‘Manchester, getting up the steam’, The Builder, October 1853.

In October 1853, the British architectural journal The Builder pictured Manchester ‘getting up the steam’, an image of the city’s forest of tall smoking chimneys, interspersed with large unadorned cotton mills, with their repetitive rows of identical windows, and diminutive groups of terraced houses. This engraving still sums up what for many is the dominant image of Manchester’s Victorian and more recent history as Cottonopolis: a soot-filled city of polluting industry, damp and unrelenting monotony. Within this imagined Manchester, epitomized by the paintings of L. S. Lowry, cotton mills tower over all other buildings, dominating the visual appearance of the cityscape. Today, in some parts of the Greater Manchester region, such as parts of Bolton, Oldham, and Stockport, mill buildings still dominate in this way, even if their chimneys have long since ceased belching smoke.

L. S. Lowry, The Pond, 1950

Devon Mill (1908) in the Hollinwood district of Oldham

From the late eighteenth-century onwards, over 2,400 cotton mills and cloth-finishing works were built in what would in 1974 become the Greater Manchester region: a territory approximately 25 miles north to south and 30 miles east to west. In their exhaustive survey of these structures, which was begun in 1985, David Farnie and Mike Williams found that less than half (1,112) of these factories had survived, with many either derelict or awaiting grant-aided demolition. Since then, many more mills have been lost: the sheer number and vast size of these structures make them particularly difficult to convert to non-industrial uses.

William Wyld, Manchester from Kersal Moor, 1852

Despite many losses through demolition, Manchester’s mills have long featured in postwar images of the city as a landscape of lingering dereliction and decay. As the German emigré Max Ferber recalled in W. G. Sebald’s novel The Emigrants (1993), his arrival in Manchester in 1942 summoned up the memory of thousands of smoking chimneys that he saw on viewing the city from the surrounding hills. Yet, by the mid-1960s, when Sebald met Frank Auerbach, the artist who had inspired the fictional Ferber, ‘almost every one of those chimneys [had] now been demolished or taken out of use.’ However, the remnants of this landscape of mills continued to persist in the city in the 1960s, as evidenced in a scene filmed in Oldham in the film Hell Is A City (Val Guest, 1960), where the town’s half-ruined millscape is revealed panoramically when a group of illegal gamblers flee from a police raid on a moor on Oldham Edge; or in a more sustained way in A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961), where the Victorian mills of Ancoats, Stockport and Miles Platting dominate the still-industrial landscape that frames the poignant story of young social outcasts in a bleak, half-ruined city.

Still from Hell is a City (1960) showing the mills of Oldham in the background

Still from A Taste of Honey (1961) showing Victoria Mill from the Rochdale Canal, Miles Platting

Victoria Mill today

In the 1960s and 1970s, the city and region’s mills continued to slide towards redundancy, with textile production in almost all of these buildings ceasing by the early 1980s. Whilst the move towards regeneration in the 1990s saved some of the more iconic mill structures, particularly those like Royal Mills and Murrays’ Mills in Ancoats that were listed or located near to the city centre, many others fell into disrepair, either being partially reused or succumbing to dereliction and decay. Some, like Brunswick Mill (c.1840) in Ancoats, survive in a state of suspended animation: part of this mill, once the largest in the city, houses a small-scale textile businesses and cheap practice spaces for musicians; the rest is boarded up – a bleak and forbidding wall of decaying brick as seen from the adjacent Ashton Canal.

Royal Mills (centre-left) and Murrays’ Mills (centre-right), Ancoats, as seen from the canal basin in New Islington

Brunswick Mill (c.1840) from Pollard St, Ancoats

Hartford Mill (1907) in Werneth, Oldham, currently awaiting demolition

Surviving cotton mills, whatever their state of disrepair, present opportunities for reflection on the memories of industry itself. These memories are highly valued by many in relation to Greater Manchester’s existing cotton mills, including a few textile companies that continue to use and care for these buildings, for example Kearsley Mill (1905-06) in Prestolee that is still occupied and well-maintained by its original owner, Richard Haworth Ltd. Local conservation groups, such as the Ancoats Buildings Preservation Trust, campaign to preserve historic mills, while the National Trust owns Quarry Bank Mill (1784) to the south of Manchester and the site’s many volunteers dramatically re-enact its social history for visitors. Finally, arts events like Angel Meadow, the audience-immersive theatre production held in Ancoats in June 2014, provide insights into the lives of former textile-workers (in the case of Angel Meadow, Irish immigrants who dominated the area in the nineteenth century).

Kearsley Mill (1905-6) in Prestolee

The National Trust-owned Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire, built in 1784

The engine-house of Pear Mill (1907-12) in Bredbury, Stockport, now used as an indoor climbing centre

Finally, if many of Greater Manchester’s mills have either been demolished or fallen into a state of ruin, others have found alternative uses, including, in addition to heritage sites like Quarry Bank Mill: children’s and adult’s play areas (for example Run of the Mill and a climbing centre, both located in Pear Mill in Stockport); self-storage or warehousing facilities (Chadderton Mill, Oldham); nightclubs (Downtex Mill); apartments (Royal Mills); and even public sector services (a health and education centre in Victoria Mill, Miles Platting). These conversions offer insights into how otherwise defunct industrial buildings might be salvaged and reused and also how their historical development might be remembered. Manchester’s mill buildings still offer an afterimage of ‘mythic’ Manchester, the city defined by writers such as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, in which the cotton mill represented not only a certain type of work but the entire industrial system. These mills may no longer act as a metonym of Manchester as Cottonopolis; but they nevertheless continue to hold out the possibility of integrating the city’s industrial history with its present and future development as both remainders and reminders of what has passed.

This post is adapted from my book The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay (IB Tauris, 2017), available to buy as a reasonably-priced Kindle version here.

Paul Dobraszczyk, Manchester Terraces, 2017. Ink, watercolour, chalk, pencil, pen and gouache on paper.

The opening title sequence of Coronation Street, Britain’s longest running soap opera, hasn’t changed significantly since it was first broadcast on 9 December 1960: the plaintive brass theme tune is still accompanied by bird’s-eye views of Manchester’s brick terraces, interspersed with images of the city as it has evolved in the last half-century – from monotone, industrial and smoky to clean, bright and colourful. The sequence finishes in the eponymous street itself – a recreation of a typical city terrace that the show’s creator, Tony Warren, described as being what one might find if you travelled ‘four miles in any one direction from the centre of Manchester’. The image of the city here could not be more different from that portrayed in the opening sequence of Eastenders (Coronation’s Street’s more recent London-based soap cousin), beginning at it does from high above east London and gradually moving towards the soap’s local epicentre, Albert Square. Thus, in the one, the city is summed up by the domestic and the generic; in the other, the opposite, namely, the global and the abstract. London, the world city; Manchester, the local one.

Still from the title sequence to Coronation Street, 1970

Victorian terraces roughy 4 miles from Manchester city centre. From top to bottom: Moston (Ivy St); Droylsden (Fairfield Rd); Reddish (Liverpool St); Heaton Chapel (Langford Rd); and Eccles (Renshaw St)

So, what might we find in Greater Manchester if we take Coronation Street as our guide and Tony Warren’s four-mile radius from the city centre? Starting in Moston, in the northern suburbs, we would discover late-Victorian terraces embellished with terracotta, exuberantly emphasising both the horizontality of the row and the repeating forms of the window and door arches. Here, as in many other districts of the city, the bricks have been painted in different hues of red, in keeping with the red Accrington bricks that were used to construct so much of Manchester’s built environment in the 19th century. Moving south and east, Droylsden’s terraces are similarly painted, but generally devoid of enlivening ornament; further south-east, the terraces of Reddish display a marked emphasis on solidity, with their imposing chimney stacks and round-arched doorways. Turning westwards, we encounter more imposing rows of much larger houses in the salubrious areas of Heaton Chapel, Didsbury and Chorlton, where wealthier tenants (owners today) were generally provided with much wider and deeper houses, large bay windows at the front and extensive gardens at the back. Moving west into Salford and the terraces revert back to type – often stretching long distances and mostly of the standard two-up two-down form, with very little ornament seen in the rows of Eccles and Swinton, the brick here mostly left unpainted.

Some of the last remaining back-to-back terraces in Salford, 1971

Terraces in the sky: the Hulme Crescents, completed in 1972

Ubiquitous and monotonous as they may be, terraces nevertheless deserve more attention than they have so far received because each has its own history and its own architectural and social value; they are, in a very real sense, the foundational building type of British towns and cities. As evidenced in the brief overview above, far from being generic, terraces in Manchester display an extraordinary variety of forms that evidence how the city was divided up according to the dictates of economy and class. Because almost all terraces were built speculatively by developers anticipating demand, their layout was decided by the social status of whom they were being built for. Thus, in the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly during the boom years following the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 and again in the 1840s and early 1850s, enormous swathes of densely-packed and poorly-constructed terraced housing were erected in the areas immediately surrounding the city centre – the mile-wide ‘girdle’ described by Friedrich Engels in 1844 in which he witnessed the most appalling living conditions endured by Manchester’s industrial workforce. Yet, virtually all of these early terraces have now vanished, either being replaced by better-quality rows in the second half of the nineteenth century or demolished by the City Council in 20th century. The terraces that remain today mostly date from the late nineteenth century, constructed during the series of speculative building booms that accompanied the growth of the cotton industry in Manchester after the building of the Ship Canal in the 1890s. As we’ve seen, these terraces catered for a wide range of potential inhabitants, from industrial workers to middle-class merchants.

New terraces: from top to bottom, Ashton-Under-Lyne (Bentinck St), Seedley (Highfield Rd); Gorton (Clowes St); Salford (Bank St); and New Islington

As architectural historian Stefan Muthesius has demonstrated, terraced housing was singular to the development of British cities in the 19th century; on the continent, the characteristic pattern of housing provision in cities was detached homes in the suburbs and dense blocks of flats in the inner urban and suburban areas. Despite the rise of the semi-detached house after about 1920 and a brief period of high-rise building in the 1960s and early 1970s, most British towns and cities continued to witness the low-rise terrace as the most commonplace form of housing, a reflection of the fact that the vast majority of British people want to inhabit a separate house, even if, in the densest inner-city areas, that house might be very small indeed. Even as the high-rise Hulme Crescents in the early 1970s attempted to replicate the density of the Victorian terraces they superseded with their concrete ‘streets in the sky’, their subsequent replacement with low-rise postmodernist rows indicates that what people want in their houses is a sense of separation from others, and particularly separation on the vertical axis. At the same time as high-rise housing in Manchester was generally abandoned, the more suburban low-rise housing estates that followed in their wake – mostly comprised of semi-detached homes arranged in cul-de-sacs – have also come to be regarded as failures. Today, the reinstatement of terraces in areas like Ancoats, Gorton and central Salford confirm the enduring appeal of the row as the most attractive form of housing for those who live in the city’s inner suburbs, whether by choice or necessity. Of course, there is much that separates the new rows of social housing in Gorton from the resolutely private ones in Ancoats, not least their price tags, but they both share a basis in a fundamental (and class-transcending) desire to both own a separate living space (whether that space is large or small, rented or bought) and to share that space with others. In a sense, the terrace represents a remarkably long-lasting architectural solution to the appeasement of these contradictory desires.

They go by a variety of names; in common English parlance, they are alleyways, passages, lanes or paths; in regional variations, they are, to name but a few, jitties (West Midlands), jiggers (Liverpool), pends (Dundee), ten-foots (Hull), and closes (Edinburgh). In Manchester, they are most often called ginnels or genells or, more rarely, snickets. All of these words describe either a narrow passage between houses or a longer and wider walkway situated at the backs of terraces and between two streets.

Alleyway off Crofton St, Old Trafford

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, when back-to-back terraces predominated in industrial towns, these passages were generally known as courts: narrow paved yards between terraces and other houses that were cut off from street traffic and often accessible only via dark covered passageways. Widely condemned as insanitary breeding grounds of disease, back-to-backs and their courts were mostly replaced in the second half of the nineteenth century by more ordered rows of terraces that still characterise most British towns and cities today, and particularly industrial ones like Manchester. These cobbled passages and alleyways were included to provide easy access to the backs of terraces for the delivery of basic goods such as coal and the easy removal of rainwater and household wastes. They predominated in working-class areas of industrial cities where building speculators maximised the available space for housing whilst also abiding by the sanitary regulations laid down by the municipal authorities.

Alleyway between streets in Moss Side

Remains of an alleyway in Openshaw

In the 1960s it seemed, for a time, that the Manchester alleyway would become a thing of the past. In this decade, Victorian terraces were generally viewed by the municipal authorities as outdated and troublesome remnants of the nineteenth-century city that impeded the application of modernist principles of urban planning. In each year from 1963 to 1967, 4,000 Victorian terraced houses in Manchester were demolished by the Council with little attempt – at least in this period – to replace them. As testified by architectural critic Ian Nairn’s BBC programme Nairn Across Britain, by the early 1970s whole swathes of the terraced city were transformed into vast fields of rubble, their connecting alleyways remaining only as spectral outlines on the ground. The eventual rebuilding of these areas would see the disappearance of alleyways, the backs of the new houses opened up to adjoining car-parking spaces, public lawns and orderly cul-de-sacs.

Two images from the Town Hall Photographer’s Collection (https://www.flickr.com/photos/manchesterarchiveplus/sets/72157684413651581), showing: above, a collapsed wall in an alley in Sapphire St that killed the householder, 1964; and, below, an alleyway off Stanley Street, 1962.. Both images copyright Manchester City CounciL.

In the early-mid 1960s, when the decrepit Victorian terraces of Hulme were scheduled for demolition (to eventually make way for the brutalist high-rise concrete housing of the Hulme Crescents), the Council’s official photographer obsessively documented the back alleys of this area. In these images, the narrow cobbled lanes are found to be places of unhealthy congestion – dark, waterlogged and, in the case of one set of images picturing a fallen wall that killed an unfortunate resident, a literal danger to life. As with much official photographic documentation of slum housing in this period, the case for demolition is made by casting a negative light on the existing built environment. In these photographs of Hulme, alleyways recur because they are viewed as both redundant, unhealthy, and ungovernable – spaces that are clearly unfit for inhabitation (and there are never any people in these images).

Shirley Baker, Manchester, 1966

Shirley Baker, children playing in a back-alley in Salford, c.1962

And yet, at exactly the same time as these official images of Hulme were being gathered, the amateur photographer Shirley Baker was capturing another aspect of the alleyway, namely as a place of human connection. In some of her poignant images of the backyards and alleyways of Hulme, both children and adults alike gather, caught in a moment of shared living in spaces that reveal private but shared examples of momentary freedom. The alleyways of Hulme in Baker’s images are as rubbish-strewn, waterlogged and structurally unsound as they are in the official photographs; yet, their human occupants speak of them as places of value, where demolition will not only result in the erasure of spaces but also of valued memories as well. Despite the loss of Hulme’s and other areas’ alleyways in Manchester, some still survive today, mostly in small pockets of densely-built Victorian terraces in areas like Moss Side and Whalley Range, where their names – ‘Passage No. 1’, ‘Passage No. 2’, and so on – ring out like a common refrain that links together otherwise scattered districts of the city.

Passage off Broadfield Road, Moss Side

Passage off Thornton Road, Moss Side

They may be taken-for-granted, grounded as they are in everyday life; but alleyways have always been ambivalent spaces. They are neither public nor private; rather a mix of the two – liminal places that are both valued and feared. As Baker’s photographs show so clearly, householders connected with each other in alleyways, whether in chance meetings or in shared activities like putting the rubbish out. Yet, the wider public are often seen as a threat, taking advantage of the public yet hidden nature of alleyways to engage in all manner of nefarious activities: drug dealing, sexual assault, burglary (the most common stories you’ll find if you search for ‘Manchester alleyways’ online).

Gated alleyway in Cheetham Hill

Renovated alleyway off Lloyd St South, Moss Side

This ambivalence has resulted in two opposing approaches to alleyways in the contemporary city. On the one hand, the widespread gating of back passages in areas like Oldham has effectively severed the alleyway’s link to the outside world, turning the public into the private; on the other, the ‘greening’ of alleyways, such as a few in Moss Side in the late 1990s, has reclaimed them as valuable communal spaces, where potted plants jostle with wheelie bins and discarded objects for ascendancy. Even when renovated, it seems, the disorderly nature of the alleyway can’t be fully tamed. The fundamental ambivalence towards these spaces derives from the fact that they are spatially unstable and dependent on the existence of other places and boundaries to define them. In this sense, alleyways are not only physical boundaries in the city but also metaphorical ones too – boundaries between the present and past, where a host of secret stories, both good and bad, linger on in these cracks in the city.

Photograph of Ancoats in the 1890s

On 16 October 2017, the sun turned a peculiar pinky shade of red, a product of Storm Ophelia whipping up Saharan sands as she approached the UK. The strangely-coloured gloom that resulted was widely described as ‘apocalyptic’, resembling as it did the light seen in many fictional depictions of nuclear holocausts; yet, in Manchester, it bore an uncanny resemblance to the city as it was in the mid-nineteenth century:

‘One receives one’s first intimation of [the city’s] existence from the lurid gloom of the atmosphere that hangs over it. There is a murky blot in one section of the sky … which broadens and heightens as we approach until at length it seems spread over half the firmament.’

This ‘lurid gloom’ was, of course, not the consequence of Saharan sands, but of hundreds of chimneys belching smoke, as well as the even more numerous coal fires in the houses of those who worked in the mills. Manchester’s blackness was the result of its overwhelming reliance on coal to power the steam engines that filled its mills and factories, coupled with the city’s damp climate and the fact that it sits in a hollow surrounded on three sides by hills. Manchester retained much of the smoke it created and, because of the prevailing winds, gathered in much from its industrial neighbours as well. In 1902, it was calculated that 30 tons of soots fell back onto the city in that year.

Blackened bricks on an abandoned building in Sherbourne St, Cheetham Hill

In the industrial period, Manchester’s blackness was legendary. As Andrew Crompton has described, new buildings would go black in as little as three years, the corrosive action of the sulphurous soot-filled air eating away at stonework, as well as stinging the eyes of the city’s inhabitants. Water left standing would gather a layer of sooty scum within days; clothes had to be washed and rewashed incessantly; trees and plants were decimated by acid rain – even ones that survived in the summer had to be rehabilitated every year; and black snow sometimes fell in the winter months. The nature that did survive had to adapt quickly to these brutal conditions and Manchester was the first place where the dark carbonaria form of the peppered moth was observed. This normally light-coloured moth had evolved to camouflage itself against the blackened trees of the industrial city.

The soot-blackened pinnacles of All Souls Church, Every St, Ancoats

The spire of Brookfield Unitarian Church, Hyde Road, Gorton

We might expect such environmental degradation to have been the subject of vociferous protest; and, for some, it was. A succession of groups were formed throughout the 19th century to lobby for the cleaning up of the city: from the Manchester Association for the Prevention of Smoke in the 1840s to the Noxious Vapours Abatement Association in the 1890s. Groups like these argued that smoke was not only a serious health hazard but was also a profligate waste of energy in that it represented a failure to make profitable use of a finite natural resource. Yet, throughout this period and beyond, their protests were drowned out by a much more powerful story of smoke as a signal of wealth and personal well-being. If Manchester was celebrated as the ‘chimney of the world’, it was so because chimneys were the most visible sign of the city’s preeminence as a global industrial city, the amount of smoke they generated being an immediate indicator of the relative health of industrial output. Indeed, when chimneys stopped smoking, as they did intermittently throughout the industrial period when there were slumps in trade, the resulting clean air meant hunger, sickness and ruin as thousands of workers faced destitution through unemployment. And in the homes of those workers, an extravagantly smoking chimney pot demonstrated that one was doing well, that your family was happy and healthy. Even as the smokeless fuel coke was sold as an inexpensive alternative to coal, it failed to take hold because its very inability to produce a smoking fireplace was widely perceived as a sign of poverty. The northern expression ‘Where there’s muck, there’s brass’ comes down to us today as a remnant of the age when smoke was thought of as ‘the golden breath of life’.

Before-and-after images of the Athenaeum building on Princess St, cleaned in the 1970s

Blackened memorials in Stretford Cemetery

Of course, that’s all now gone. Even as the 1956 Clean Air Act restricted the burning of coal and transformed urban fogs from deadly miasmas to benign and often nostalgic signs of a lost age, Manchester’s smoking chimneys were already doomed. After the Second World War, as the cotton industry relocated to cheaper locales across the world, the city’s smoke abated as mills and factories closed. The buildings left blackened by years of smoke pollution were scrubbed clean: before and after photographs of such landmarks as the Athenaeum and the Town Hall creating a jolting sense of difference between the natural and unnatural colour of the built environment. Yet, such scrubbing also left its destructive marks, the high-pressure jets of water that cleaned off the smoke also further damaging soot-eaten stonework, the previously sharp edges of ornamental carvings now forever blunted. And, in the 1960s, the modernist fetishisation of white added its own vision of a city cleansed and purified – the new concrete towers of Piccadilly Gardens standing out against the old, still-blackened remains of the dirty industrial past the city now had to leave behind. Blackness was now a symbol of redundancy and lifelessness, a startling reversal of its former associations with wealth and vigour.

Soot-covered former warehouse, Lever St, Northern Quarter

Blackened bricks on a former warehouse in Port St, Northern Quarter

Yet blackened buildings can still be found across the city, often in places where cleaning was prohibitively expensive or out of the remit of the municipal authorities. Thus, many of Manchester’s church spires still stand out in their blackness, while the plaintive epitaphs on many Victorian tombstones in the city’s cemeteries remain obscured by soot. These offer powerful visual reminders of the city’s past even as the smoke that produced that blackness has long since disappeared. And, in the Northern Quarter, some of the old warehouses there still retain their soot-coloured brick and stonework, testament to the kind of historical authenticity that is so prized by the area’s mainly hipster populace. That kind of attitude may be scorned as just another form of nostalgia, albeit artfully repackaged as gritty rather than sentimental; yet, the blackness that remains still offers a powerful visual reminder of a past that continues to haunt the city and a miasma of smoke that has not gone away but has simply moved elsewhere.

Towers under construction near the Mancunian Way, Hulme

Manchester, like many other cities today, has a fetish for tall buildings. Perhaps this is a result of the topography of the city centre, occupying, as it does, the bottom of a gently sloping bowl; or, maybe, the natural architectural accompaniment to Manchester being branded as the epicentre of the ‘Northern Powerhouse’. Whatever the reasons, skyscrapers will dominate the city’s skyline in the near future. In 2016, Manchester City Council approved plans for the construction of the 64-storey Owen Street Tower, set to become the second tallest building in the UK after the Shard in London. An even taller tower (67 storeys) will probably soon after overtake the Owen Street Tower, the centrepiece of a five-tower residential island to be built on the banks of the River Irwell, and which was approved by the Council in the summer of 2017.

Architects’ rendering of cluster of towers on Owen Street, currently under construction

Proposed 67-storey tower, designed by Child Graddon Lewis, and to be built at Trinity Islands on the River Irwell by Allied London

Lest we are left wondering what kind of impact these towers will have on the city, the Manchester Evening News has already provided a virtual fly-by to give us an idea. And despite the fact that there seems to be a great deal of public dissatisfaction with these new skyscrapers – witness the withdrawal of ex-footballers Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville’s plan for two bronze towers in the city centre in 2017 after much protest – there seems to be no let up in the City Council’s desire to build tall.

Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs’s proposed bronze skyscrapers, shelved in March 2017

Yet, for the time being, it is the Beetham Tower that remains Manchester’s tallest building. Opened in 2006, its 47 storeys of shimmering glass, housing a luxury hotel and apartments, could not be more different than the defunct Victorian railway viaduct it replaced. Designed by local architect Ian Simpson at a time when Manchester was boldly reasserting itself as a confident competitor to London (and the Beetham Tower remains, for the moment, the tallest building outside the capital), the skyscraper encapsulates the recurrent image of Manchester as a phoenix rising from the ruins of post-industrial decline.

The Beetham Tower, completed in 2006

For those who want to experience the building, and who cannot afford to stay in the 4* Hilton Hotel or to buy the luxury apartments above, there’s always Cloud 23, a restaurant and bar located half-way up that offers spectacular views of the city. Even though this observation deck is much lower than that of the Shard in London (at 72 floors, it’s the highest in the UK), it is still the highest in the city and is thus Manchester’s equivalent to the numerous observation platforms that now grace (and sometimes fund) many of the world’s tallest buildings. In exchange for one overpriced drink, one can see Manchester from an elevated position, the city’s otherwise chaotic networks of roads, railway viaducts and tram lines spread out before you in an orderly fashion, disappearing into the hills beyond. And, at night, that view becomes a fairytale multicolour image of twinkling grandeur: a city that seems to hold you, the viewer, at its very centre. Of course, such a sense of mastery is a product of being so distanced from the chaotic sensory bombardment experienced on the ground and from being hermetically sealed off from the often grey and wet atmosphere just beyond the tall windows. When those other taller skyscrapers are eventually built in Manchester, these feelings will only intensify, with each new building competing to provide the most intense variant on this experience of the city from high above the streets.

View southwest from Cloud 23, towards Castlefield and Stretford

View southwards from Cloud 23 towards Hulme

Beetham Tower and an early 19th-century factory from the Rochdale Canal, Castlefield

However, the Beetham Tower gains a new layer of meaning when viewed from the Rochdale Canal in the Castlefield Basin. For here – the original heartland of Manchester – the otherwise brazenly incongruous form of the skyscraper seems to mirror that of a much older industrial structure, namely, the ruins of a canal-side brick mill dating back to the early nineteenth century that has been miraculously preserved between two railway viaducts. This architectural conversation across time is probably wholly accidental but it nevertheless suggests that the Beetham Tower might actually also be some kind of gigantic ruin; or that it will become one at some point the future – a symbol perhaps of the hidden decay, and inevitable future ruin, that haunts even our most transparent and polished contemporary glass towers.

View of Ian Simpson’s penthouse apartment in the Beetham Tower, as pictured in the Manchester Evening News

As J. G. Ballard powerfully articulated in his 1975 novel High-Rise, skyscrapers may be the epitome of glamour, offering the promise of detachment from the noise, dirt and danger of the city’s streets; yet, their very isolation might lead to the emergence of other, more disturbing problems – in the case of High-Rise, the complete breakdown of civilisation within the skyscraper itself. Perhaps the architect of the Beetham Tower (and its even higher progeny to come, the Owen Street Tower), hasn’t come across Ballard’s novel. For why else would he, like the architect of the eponymous building in High-Rise, choose to live in splendid isolation on the top floor of the skyscraper he himself designed? As Simpson confidently intones: ‘I enjoy the serenity of living at height in a city. The act of rising above it..it’s very secure, no one is going to break in through your window!’ Yet, in Ballard’s novel, after an orgy of violence, the architect of the skyscraper ends up being butchered by the building’s last remaining inhabitants. Of course, Ballard’s vision is extreme, but he uses the doomed skyscraper as a metaphor for the hubris that underlies most high-rise construction. We might believe that we can flee from the dangers of the city by simply rising above them, but we can never escape those that are always lurking within.

Bee mural painted by Peter Barber in September 2017, Warwick Street, Northern Quarter

For over 150 years, the bee has been a symbol of Manchester. The city’s coat of arms was given royal approval in 1842, even though Manchester didn’t officially become a city until 1853, and it included a globe covered with bees. These were not only an obvious symbol of industriousness, but also a reflection of the fact that, by the 1840s, Manchester had become the world’s pre-eminent industrial city, defined by its global domination of the cotton industry. From then on, bees became part of the image of the city and were incorporated into the floor mosaics of Manchester’s most important civic statement – the Town Hall, completed in 1877, as well as some of the buildings of the Cooperative movement, where bees are equated with an equitable form of industriousness, one that isn’t based on the exploitation of workers. Even as the city’s principal industry went into catastrophic decline after the Second World War, bees still featured in Manchester’s civic iconography, but reduced to a more prosaic role as labels for the city’s lampposts and rubbish bins.

Bees on a co-operative building, Greenside Lane, Droylsden

Rubbish bin label in Albert Square

The significance of the bee in the city was changed forever in the wake of the terrorist atrocity that was carried out just after an Ariana Grande concert ended at the Manchester Arena on 22 May 2017 – a suicide bomb attack that left 22 people dead and 64 injured. Many of the victims were children, the youngest being eight-year-old Saffie Rose Roussous. Hours after the attack, illustrator Dick Vincent posted a hastily-drawn image of a bee on Instagram, together with the caption ‘Stay strong our kid’, and, in the following days, bees appeared everywhere in the city. This equating of the bee with resilience chimed strongly with the defiant mood of the city. When a vigil was held for the victims on 23 May in Albert Square, the same design was seen surrounded by flowers at a memorial near the cenotaph.

Bee tattoo photographed on the arm of a waiter in Teacup in the Northern Quarter

Bees also began appearing on the bodies of Manchester’s residents. After Stalybridge tattoo artist Sam Barber launched the Manchester Tattoo Appeal on 25 May, hundreds of people were seen queuing for bee tattoos – the proceeds donated to a fund for the victims of and families affected by the attack. As reported by the Manchester Evening News, people of all ages waited patiently for bee tattoos. They wanted to identify with those affected by the atrocity, not least the parents of one of the victims – 15-yr old Olivia Campbell – who both had the bee emblem tattooed on their hearts, together with Olivia’s name and birthdate.

Bee mural painted by Qubek in June 2017 on the Koffee Pot cafe on Oldham Street

Bee window sticker in Stockport

Months on from the attack and bees have become one of the principal emblems of the city, often accompanied by messages of defiance, whether ‘we stand together’, ‘stronger together’, ‘unity is strength’ or ‘bee strong Manchester’. Window stickers have appeared in many premises, with bee badges and stickers now sitting alongside football shirts and postcards in the city’s souvenir shops. Some have stickers on their car bumpers or windows; others have bee trinkets, bee-emblazoned boxes, or even bee wallpaper. Perhaps most obvious are the dozens of bee murals that have been painted onto buildings in the city, particularly in the Northern Quarter, where street art defines the look and feel of this area. Foremost of these artists is Qubek – tag name of Russ Mehan – who painted a bee mural on the old public toilets in Stephenson Square two days after the attack. In early June, Qubek was commissioned by the Manchester Evening News to paint a large bee mural on the side of the Koffee Pot cafe on Oldham Street. Taking up an entire wall, this mural unequivocally equated the bee with the victims of the attack, each of its 22 bees representing one of those killed. Here, Manchester’s principal newspaper endorsed the bee as a symbol of ‘Manchester’s indomitable spirit’. Since then, Qubek has been overwhelmed with commissions to paint bees, whether civic projects that seek to draw diverse communities together, such as one he undertook in October 2017 with children attending Stanley Grove primary school in Longsight, or as emblems for businesses seeking to identify with this new collective spirit. Qubek has even been commissioned to paint large-scale bee murals on private homes in Chorlton and Offerton.

Bee mural painted by Qubek in 2016 on Aspin Lane, Angel Meadow

Bee mural painted by Qubek in August 2017 near the Southern Cemetery, Chorlton

This renewed sense of civic identity and unity is clearly a powerful response to a tragedy that was shocking in its brutality and senselessness; yet it risks turning the bee into something sacrosanct – an image that can only symbolise one thing. Qubek may have become the leading image-maker of bees in the wake of the terrorist attack, but he was actually using bees in very different ways previous to it. For instance, in October 2016, Qubek painted a bee on a hoarding advertising ‘luxury student apartments’ in Hulme, questioning how such accommodation could ever be afforded by most Mancunians. In May 2016, he painted an aggressive-looking bee on another hoarding in Back Piccadilly, together with the slogan ‘Save our banks; kill our poor!’. He also painted a cubist-style bee mural in 2016 near the Cooperative building in Angel Square, with the slogan ‘so much to answer for’, a reference to The Smiths 1984 song Suffer Little Children, which is about the Moors Murders. And even in the months after the attack, Qubek has used bees to symbolise something quite different. In a recent mural painted near the Southern Cemetery in Barlow Moor, bees revert back to their association with industry – here the references are to the Manchester Ship Canal, built in the 1890s.

Rainbow bee with umbrella on Canal Street

The malleability of symbols like the bee is important because it allows them to remain open to multiple interpretations. One of Manchester’s bees demonstrates this beautifully. On Canal Street in the city’s Gay Village is a lamppost sporting bees placed there by the City Council – the bee as symbol of civic authority. An unknown person has added the colours of the rainbow to the bee’s abdomen, together with a rainbow umbrella above its head, to protect the delicate bee from the inevitable Manchester rain. Subverting a symbol of civic order into one that celebrates both diversity and vulnerability turns the meaning of the bee on its head. We may need to be strong in the face of terror; we may need to be unified and defiant; but we also need to acknowledge our vulnerability and to accept the need for protection against any unity that is enforced or exclusive.

This month, I’ve finally published a website I’ve been building since February called The Stones of Manchester. It’s a photographic record I’ve created mainly over the last year of the metropolitan region of Greater Manchester in the northwest of England, where I’ve been living now for nearly 8 years, and which at 493 square miles is almost as large as Greater London. Created in 1974 as one of six metropolitan counties in the UK, Greater Manchester is made up of ten metropolitan boroughs: Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford and Wigan, and the cities of Manchester and Salford. Over 2.6 million people live within its borders.

The Metropolitan County of Greater Manchester

Like many people living in Greater Manchester, I had little knowledge of the urban region outside the city centre and where I live in Stockport. For me, the desire to explore further was tied up with two things. First, the suicide bombing attack on the Manchester Arena on 22 May 2017, which left 22 dead, half of whom were children, and 139 injured; and second, the ongoing transformation of the centre of Manchester and Salford that is seeing dozens of new luxury residential towers being constructed alongside a very conspicuous rise in the number of homeless people on the city’s streets. 

Architects’ rendering of cluster of towers on Owen Street, currently under construction

The morning after the terrorist attack, I visited the city centre with a friend and found myself caught up in the international media attention Manchester was receiving. In the days that followed, there were insistent calls for unity, for Mancunians of every persuasion to be strong and stand together against an ideology that sought to create fear and division. Like so many others, I was left wondering what my part in this might be, how I might deal with that sense of shock and desire for solidarity that comes when an atrocity is carried out close to where you live. 

Policemen on New Cathedral Street, the morning after the Manchester Arena attack on 22 May 2017

At the same time, I felt strongly that how the centre of Manchester was being transformed at the time of the attack grated with this call for collective unity. All around the centre, new luxury towers spoke of the city as place for the wealthy – a deliberate turning away from Manchester’s long-standing reputation as one of the poorest cities in the UK. As if to confirm this, the streets of the city centre were increasingly drawing in those who were homeless – a dystopian counter to this image of luxury and exclusivity. I knew that this didn’t represent what I’d already seen outside the city centre, but I wanted to explore this more fully to find out what really unifies the wider urban region. And I would do this by walking as much as was possible and recording the buildings I encountered through photographs. For me, buildings in cities are just as important as people because they are the anchor points where communities form and flourish. They also embody collective values about what cities are and what they aspire to be.  

85 walks, 320 miles and 9,500 photographs later, I am still feeling overwhelmed by the sheer variety of places, buildings and people I encountered; and the project is still ongoing – there are many places left to explore. Here’s a snapshot of some of the types of buildings and spaces that recurred as I walked and which feature in The Stones of Manchester:

Bees

Bees are symbols of civic pride in Manchester that were invented by the Victorians but transformed in the wake of Arena bombing on 22 May 2017 into icons of defiance, unity and strength. A year on from the attack and countless bee stickers now adorn cars and windows, bee tattoos mark bodies, and bee paintings and murals enliven the walls of buildings across the city. 

Bee decoration, New Quay Street bridge over the River Irwell, 1870s.

Decorated stones made as memorials to those killed and injured in the bombing of the Manchester Arena on 22 May 2017

Churches

I was struck by the sheer variety of churches in the Greater Manchester region, particularly the range of uses to which these buildings have been put. One of the most impressive is The Monastery in Gorton. Built from 1866-72 and designed by E W Pugin, the building was a Franciscan Friary until 1989. After falling into disrepair, the building was restored and converted into a community hub and events venue and was reopened in 2007. Equally impressive, but in a very different way, is the William Temple Church in Wythenshawe, a fine example of a modern church building that has stood the test of time. Built in 1965 and designed by George Pace, it’s still a thriving church with a beautifully light and airy interior. 

The Monastery, Gorton Lane, Gorton, 1866-72

William Temple Church, Robinswood Road, Wythenshawe, 1965

Co-operative buildings

Throughout my walks, I was amazed to discover a whole family of buildings both fanciful and mundane that developed out of the Co-operative Movement, which began in Rochdale in the 1840s and quickly spread to the whole urban region and far beyond. Usually located in areas of high-density terraced housing, some, like the Co-op building in North Road between Levenshulme and Longsight, were magnificent architectural showpieces; others, like those built earlier on in Saddleworth, were much more restrained.  

Beswick Co-operative Society building, North Road, Longsight, 1912

Co-operative Store, Court Street, Uppermill, Saddleworth, 1860

Mills

At the height of the industrial period, there were over 2,000 cotton mills in the Greater Manchester region. Today, less than half remain, and since production has now declined to almost zero, many of these magnificent buildings exist now in various stages of dilapidation. Bolton’s Beehive Mills – two enormous cotton mills built at the beginning of the 20th century – testify to the town’s importance in that period; while the earlier Houldsworth Mill in Reddish, Stockport, was part of the philanthropic vision of Henry Houldsworth, who built a whole community to service his mill, including a magnificent church. Sadly, Bolton Council have recently approved the demolition of Beehive mills, as a new use for these gigantic buildings hasn’t yet been found. 

Beehive Mills, Crescent Road, Great Lever, Bolton, 1901-02

Houldsworth Mill, Houldsworth Street, Reddish, Stockport, built in 1865 and designed by Abraham Stott

Stained glass

Although Manchester Cathedral contains a rich variety of stained-glass windows, these are mostly abstract in design; by comparison, the extraordinary figures in the dozen or so windows at St Oswald & St Edmund Arrowsmith Catholic church in Ashton-in-Makerfield are a revelation. Created by the Harry Clarke Studio in Dublin in 1930, they represent one of the finest collections of stained glass from that period anywhere in the world – and I found them almost entirely by accident when visiting the town.

St Agnes window, St Oswald & St Edmund Arrowsmith Catholic church, Liverpool Road, Ashton-in-Makerfield, installed 1930-31

Christ-in-glory window, St Oswald & St Edmund Arrowsmith Catholic church, Liverpool Road, Ashton-in-Makerfield, installed 1930-31

Terraces

Ubiquitous and monotonous as they may be, terraces nevertheless deserve attention because each has its own history and its own architectural and social value; they are, in a very real sense, the foundational building type of not just Manchester but nearly every British city. Far from being generic, terraces in Manchester display an extraordinary variety of forms that evidence how the city was divided up according to the dictates of economy and class.

Terrace, Coronation Street, Ordsall, Salford

Terrace, Clowes Street, Gorton

Underground

I’ve always found the idea of a hidden city enticing and, during the course of my Manchester explorations, I wanted to find some of the city’s underground spaces. River culverts are fascinating because they often contain things left behind by urban development. The former cattle bridge that spans the walls of the Irk culvert under Victoria Station was particularly impressive: a relic of Manchester’s pre-industrial past, which might well date back to the 16th century, that has survived because it’s been repurposed as a utilities tunnel. Equally impressive, but in a different way, are the concrete ribs that support the Mersey culvert under the centre of Stockport, resembling as they do the vast mouth of a basking shark. 

Former cattle bridge spanning the Irk culvert, Manchester, now used as a utility tunnel

Mersey culvert, Stockport, completed in 1940

From Northenden to Partington, it’s rain
From Altrincham to Chadderton, it’s rain
From Cheetham Hill to Wythenshawe, it’s rain
Gorton, Salford, Sale, pretty much the same
What makes Britain great
Makes Manchester yet greater
The Beautiful South, ‘Manchester’, 2006

I still vividly recall the five consecutive days in November 2011 when it rained continuously in Manchester. Still a relative newcomer to the city, it was a rude induction to Manchester’s reputation as the rainiest of English cities (it is, in fact, only the 5th wettest city in the country). In dismal late-autumn light, those five wet days seemed locked in a strange timezone – my experience of the city was all interiors, punctuated by dashes between buildings or steamed-up buses, umbrella always at hand. Outside, the rain stained the city’s brick and concrete buildings with ribbons of water; it gathered in every available hollow, and dribbled incessantly from lintels and eaves. For that seemingly interminable period, it was as if the solid architecture of the city had been blurred into the smudges of paint seen in the work of Adolph Valette, teacher of L S Lowry – the city liquified into atmosphere; water everywhere. 

Adolphe Valette, Albert Square, Manchester, 1910

As literary historian Lynne Pearce has observed, Manchester’s rain looms large in nearly all fictional representations of the city, confirming the way in which the city has tended to be disparaged as a place of bleak monotony – a city with intractable problems. Unsurprisingly, rain features strongly in much of the crime fiction centred on the city. In Karline’s Smith’s Moss Side Massive, a novel which reflects on Moss Side’s reputation as a centre of gang violence in the 1990s, the young ‘Rasta’ Zukie is depressed by the drizzle as he cycles along Moss Lane East, where a ‘dreary grey block of council flats … [is] awaiting demolition. Row upon row, block upon block of solid, grimy pigeon-shit concrete’. Here, rain is a metaphor for failure – a reminder that Manchester seems condemned to keep repeating mistakes made in the past, as if unable to escape the depressing connotations of its predominantly grey skies. And, in Moss Side Massive, this is a failure by the city towards its black citizens – a municipal authority that repeatedly used demolition as a way of dispersing concentrations of ethnic minorities from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Photograph by Mike Kniec

More personal is Lem Sissay’s poem ‘Moods of Rain’ (1988), in which water frames the poet’s experience of being a young black man in the streets of Manchester in the 1970s and 1980s – a time when racist abuse was encountered everywhere. 

I’m giving up dodging glassy eyed puddles
My feet like the kitchen cloth
Face screwed up no time for scruples
Head down, walk straight and cough
And silver speckled my licks are crowned
Melting black faces drip and shine
No smile but an unsatisfied frown
Same goes, I think, for mine

Lem Sissay, ‘Rain’, Oxford Road

When that discrimination eased, rain came to mean something altogether more positive for Sissay. His 2008 poem ‘Rain’ was painted onto a wall above a takeaway on the Oxford Road near the University of Manchester. In order to make sense of the poem, one has to read from top to bottom rather than left to right, as if following drops of rain themselves, assembling the fragmented words one-by-one. The ‘triumphant’ rain in this poem is equated with hope – the ‘Man/cunian way’ of the last line referring both to the motorway that bisects the city just north of the University and also the indomitable spirit of Mancunians themselves. Here, rain provides a shared experience of the city that strengthens the spirit of its people.

Rain-stained viaduct, Ardwick

Mancunians may moan about the city’s rain, but for many, it does indeed provide a means of connection with others, if only in shared conversations about the weather. Rain represents homecoming – a sense of belonging to the city.  In Jeff Noon’s futuristic cyberpunk reimagining of Manchester in Vurt (1993), rain provides an anchor point in a world where the virtual world of dreams has blurred into reality by means of powerful drugs that are ingested through different-coloured feathers. The novel’s central protagonist Scribble remembers his youth through the rain: ‘all I know is that looking back I swear I can feel it falling on me, on my skin. That rain means everything to me, all of the past, all that has been lost’. The sheer physical reality of rain – the way it makes you feel its presence so strongly – is like a call to be truly present in a world where the virtual threatens all the time to pull us away. Rain demands that we come out of ourselves – ‘The raindrops on my face play a sweet refrain’, in the words of The Beautiful South’s 2006 song ‘Manchester’. For first-generation migrant poet Basir Kazmi, the shared experience of rain allows newcomers to identify with the city:

So that others may take pleasure in your talk, Basir
Don’t talk of your tears, talk rather about the rain.

Rain-soaked cobbles in Heaton Moor

That Manchester is indelibly thought of as England’s rainiest city, despite the facts indicating otherwise, speaks more perhaps of its lack of cohesive identity – after all, Manchester has always been a city of migrants of all kinds longing to feel at home. In Mike Leigh’s film Naked (1993), two young Mancunians living in London recite a traditional ballad where the imagery of rain encompasses this kind of longing:

Take me back to Manchester when it’s raining
I want to wash my feet in Albert Square
I’m all agog for a good thick fog
I don’t like the sun, I like it raining cats and dogs
I want to smell the odours of the Irwell
I want to feel the soot get in me hair
Oh I don’t want to roam I want to get back home
To rainy Manchester

Mike Leigh knew the song from his own youth – he sang it with his friends in Habonim – the international socialist Jewish youth movement he joined as a schoolboy in Broughton in Salford. Once again then, the imagery of rain draws us out into a rich tapestry of feelings and memories. Unlike most symbols of belonging – flags, coats of arms, monarchy or national anthems – rain doesn’t allow any one social group to claim it as their own. That is why it is such a powerful way of conceiving the city as a whole – rain falls on the just and unjust, rich and poor, black and white, religious or heathen. It’s a rich metaphor of unity that always reaches beyond any given meaning that we assign to it.

Stockport central library, funded by Andrew Carnegie, built from 1913-14 and designed by Bolton-based architects Bradshaw, Gass & Hope

Of the numerous public libraries in Greater Manchester, no less than 24 were paid for by the Scottish-American steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. These were built from 1904 to 1927 and display a remarkable range of architectural styles, from the flamboyant baroque curves of Levenshulme (1904) to the restrained Art Deco geometries seen in Withington (1927). Some, like Stockport (1913-15), are large and imposing buildings that proclaim their civic virtues in both their visual dominance and abundant ornament. Stockport has a civic crest over its main entrance and stained glass in its interior; Halliwell (1910) in Bolton has prominent stone carvings on its frontage, including an open book inscribed ‘Let there be light’; while Eccles (1907) displays a veritable cornucopia of imagery, including luxuriant boughs of vegetation held by cupids and figures representing the arts and sciences above the doorways. This rich array of symbolism reflects Carnegie’s passion for libraries and his opinion that ‘a library outranks any other one thing a community can do to benefit its people. It is a never failing spring in the desert’. The testimony of famous users confirms this: for example, as a child, architect Norman Foster ‘discovered a whole world of literature and also a world of architecture’ in his local Carnegie-built library in Levenshulme, and credits the library as enabling him to go to university. 

Former Levenshulme library, opened in 1904 and the first Manchester library to be funded by Andrew Carnegie. The library has recently been relocated to a purpose-built leisure centre.

Withington library, completed in 1927 and designed by Henry Price. This was the last library building in Manchester to be funded by Andrew Carnegie and is still in use today.

Halliwell library, Bolton, completed in 1910 and funded by Andrew Carnegie. Still in use today.

Sculptural relief above the doorway of Eccles library, completed in 1907, designed by Edward Potts and funded by Andrew Carnegie. Still in use today.

The 24 Carnegie libraries in Greater Manchester represent only a tiny fraction of the many thousands of libraries funded by philanthropy in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Manchester has the oldest public library in Britain – Chetham’s Library, founded in 1653 – it wasn’t until the passing of the 1851 Public Libraries Act that library provision became an important aspect of the civic duties of municipal authorities. Yet, even then, the Act didn’t allow those authorities to take money from their residents for books – only the buildings and staff could be paid for in this way. Nevertheless, in this early period, the Manchester Free Public Library was established in 1852, with branch libraries following soon after in Hulme (1857), Ancoats (1860), Chorlton and Ardwick (both 1866), and Cheetham (1876). The city’s central library would eventually evolve into the monumental neo-classical edifice that still dominates the civic centre of Manchester, built from 1930-34 and designed by E. Vincent Harris. 

Former Manchester Free Library, Cheetham branch, completed in 1876. The building is now a wholesaler’s store.

Manchester central library, built from 1930-34 and designed by E. Vincent Harris. Still in use today.

From the start, public libraries were regarded as a necessary provision for the working classes – stemming from a middle-class desire to ‘improve’ what working people were reading. Libraries were also a way in which Manchester sloughed off its predominant image in the mid-nineteenth century as an industrial city devoid of cultural life. Whether classical or gothic in style, library buildings created free spaces in the city for leisure: oases of culture amidst the dominance of utilitarian mills and warehouses. Carnegie clearly shared the view that libraries brought a more enlightened form of learning to the working classes, and he often chose to fund libraries in poor urban areas over provision for the middle classes. And many of these libraries proclaimed their didactic function in their spatial layout. For example, Stockport and Withington libraries are based on an ‘open-book’ plan – these buildings are wrapped around street corners, a single main entrance leading to an interior that fans out exactly as the pages of a book do.

Former Wigan library, built in 1907 and funded by Andrew Carnegie. The library has moved to another building and is currently offices.

Atherton library, built from 1904-05, designed by Bradshaw, Gass & Hope and funded by Andrew Carnegie. Currently being renovated.

Yet it’s no exaggeration to say that, today, the public library network in Greater Manchester is in danger of becoming extinct. Not only have some of the Carnegie-funded libraries closed – Castleton, Levenshulme, Wigan, Chadderton, Pemberton, Astley Bridge and Great Lever – but many others across the region, both old and new, face unprecedented challenges caused by the drastic cuts to the budgets of local authorities since the Conservative-led government came to power in 2010. In the last eight years, at least 478 of the UK’s 3,850 public libraries have closed, with another 500 now run by volunteers as the cuts have also seen the laying off of 8,000 librarians. As argued by Laura Swaffield, these recent developments are not only having a devastating effect on local library provision; they are also effectively destroying a national public library system that has been in place for decades. Evolving from the desire to make libraries work within a wider interconnected network of learning, this system meant that every local public library was also a gateway to national assets, including online reference works, newspaper archives, a link to the British Library, and events for children like the annual Summer Reading Challenge. As the many closures and ongoing cuts make clear, this standard service has now disappeared – users face a lottery as to what they’ll find now in their local libraries. 

Heywood library, completed in 1905 and funded by Andrew Carnegie. Still in use today as a library.

Ashton-in-Makerfield library, completed in 1905 and funded by Andrew Carnegie (still in use today)

This dissolution of a national network betrays the principles on which public libraries were founded in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as the complex networks of learning and communication that have evolved since then. As anchor points in local communities, libraries are critical tools in maintaining social cohesion. They are sanctuaries for the lonely, resting places for the homeless, free spaces for those who lack resources, and places of wonder for avid learners of any age. They provide perhaps the only buildings in cities where the entire complex diversity of what constitutes the social is allowed to mix and mingle freely and without demands being made in return, except perhaps respect and politeness and sometimes silence. Even as the entire contents of the British Library can now fit in the memory of a high-end smartphone, there is still no substitute for libraries as places of gathering and exploration. As Robert Macfarlane so beautifully stated in  December 2017, responding to an online petition calling for the government to provide more resources to public libraries: ‘Libraries are time-machines. Libraries are wildwoods. Libraries are galaxies. Libraries are magic portals into learning & dreaming’. The digital age has certainly transformed how, what and where we read, but it has also isolated us in our knowledge. In contrast, the physical and social space of the public library still provides a vital portal into a shared world whose loss threatens to isolate us even more. 

The pink boat moored in Oxford Circus, 19 April 2019

With the alarming warning from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in late-2018 that we have only 12 years in which to act to avoid unprecedented disaster of runaway global warming, the nascent Extinction Rebellion (XR) group, established in Britain by 15 academics in May 2018, has suddenly galvanised the public imagination as a way out of the powerlessness felt by so many, particularly the young. Together with the School Strikes for Climate, begun in Sweden by Great Thunberg in August 2018, the actions of XR have been key in raising the awareness of the likely effects of climate change and by confronting governments with their responsibility to act decisively and quickly, even as they have mostly so far failed to do so.

A car-free Waterloo Bridge on 19 April 2019

Tents at Marble Arch, 19 April 2019

The tactics of XR are simple but spectacularly effective: in well-organised groups they ‘retake’ urban spaces normally given over to petrol-guzzling vehicles and transform them into temporary encampments open to all. One of their first large-scale actions, on 17 November 2018, was to block the five main road bridges over the River Thames in London for several hours, causing major disruption. Their most significant UK actions to date have been a ten-day occupation of four key sites in central London from 15-25 April 2019, a four-day occupation in central Manchester in September, and a week-long campaign of actions in London in early October (before they were temporarily banned from further actions in the capital). 

Barricade at Marble Arch, 19 April 2019

Chalk drawings at Parliament Square, 19 April 2019

In the April protests, activists blockaded Waterloo Bridge, Parliament Square, Oxford Circus and Marble Arch, as well as engaging in other smaller-scale actions. Over the course of the ten days, over 1,000 activists were arrested by the Metropolitan Police – a move that mainly served to bring more protestors to the sites where arrests had been made. This tactic of multiple occupations was made possible by instantaneous online communications through social media and it created a highly fluid protest that was very difficult to police effectively. It also powerfully disrupted the conventional everyday flows of traffic, people and goods that modern cities take for granted as normal. For a brief period, large areas of central London were largely car-free, the city’s air seemed cleaner, its streets dominated by the noise of people rather than vehicles. 

Skateboarding ramp on Waterloo Bridge, 19 April 2019

Washing-up station on Waterloo Bridge, 19 April 2019

At the same time, XR protestors brought with them a range of structures to sustain the occupations. A pink boat was ‘moored’ in the centre of Oxford Circus, around which a sea of protestors gathered, some gluing themselves to the boat. Potted plants and small trees were brought to Waterloo Bridge; while coloured chalks enabled people to transform the surface of roads into a canvas for art. Tents dominated in the pedestrianised space at Marble Arch – barricades made of traffic cones, canvas banners and wooden palettes marking the edges of the zone of occupation. The protestors’ everyday needs were met by a variety of ad-hoc structures: a small raised platform balanced on used car tyres supporting a sink on Waterloo Bridge a place to wash dirty cups and dishes; toilets at Oxford Circus constructed from salvaged wooden panels and doors; a free shop from similar materials at Marble Arch. In addition, structures were built simply for pleasure: an improvised stage made with palettes in the heart of Parliament Square hosting musicians and other performers; a skateboard ramp one of the first things to be installed on Waterloo Bridge; sculptures and assemblages at all four sites melding protest and art in the mode of the Situationists in 1960s Paris. Finally, in a similar way to the 2011 Occupy movement, the day-to-day organisation of the protest sites was facilitated by easy-to-erect gazebos and other inexpensive demountable structures. As with Occupy, a consensus-based politics emerged within small groups of protestors, each of which took responsibility for different tasks assigned to them. Indeed, one of the three key demands of XR – that a citizens’ assembly be created to hold governments accountable for the transition to a zero-carbon society – came directly from anarchist thinking, namely to make political representation a truly bottom-up process.

Gazebo being erected at Parliament Square, 19 April 2019

Free shop at Marble Arch, 19 April 2019

Since the April 2019 occupations, there has been much celebration within the XR movement, particularly after the UK became the first government in the world to declare a climate emergency shortly after the end of the London occupations on 1 May 2019. But its breezy optimism has been tempered by criticism of the movement as overly concerned with generating a spectacle (arrests seen as a status symbol) at the expense of the hard graft of long-term negotiation for concrete results. XR has also been criticised for paying little attention to wider anti-capitalist struggles which are inextricably linked with climate change and ecological collapse, as well as focusing attention on developed-world communities that probably already have enough privileges and resources to escape the very worst effects of environmental breakdown. And, despite the bringing together of young and old in XR occupations, it still lacks a broader social basis, particularly in relation to minority groups, the old working class and the new precariat. In the more recent October actions, XR protestors came into direct conflict with a hostile public. Two protestors who occupied the roof of a Tube train were forcibly removed by commuters, who were angered by XR’s counterproductive targeting of public transport. 

A working group at Marble Arch, 19 April 2019

Toilets at Oxford Circus, 19 April 2019

It remains to be seen how the movement will develop in response to these criticisms; but what it has undoubtedly achieved is a spectacular demonstration of the power of occupations to transform the nature of urban space, even if this is only temporary. When streets become places to live, when the dominance of cars is powerfully challenged, when politics grows directly from full participation, when everyday life itself merges with art and festival – then, the city is truly transformed into a new kind of space that prefigures more sustainable, emancipatory and hopeful futures.

The People’s Podium, Parliament Square, 19 April 2019

Ever since the UK government imposed a nationwide lockdown on 23 March, I’ve been using the time to do more painting, something which I’ve only practised very intermittently since 2004. It’s interesting to me that the period of lockdown (now coming up to 14 weeks) has resulted in a surge of creativity – I’ve completed 11 paintings in this time (more than I’ve done over the last four years). Perhaps having my family at home during the day has, at last, provided a sense of normality to what is my unusual working life – mostly solitary, home-based research and writing. Perhaps it was a necessary way of structuring my time – providing variety when much of everything else was being stripped back. Whatever the reason, in this difficult time, I’ve found focus and meaning through art-making and it’s something I’d like to build more strongly into my everyday life once this crisis has passed. Here’s five pieces that I enjoyed making the most.

I’ve lived in Greater Manchester for nearly 10 years and it’s the first city I’ve lived in that I’ve truly grown to love. I’ve already written about the city’s industrial ruins in The Dead City and gathered together, with fellow writer Sarah Butler, a diverse range of stories about its unheralded places and pasts in Manchester: Something Rich & Strange. I’m fascinated by the textures of the city’s buildings – their overwhelming ruddiness (the ever present brick); but also by the historical undertow that pulls on everything in the city. This painting – multiple replicas of Brownsfield Mill in Ancoats – references French traveler Alexis de Tocqueville’s remark about Manchester in 1835, a time when the city was ‘Cottonopolis’, the global centre of cotton textile production. De Tocqueville said that ‘from this filthy sewer, flows pure gold’. This uncomfortably melding of darkness and light, and corruption and beauty, is perhaps what most entices me about the city I call home. Despite its recent high-profile regeneration, Manchester remains intractably bound up with this powerful contradictory image from the past.

In the early weeks of lockdown, my spatial horizons became very narrow: mostly daily walks or cycle-rides to places I already thought I knew well. During this time, I must have passed the gargantuan railway viaduct that straddles the Mersey Valley in Stockport dozens of times. This structure, built in 1840, always appears in two guises: at once both graceful and also brutal. It always seems out of place, yet also absolutely rooted in everyday experience. Its geometries are simple – repeating round arches on massive brick pillars dressed with stone – but these geometries shift and warp when seen from different viewpoints. In this painting, I imagined the Stockport viaduct stacked on top of itself many times; the passing trains crisscrossing the sky at different angles. In many ways, this improbable image reflects the reality of how urban infrastructure works. In Stockport, rivers occupy the lowest level, mostly still where they were before the town was developed. Industry brought roads –  bridges spanning the rivers below – and later railways, their bridges and viaducts spanning the space above the roads. Thus, multiple layers developed – a skyward movement that now extends much further upwards to the flight paths of aircraft coming and going from Manchester’s airport (although almost erased during the early period of lockdown).

After a few weeks of this focus on my immediate surroundings, I wanted to try and broaden my outlook. My paintings became more experimental – ways of trying out new techniques and forms. I’d also become fascinated with using glass gems and sequins. Generally, my paintings are composed of many layers of materials: first, a wash of ink or acrylic; second, chalk squares or circles; third, watercolour which fixes the chalk. Next comes gouache – metallic paints that I enjoy for their unique sheens. Gems provided the final layer – a top surface that shimmers as different kinds of light are reflected off or refracted though the little pieces of glass. The three paintings shown here illustrate how I’ve been experimenting with more abstract forms in this layering of materials. Medusa is named after the jellyfish that go by this name – it’s a spiralling form that glistens in all the colours of the rainbow, as some marine creatures do in the pitch-black of the deep sea.

The next painting, Cloudburst, came as a response to the record-breaking spell of dry weather we had during the first two months of the lockdown. In some ways, that unbroken sunshine was a great mercy but it was also part and parcel of the climate crisis that continues to unfold despite the enforced stillness imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic (and, seemingly, the first ever global reduction in carbon emissions). On every raindrop in this painting is fixed an iridescent gem. In a certain light, these flicker and pulsate with a hypnotic beauty.

The final painting – Singularity – develops the spiralling forms seen in Medusa and the iridescence of Cloudburst. The double spiral is made up of hundreds of different-sized dots. I managed to source 12 sizes of iridescent gems to match these and painstakingly glued them to the dots – from the smallest (0.2mm) to the largest (8mm). Although the forms are abstract, the idea was to give a sense of the way in which light might disappear into a Black Hole – the singularity that provided the title for the painting. But I also found out that the word ‘singularity’ can mean something different, namely an imagined point in the future when the world spirals out of control as technology develops its own sentient intelligence. This meaning felt very apt for our own times, as a seemingly alien intelligence really has shaken human life to its very core.