http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/feb/04/manchester-morrissey-the-smiths
Interesting article on the changes to Manchester in the last 30years.
Interesting article on the changes to Manchester in the last 30years.
Treading cautiously over puddles of January Manchester rain, a group of tourists from Mexico, Australia, France and Israel take turns to pose in front of Salford Lads Club, the unassuming community centre made famous by their Mancunian heroes, The Smiths.
The lyrics and imagery created by the band’s lead singer, Morrissey, are forever associated with the Manchester of mid-1980s post-industrial decay; entrenched with accounts of stabbings, domestic violence and back-alley encounters in a city struggling to find new purpose following the demise of its textile and other traditional industries.
Since then, the city has been bombed by the IRA and had its centre reconstructed; it has hosted a Commonwealth Games and witnessed three decades of rapid growth and regeneration. Along the way, iconic locations in The Smiths story have disappeared or morphed into a new guise: the infamous site of their second gig, the Hacienda nightclub, was torn down and a luxury apartment block raised in its place; Rafters, the underground club where the band played soon after, is now a Tesco Express.
The Smiths at Salford Lads Club.
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The Smiths outside Salford Lads Club in 1985. Photograph: Stephen Wright (smithsphotos.com)
But, 30 years on from the band’s only UK No 1 studio album, Meat is Murder, how does The Smiths’ vision of life in Manchester compare with life in the city today? Where else to begin but ...
Salford Lads Club
In many parts of Salford, just west of Manchester’s city centre, the 80s epitomised the failings of post-war reconstruction: poorly judged, slum-clearance housing estates. The 60s high-rise tower blocks surrounding the Salford Shopping Precinct – built as part of the redevelopment of the Hanky Park slum – had, by 1985, largely been abandoned by residents, becoming fodder for arsonists and a base for the city’s growing number of violent drug gangs.
Local mythology states that as the four members of The Smiths posed in front of Salford Lads Club, established in 1903, they were pelted with stones by local kids. Years later, atop a rusty bicycle, Morrissey defiantly led a troop of his fellow-bequiffed through the backstreets of Ordsall, the troubled Salford housing estate, in the video for the single There Is A Light That Never Goes Out.
Decades of economic decline, exacerbated by the loss of 3,000 jobs after the closure of Salford’s dockyards in 1982, had pushed Ordsall to such depths of deprivation that the local council chose to board-up most of the estate. It was not until 2006 that a deal was struck with developers LPC Living which injected £50m into its redevelopment. More than 500 new homes have since been built, plus a primary school and health and leisure facilities. The abandoned Victorian townhouses have once again been occupied, most-recently welcoming an influx of young Spanish migrants.
However, with just under half of Ordsall’s children recognised as still living below the poverty line in a ward that ranks among the top 2% of the UK’s most deprived, Leslie Holmes, project manager for Salford Lads Club and local resident, says the need for guidance for young people in Ordsall is as urgent as ever.
“Physically Ordsall has been regenerated, but that doesn’t do the job. We still have a poor population,” Holmes says. “You can physically change the buildings but unless people have got more jobs, it’s still a poor area. We provide a route away from the gangs.”
Ordsall in Salford, with its Job Shop and Resource Centre above retail outlets protected by barriers to deter ram raiding.
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Ordsall in Salford in the 90s, with a Job Shop and Resource Centre above retail outlets protected by barriers to deter ram raiding. Photograph: Don McPhee
These days the Lads Club is open to girls as well, and is undergoing construction of a new fire exit so it can host live music concerts later this year. It continues to provide sports, art, dance, cooking classes and, most importantly, guidance to more than 200 young Salfordians each week – not to mention a shrine for star-struck visitors from around the globe.
Ancoats
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“Ann Coates” was the nom de plume used to accredit Morrissey’s pitched-up backing vocals on the 1986 single Bigmouth Strikes Again – and a nod to the world’s first industrial neighbourhood, Ancoats, which borders the northeast corner of Manchester city centre.
By the 1980s, the textile industry from which Ancoats blossomed had dwindled to near-extinction; those towering factories and mighty cotton mills that defined the period when Manchester dragged the world into the industrial era were left abandoned and decaying, a vandal’s paradise.
Parts of east Manchester, including Ancoats, lost 60% of their economic and employment base between 1970 and 1985. In turn, Ancoats saw its residential population fall to below pre-industrial revolution levels. In an early attempt to tackle the degenerating effect of industrial decline on housing, a cluster of low-rise council houses, the Cardroom Estate, was built there in 1978.
By the mid-80s, however, the estate had still failed to eliminate the social problems of the area. Drug gangs moved in, attracted by its proximity to the city centre and the maze of pedestrianised streets that made it easy to shake-off police. Residents began to move away and Ancoats was once again almost completely uninhabited.
Shop shutters in Manchester's northern quarter.
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Shop shutters in Manchester’s northern quarter, a regenerated area of southern Ancoats. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
In 1993, the Mancunian architect Dominic Sagar led a group of artists, community members, urban enthusiasts and, eventually, city leaders in the regeneration of Ancoats’ southern extent, the Northern Quarter. “It was wild, loads of needles everywhere, a kind of no-go area,” says Sagar, now a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. “Our job was to change people’s perceptions.”
The project turned warehouse-blocks of appalling neglect into record stores, rehearsal spaces, bars and, ultimately, housing. Around the same time, art studios riding the wave of Manchester’s creative zenith began to move into Ancoats’ empty warehouses – more than two decades before Nick Clegg’s suggestion that northern cities shoud copy the “Berlin model” of transforming unused urban spaces using the arts.
“Living in the city centre in the 1980s was seen as un-English and a dangerous choice; there was basically only caretakers living here,” says Manchester councillor Pat Karney, a leading figure in the city centre’s regeneration and a Northern Quarter resident for 25 years. “Yet it’s a full house at the moment; it’s hard to get properties to rent.”
The Cardroom Estate was selected in 2002 to be one of seven “Millennium Villages” – chosen from deprived housing estates across the UK to undergo further demolition in favour of a new, “exemplar sustainable community”. The replacement development, “New Islington”, boasts 1,700 multi-shaped, multi-coloured living spaces, built with an emphasis on energy efficiency and with a fixed amount of dwellings reserved for former Cardroom residents.
The CHIPS building, designed by Will Alsop, in New Islington.
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The Chips apartments, designed by Will Alsop, in New Islington. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian
But issues of drug dealing and vandalism continue to dog parts of New Islington – particularly its “marina” on the Rochdale Canal – prompting talk of a “hidden crimewave” by the Manchester Central MP, Lucy Powell. This 21st-century regeneration may be more aesthetically pleasing than its previous Cardroom Estate incarnation, but many of the same problems linger in this most post-industrial of neighbourhoods.
Manchester Central
The inlay image of the Smiths’ only official live album, 1986’s Rank, showed rabid fans tearing at a tossed Morrissey shirt in the G-Mex centre, the old rail terminus which had linked the city with London St Pancras. In 1969, Manchester Central station was closed as part of the Beeching cuts, and for the next 13 years it stood empty.
“In 1985 this was a nothing area, with nothing going on,” recalls Matt Tansey – aka Matt the Bike – a cycle courier who began working in central Manchester that year. “Manchester Central was just used as a car park, although it did still look very nice. I accepted it as it was back then; I didn’t expect all this development.”
In 1978, the structure had been purchased by the council as it became clear the city needed a major concert venue. Finally, eight years later, Manchester Central was re-opened as the Greater Manchester Exhibition Centre, or G-Mex, for the Tony Wilson-organised “Festival of the Tenth Summer” (it was the 10th summer since the Sex Pistols’ seminal concert at the adjoining Lesser Free Trade Hall).
The Bridgewater Hall, Beetham Tower and G-Mex centre.
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The Bridgewater Hall, Beetham Tower and Manchester Central (formerly the G-Mex centre). Photograph: Alamy
Twenty years on from that re-opening, Morrissey played the G-Mex’s final two nights ahead of an ambitious £30m renovation to become the north of England’s leading conference and exhibition venue – under the station’s original name. Manchester Central is now reckoned to bring in more than £80m in economic value and half a million visitors to the city each year, and has also contributed to the re-establishment of Manchester’s political importance, hosting five Labour and three Conservative party conferences since 2006.
Immediately east of Manchester Central, on the site of the old Lower Mosley Street bus station, the Bridgewater Hall was constructed at a cost of £42m and opened by the Queen in 1996. To the west, the Deansgate No1 apartment tower opened in 2002 as the tallest all-steel building in the UK, with its penthouse going for a cool £1.75m. As for the Lesser Free Trade Hall, that once-so-rebellious punk venue was gutted and reopened in 2004 (keeping just the original front facade intact) as a Radisson Blu Hotel.
“Some of the development has been good, some has been bad,” Tansey says. “They did a good job with Manchester Central, but the Bridgewater Bank [set behind the Bridgewater Hall] is an abomination. The people I come across in the area are very different now. There are residents now – there weren’t any back then.”
Whalley Range
“What do we get for our trouble and pain? Just a rented room in Whalley Range.” So sang Morrissey on Miserable Lie, from The Smiths’ eponymous 1984 debut album. When asked by now-defunct music magazine The Face if Whalley Range was a real place, the Stretford-born singer replied: “I’m afraid so. It’s the little suburb of Manchester bedsit land, and everyone who lives there is an unrecognised poet or a failed artist.” In his youth, the singer would apparently spend long hours there in Paul Marsh Records, saying the shop had given him “any education he has”.
In the 80s this formerly wealthy suburb was another struggling inner-city neighbourhood, characterised by economic decline and a burgeoning red-light district that pushed out many of its remaining long-term residents. Manor-esque homes of tree-lined streets leading to Alexandra Park, epicentre of Manchester’s Victorian heyday, were snapped up by opportunistic landlords and converted to bedsits of questionable condition, then occupied by students and artists (the band James formed there in 1982, and Velvet Underground collaborator Nico spent much of the decade there). “Whalley Range has always been bohemian,” says Mike Monaghan, owner of the Record Shack record store on Withington Road. “There used to be some great parties here in the 60s and early 70s.”
Whalley Range.
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‘What do we get for our trouble and pain? Just a rented room in Whalley Range.’ Photograph: Christopher Thomond for The Guardian
Today, this re-emerging neighbourhood is more likely to attract young professionals filling the city centre’s multiplying office spaces. Property prices within Whalley Range’s M16 postcode (shared with parts of similarly renascent neighbourhoods Firswood and Old Trafford) have risen £30,000 above the Manchester average, and blocks of new apartments compliment the newly restored, large period houses.
“The area has improved massively,” Monaghan says. “There used to be a lot of muggings, particularly round the back of the store [which leads on to Moss Side]. Lots of the bad guys have been put in jail and the people are more settled and matured. But I just mind my own business.”
In truth, parts of Whalley Range remain untouched by the economic prosperity of Manchester’s recent years, and red-light activity is reportedly on the rise again. Some local estate agents appear wary of Whalley Range’s past reputation as a neighbourhood of rancid bedsits and prostitution: a number of landlords and agents have taken to advertising properties in the neighbourhood as “Chorlton Borders”, reflecting the southern-border shared with wealthy Chorlton.
“The area is getting slightly yuppified by Chorlton,” Monaghan confirms. Heaven knows what Morrissey would make of that.
