The Mancunian Way

 

'The Mancunian Way' is actually the name of a road (a very ugly 70s elevated through-way that cuts across the city). That's it in the picture above.

But I also like it as a way of describing the manner of this city (Manchester, of which of course you knew the demonymic form). And Manchester has a lot of meaning for me, and not just in football rivalry but in that also. For in September 2027 it will be 50 years since I turned up as a green fresher at the University of Manchester. And this weekend I have had the chance to wander around the place, and my youth, and the link between the two. 

Manchester is many things apart from the turf of our current Prime Minister, and I admire many of those things. It is the big Northern counterweight to Industrial West Yorkshire, and we divvied up the cloth-making industry between us when it  became an industry under Queen Victoria. We did wool in Yorkshire (check out the city crest of Leeds) and they did cotton over on the West side of the Pennines. For international readers the Pennines are what Brits hilariously regard as a spine of mountains running up the centre of Northern England, but as the highest part soars to 893 metres, most sane people would call them hills.

But for the spoddy historian, they matter for reasons of climate. The prevailing Westerlies dump a lot of rain where the Pennines rise, and Greater Manchester is ground zero. It is raining outside this cafe right now, on Princess Street in the heart of Manchester. And to spin cotton you benefit from damp air, to prevent the threads breaking, apparently. And here, cotton was king, just as wool was the God of Pudsey, where I grew up. The shattering noise of power looms from a huge weaving shed was my childhood soundtrack, and so it was here too, with a different fibre. Which is, incidentally, why many older people here are good at lip-reading.

The industrial heritage of Manchester is all around me here. Huge Victorian buildings of trade, massive brick warehouses along the canals, and cultural products of the wealth that flooded in, including the very University I attended. And glorious structures like the Midland Hotel and the Theatre and warehouse (below).

But all the human hands that worked those looms, built those warehouses and dug those canals brought another cultural product. This city  was a key to the idea of a 'working class', and not just because Marx and Engels both stayed here. There is a pub half a mile from me which we know they frequented. To turn to that other Mancunian cultural product, you could call it 'class consciousness'. Whatever you call it, you can see how it would emerge here. A random Gallagher, Murphy or Gillard, say, might well have a good idea of their place in the world in a village in the West of Ireland. But I bet they would think even more about it if they came across the Irish Sea to be a cog in a visible machine that those huge mills represented. And as you look at your hundreds of co-workers or co-cogs, you may have idly speculated about what it meant. And if you found the time, as a surprising number of people did, even under these conditions, you might even think about the slave labour that produced the cotton that you wove, or the Qing Empire to the East which was brought to its knees to provide another market for the cloth that rolled off your loom. And you may have started to invent new stories to tell about your world and your place in it.

Weaving areas have always had a NonConformist and 'Free-thinking' tradition in Britain. The Industrial Revolution just boosted it. Yorkshire had it, and Manchester had it too. There was a huge history of agitation for reform of Parliament from this area, leading to the 'Peterloo Massacre' here in the centre of Manchester in 1819 and eventually to the great Reform Act of 1832. The proletariat didn't get the vote then, but it did follow about 30 years later (if you had XY chromosomes of course, but that's another revolution).

So I feel as I walk down these familiar streets a certain "Why not, pal?" attitude. Its not exactly confidence or braggadocio but it is a refusal to agree with the way that people describe you or pigeon-hole you. There is brashness here, there always was. look at those Victorian edifices; look at old Trafford and the Etihad Stadium for that matter. But that spirit makes it an exciting place to live. it was so 50 years ago; it still is. long live the Mancunian Way!

And just as a gratuitous bon bouche, do watch this smashing pop video for The Beautiful South's tongue-in-cheek paean, 'Manchester'

Manchester by The beautiful South