joseph, built in 1889 as a memorial for a teacher from Spain called Maria Dolores de Ybarguen who worked at the school of the Errwood Hall estate. Within the shrine you can find Spanish glazed tiles that depict St. Joseph himself. An unexpected feature in a sparse moorland landscape from which the glass towers of Manchester loom in the great basin below. A guy we met in the woods directed us there, but we didn’t quite make it that day, only catching a glimpse of it through the trees.
Monday
Viewings and house searching. I cycled around the city visiting houses and flats. Still, nothing that was suitable. I drowned my sorrows with 4 cans of Guiness and hoped for better luck the next day.
Tuesday
I viewed some more houses, tried to put an offer down for one that was suitable, but it had been snapped up by the very next viewer. I needed to get my mind off the flat searching, so I ran a half marathon around the city, had dinner with my some friends and then drank wine and chatted all night.
Wednesday
Woke up hungover and forced myself to go to more viewings, tried to put in another offer on a flat. Already taken again. Probably for the best though, I was getting impatient, and this place wouldn’t have been a very nice place to live. I got into bed very relieved and still hungover. Wondering if I’d ever find somewhere to live.
Thursday
It was a hot day, and I had a good feeling. I cycled around doing viewings in a T-shirt and shorts, locking up the bike in the streets and being led around flats by estate agents, getting used to the routine, looking out for mould, asking all the same questions. I met a Thornley Groves estate agent by coincidence and viewed an apartment that I hadn’t even booked in advance through the tiresome ritual of repeatedly calling irritable estate agents, a miraculous achievement. I viewed a place next to The Angel and had a pint in there, another proud Manchester institution of a pub. The viewing pantomime dragged on, but then I found somewhere. It was a risk, because I didn’t even get a proper viewing, the viewing was just an online video, but it looked the part; central, 2 bathrooms and bedrooms, space for a bike. I called the estate agent in a hurry, put in an offer, got confirmation from the shadowy landlord (the last time I’d hear of their existence most of our tenancy), signed off the paperwork and sealed the deal. With the job boxed off, I would set off again and resume the journey the next day. I didn’t want to stay in Manchester, I never really feel like I do…
Manchester
There is something deeply wrong with Manchester. Manchester’s broken. Manchester’s sullen. Manchester scowls at you from a distance, languishing in its great drainage basin, collecting all the silt and mud from the land around. Manchester scowls at you from close by, its furrowed brow of such hostility that it amazes you anyone ever chose to inhabit this marsh, let alone build the capital of the North here. The gateway to the North.
Early Manchester
When I first moved to Manchester, I cycled into the city one morning and stopped to look at a statue in St. Peter’s square. ‘Adrift’ by John Cassidy fecit 1907. The plaque reads ‘John Cassidy was born in Ireland but settled in Manchester. He wrote that his sculpture represents… HUMANITY ADRIFT ON THE SEA OF LIFE, DEPICTING SORROWS AND DANGERS, HOPES AND FEARS AND EMBODYING THE DEPENDENCE OF HUMAN BEINGS UPON ONE ANOTHER, THE RESPONSE OF HUMAN SYMPATHY TO HUMAN NEEDS, AND THE INEVITABLE DEPENDENCE UPON DIVINE AID.’ The sculpture depicts a family, floundering on a raft in a stormy sea. The heroic father drags the women and children up out of the waves, holding aloft a sheet that unfurls like a soldier’s flag rippling out over a ravaged battleground. A pessimistic interpretation of life against which only masculine strength can drag us out of the depths of SORROWS AND DANGERS, divine aid reduced to the simplified heroism of the superhero. Cassidy made the statue of Edward Colston that was pulled down in Bristol.
I cycled along Deansgate, locked the bike up next to the book shop and entered to rummage through its collection. Then I headed down towards the River Irwell to The People’s History Museum. The temporary exhibition space contained a tribute to Jo Cox full of community art, school art, stories of her life and the struggle against fascism. One wall contained short stories written by locals of her constituency, one of them caught my eye – ‘I understood that our house was linked by a mysterious system of coded signs into a network which stretched away miles and miles down the main road in each direction, out beyond the black sprawl of Manchester and Salford and into the countryside around, invisible filaments which reached on and on through the rest of the country, the whole of the country, never-ending invisible paths, and that my mother’s heart yearned to be elsewhere.’
The permanent exhibition wove a chronological narrative of British working-class politics through its galleries, starting with the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the Peterloo Massacre then weaving its way around the halls through the world wars to the miners’ strike. The proud banners of Trade Unions and other icons of workers’ organisation adorned the walls. Bold fonts and semi-religious imagery of struggling workers reaching towards the symbols of socialism and unity – meaning spelled out in didactic form. The museum takes upheaval and turns it into something presentable and palatable, it’s typical of post-modern Manchester that the harsh qualities of industrial change and social tumult are transmuted into objects and symbols for display and quiet contemplation. Does it really make sense to put radicalism in a museum when the need for radicalism remains? Does it make sense to memorialise when the situation demands action? Still, the main feelings I took away from this museum were admiration and gratitude that such a place exists, and that the idealism of past struggles are not forgotten. The future fought in the heat of struggle leads to the future stored in cabinet boxes, forced to be history even when the future lingers on. I left and followed the Irwell to the Museum of Science and Industry.
‘New ways to work and live. Nobody had seen anything like Manchester before. By 1831 its population of 188,000 was double what it had been just 20 years earlier. This rapid and uncontrolled growth created a new, urban environment for the people who flocked to work in its cotton mills. Mill work was a new type of toil. It transformed people’s days and became a way of life for generations of families. Outside the factory walls, in sprawling, swarming Manchester, workers lived lives nobody had planned for. Ruled by machines. Manchester’s mill workers toiled in time with their machines. The new system of cotton manufacturing changed the way they organised their daily lives. Winter or summer, rain or shine, the machines set the pace, and the factory clock told them when to work and when to rest. Time was money and some dishonest manufacturers even tried to fiddle the time in their mills, forcing their employees to work for longer.’ The ribbon loom with Jacquard head designed in 1900 had a programming system. Cards with small, punched holes programmed the loom to weave different designs. The punch card system inspired the invention of the earliest computer. Spinning mules and looms weave together threads into fabrics and churn out profit in a process that weaves together the threads of money, production and information all across the world to create the fabric of modernity.
Late Manchester
In William Morris’s utopian novel News from Nowhere written in 1890, the protagonist inexplicably travels into the future and finds himself in a pleasant medievalist-socialist utopia. A garden-paradise where the state has withered away and left behind a craft-based economy of abundance, luxury and democracy where healthy citizens lounge around playing lutes and whittling. Although Priestley would have scoffed at Morris’s vision and indeed, he criticises British intellectuals’ tendency to romanticise a medieval past various times in The English Journey; there are some parallels between them. They both focus on the desire to rationally organise society to form communities of ideal citizens that are productive, creative and virtuous by the standards of British socialism. In Morris’s utopia, the protagonist meets an old man recounting the history of this land so greatly transformed from that satanic Victorian England by revolution and dizzying progress-regress. Amidst the old man’s tales of tumult, uprising and revolution he mentions ‘a place called Manchester, which has now disappeared.’
How did Manchester disappear? Rochdale was swept away by a northern gale that rushed down the Pennines. Stockport dissolved in the damp fog. Oldham was crushed by dovestones that fell from the hills. Bury never existed except in medieval times. Bolton committed suicide. Salford floated down the shipping canal and drifted into the Irish sea. Wigan went back to Lancashire. Sale became a water park. Ashton-Under-Lyme became a shopping centre. Marple and Hazel Grove became outdoor adventure playgrounds for decadent rich families. Manchester the metropole lost its satellites and disintegrated. Everyone moved out into the garden-towns. All that’s left is a heap of red brick, a few girders of steel and shards of glass that jut out. Manchester was always a fake centre that parasitically fed from its metropoles but then the dynamics changed. It’s not what Morris would have expected, he just saw Manchester as a load of slums and factories that had to go. It’s not what Priestley would have expected. The past used to be full of possible futures, teleology disintegrates into apathy. One hot day, nobody could be bothered, and nobody went to work. Everybody just hung around staring into the distance, twiddling their thumbs. There was so much to think about that people just stopped doing anything. A few panicked bureaucrats ensured that robots took over the important jobs to avoid a complete catastrophe but mostly everyone just stopped bothering.
Now that Manchester has gone forever, take a moment to remember it. The city sprawled across a convergence of rivers. Irwell: ere-well, meaning "hoar or white spring", the first part of the name may also be the Brittonic *ar, an ancient river-name element that implies horizontal motion, "flowing", "rising" or else "springing up". The Mersey, border river. Meandering to the south of the city, intermittently spilling its banks into the rich suburbs of Didsbury when it can no longer bear its load of brown torrenting water from the moors. The Irk, derived from the Anglo-Saxon roebuck, meaning deer, twisting under railways and bridges, its dirty banks once lined with slums banished beneath layers of development. The Tib, named after the Tiber of Rome by nostalgic Romans who wondered how they had ended up in this barely habitable marsh, now vanished beneath the concrete. The Medlock from old English, med meaning meadow and lac meaning stream. The Irwell drained the northern valleys while the Medlock and Irk meandered into the Irwell from the north-east while the Mersey sweeps south of the whole area in a long arch into which the artificially swollen ship canal / Irwell surrenders its waters at an obscure industrial park.
The city was founded by the Roman Empire in the year 79 as a minor fort, Mamucium – city of the breast-like hill. After they left, a great earthwork was thrown up, painstakingly dug out of the earth with crude instruments, sometime between the 5th and 11th centuries, 6 miles across the marsh from Ashton-under-Lyme to Stretford. Possibly as a territorial boundary to divide Mercia and Northumbria but nobody knows. For hundreds of years Greater Manchester remained a sparsely populated boggy area. The earthwork survives in points across the city as an inconspicuous unmarked ditch. In Platt Fields Park its existence is recognised by an information board, and you can follow it through woods and fields beside groups of university students smoking weed and listening to Bluetooth speakers. its name is believed to derive from an old Germanic water spirit: Nico’s ditch. This water sprite roamed these marshes for centuries, luring unwary travellers into the bogs and pools before the industrial revolution finally tamed the marshes, funnelling its waters into concrete culverts. The water sprite has left behind the marshes and transformed into its modern incarnation as a scally who robs unwary travellers in the parks and ginnels. Hundreds of years ago, a patchwork of sparse homesteads echoed into a future of dense urban sprawl, you can still hear the sounds of the remote past impressed into and bestowed upon successions of life and labour in expansion and conquest of marsh.
In Manchester, Priestley goes to his familiar theatre. Back then, the shadowy ‘Manchester City Fathers’ had the power to prevent firms from opening cafés with music on Sunday evenings, gatekeeping the sombre, boring sanctity of the holy day. The city was still sprawling back then, feeding off its numerous satellite towns. He comments on the Lancashire ‘terror of seeming affected and pretentious’ that has the unfortunate tendency to reduce people to a lower common denominator. This tendency to knock down a peg is widespread throughout the north to this day; I am surprised to see it characterised as a specifically Lancashire phenomenon. He sees the empty mills, rain and sleet and fog, warehouses and dark streets exaggerate the oppressive power of the bleak Manchester rain. He finds the extravagant Manchester Midland Hotel too hot and dedicates a substantial passage of text to complain about this fact, but he likes Manchester theatre audiences. He shuns the bleak November city to dwell on his passion for the theatre, especially in a city with a theatrical establishment he knows well, and who can blame him.
His theatre on Oxford Road is like a dim vast building in a dream. He looks from the gallery onto a proscenium arch: the barrier between audience and actor, witness and perpetrator, passive spectator and omnipotent design. Manchester fog has crept into the theatre and taken the place of the curtain, a thick barrier of fog that separates artist and public. His pen is the director’s hand beyond the proscenium as it elaborates the characters and life of the theatre. England is his show, even if he was trying to depict reality; the brave port of Southampton, the bucolic hills of The Cotswolds, the proud city of Bristol, the ingenuity of Coventry, the urban misery of The Black Country, industrious Leicester and Nottingham, the dignified wool merchants of Bradford, the deft potters of Stoke, slums of hopeless victims in Liverpool, the sadness and resignation of unemployed cotton mill workers in Lancashire.
All characters in a melodrama of humanity, earning their existence and robbed of their dignity. Virtue in toil and creation robbed by the injustices of exploitation while the lavish business conferences and meetings of parliament make a mockery of the nation’s suffering. A moral tale of right vs. wrong where the good will triumph over evil as society progresses. His England is a stage drama. The theatre is another industry to him. Rising out of the Manchester fog from the back of the galleries, chimneys rise. Grinding millstones, lurching steam engines and blue bolts of electricity carve out the production backstage. ‘The play binds you, body and soul.’ The product of the theatre is a dream that lets you forget all else, it cannot be valued with money or exchanged for labour time. A dream that represents freedom and egalitarianism, in contrast to modern consumerism. It is the spontaneous creativity of free and equal citizens providing dreams and inspiration to the worker satisfied by a fulfilling working week of productivity. To Priestley, theatre is the art of the ideal community.
There are many who don’t fit into this ideal. There are many that must stand on the sidelines – like the slum-dwellers of Liverpool he will meet later – and watch their own liberation won for them by an idealised old socialist working class, a liberation they might not recognise. The reality that the dreams are produced here for, that reality seems to become another dream. That England is Priestley’s dream. Not entirely. Those plays were real, that industry was real, that obsession with the theatre and its sacred ability to inspire real people and real actions was real. Those stories played a real part in the struggles of ideas in people’s minds that produced the cities and the buildings and the confluences of people and things that led forward to change in time. And he was there in that theatre, in those plays, more than he was in Manchester. He admits so himself and who can blame him. I was there in Manchester for years and I don’t blame him. But he does get to eat some Bury black pudding, hear some Lancashire comics, lay down some platitudes on the grit of Lancashire folk and observe their aesthetics of ash and the funerial while praising their ‘sheer gusto’. I was happy to leave Manchester anyway, I didn’t want to stay in Manchester, I never really feel like I do…