Manchester is proud of its creative history, which is often seen as a consequence of the amount of rain it gets. Maybe the distance from the capital also fosters a spirit of independence, the city wanting to sort itself out without any help from the authorities in London. In his wretched Autobiography, Morrissey provides an anecdote which speaks to both the city’s past grimness and its resistance to condescension: ‘Queen Victoria had visited Manchester in the 1840s and had remarked upon its destitution as despair previously unseen, and she also remarked upon the sickly look in the faces of Manchester folk. Manchester repaid her unflattering comments with a fat, black statue in Piccadilly Gardens’. As I walked past the statue this morning, a bus plastered with logos for ‘Embarrassing Bodies’ was parked up a couple of feet away, so maybe we still haven’t got over it.
The Condition of the Working Classes in Manchester
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| The young Engels |
Although the city is proud of its outspoken inhabitants, it’s unlikely that Engels’ findings will be quoted in the tourist literature any time soon. The picture he paints is bleak indeed, with the city encapsulating ‘all the evils incident to the customary method of providing working-men’s dwellings’. He is particularly scornful of Manchester’s satellite towns, which he describes as ‘badly and irregularly built with foul courts, lanes and back alleys, reeking of coal smoke, and especially dingy’. Worst of all is Bolton, which Engels calls ‘even in the finest weather a dark, unattractive hole’.
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| The filth & ruin of Manchester, seen from Kersal Moor, 1857 |
Manchester itself is even worse. Engels professes his descriptions are inadequate to convey ‘a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness’ in the city’s slum dwellings. He suggests to his readers that if they wish to see ‘in how little space a human being can move, how little air he can breathe (and what air!), how little of civilisation he may share and yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither’.
Engels also notes the peculiar layout of the city, in which the working people’s dwellings are crowded in a band around the city centre, ‘sharply separated from the sections of the city reserved for the middle class’, who could be found in Chorlton or Ardwick. The purpose of this arrangement, according to Engels, was to ensure that ‘members of the money aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the labouring districts to their places of business, without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left’. Nowadays, the Metrolink to Chorlton serves a similar purpose for the suburb’s population of artists and trendy young professionals.
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| Remnants of the Irish slums |
The last remnants of the slums Engels described as ‘this Hell upon Earth’ can be found in the streets around Oxford Road train station, with their uneven cobbles and closely packed buildings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, virtually every building remaining is now a pub.
Between the Wars
Things improved slowly in the twentieth century, but the same problems were still apparent to George Orwell in the 1930s. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he touched on the housing situation in the city: ‘When you walk through the smoke-dim slums of Manchester you think that nothing is needed except to tear down these abominations and build decent houses in their place. But the trouble is that in destroying the slums you destroy other things as well. Houses are desperately needed and are not being built fast enough; but in so far as rehousing is being done, it is being done – perhaps it is unavoidable – in a monstrously inhuman manner’.
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| Ancoats in the 1930s |
The idea that slum clearances destroyed communities is slightly fogeyish, and there is a tendency to romanticise the past. In The Kid From Angel Meadow (1989), Malcolm Lynch is at pains to show how vibrant 1920s Ancoats was, in spite of the living conditions. The winsome dust jacket notes portray ten year old Kitty Noonan ‘clog-dancing outside the pub for halfpence’ and ‘doing her share of the street’s communal laundry in the steaming copper’ before the theatre lures her away from ‘the wretched industrial slum’. In the early nineteenth century, Ancoats was home to such a high population of Italian immigrants that it was known as ‘Little Italy’, but by the 1850s the ‘black huddle of two-up two-down houses built during the Crimean War to stable cotton mill workers’ was now home to a largely Irish community. In true stereotypical fashion, life as depicted in the novel is dominated by the institutions of pub and church – ‘the girls always knew when to finish their dancing because the Salvation Army girls invaded the pub to sell copies of The War Cry’. Later, Kitty hears her father coming home, ‘singing the rebel songs, so she knew he was drunk but not too drunk’. Describing the nightlife, Lynch writes ‘it was very dark down Ancoats Lane. Men pushed their young tarts into back entries; sometimes two cigarette glows would dance in the dark of the entry’.
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| Ancoats Dispensary |
Nowadays, Ancoats is on the border of the NoMa regeneration project, with developments like Islington Mill making the area quite trendy. The music scene has benefitted from the cheap spaces offered by the old mills, with nightclubs like Sankey’s Soaps and a number of rehearsal studios setting up in the area. One notable building, the Ancoats Dispensary, is currently the subject of a dispute between locals who want to see the Grade II listed building preserved, and developers Urban Splash who claim there is no economically viable use for it.
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| Belle Vue Zoological Gardens |
More interestingly, Lynch describes a trip to Belle Vue, the amusement park–cum-zoo which featured rides, firework displays and fairs, and became known as the ‘showground of the world’ in the early twentieth century. On a school outing, the children from Ancoats find themselves ‘mooching around, hands in their pockets, looking for lost pennies on the ground’ which would buy them entrance to the amusements. The attractions seem to have been rather morbid, with Lynch describing ‘a thick crowd gathered around the large For Amusement Only case called ‘The Early Morning Execution’. A penny in the slot lit the prison up, and a group of warders and a priest moved along like clockwork to the tower… the tower went ding-dong eight times, and the tower wall swung open on a hinge, and there was the prisoner with the rope around his neck. The trap door opened and the prisoner was swinging, swaying and twirling on the end of the rope’.
Other attractions at Belle Vue included a zoo, with lions, bears and rhinos, and a scenic railway. In 1928 a speedway stadium was built, and the large Kings Hall would later host concerts by the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Leonard Cohen. The amusement park shut in 1980, and the entire site was closed seven years later. All that remains now is a greyhound racing track and a snooker hall.
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| Salford, as seen in the 1941 film adaptation of Love on the Dole |
Walter Greenwood’s novel Love on the Dole (1933) has rather more literary merit. Set in Hanky Park, a fictitious area closely modelled on Salford, Love on the Dole looks at the effects of mass unemployment and economic depression on the community, and its unflinching realism has led to it being hailed as a valuable ‘social document’ by the Times Literary Supplement. Greenwood’s Salford is a cramped and run down city ‘whose pavements, much worn and very narrow, have been polished by the traffic of boots and clogs of many generations’. The streets are ‘mazes, jungles of tiny houses cramped and huddled together’, and the only distractions are ‘public houses by the score, where forgetfulness lurks in a mug; pawnshops by the dozen… [and] churches, chapels and unpretentious mission houses’.
There is still a sense of pride amongst the people of Hanky Park, though: ‘the doorsteps and windowsills of the houses are worn hollow. Once a week, sometimes twice, the women clean them with brown or white rubbing stone; the same with portions of the pavement immediately outside their front doors’. Greenwood contrasts the nineteenth century prosperity of Salford with the present misery. Describing Eccles Old Road, he states that ‘until the coming of the electric trams in the early years of the century’, the road was ‘the place of residence of many millionaires whose source of wealth was cotton… in those days, the road was termed ‘millionaires’ mile’. The mansions still remain’.
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| The Docks at Trafford Park |
Later he bemoans the fate of Trafford Park. Sold by the Trafford family in 1896, Trafford Park became the first planned industrial estate in the world, employing thousands at its factories and docks, but Greenwood bemoaned its impact on the environment: ‘Thirty years ago it was the country seat of a family whose line goes back to the ancient British kings and whose name the area retains. Thirty years ago its woodlands were chopped down to clear the way for commerce and to provide soles for Lancashire clogs; thirty years ago the park-roving deer were rounded up and removed; thirty years ago the lawns, lately gay with fashionably dressed ladies and gentlemen, were obliterated’. These sights have been replaced with ‘a double railway track only six yards away… the fungus of modern industry, huge engineering shops, flour mills, timber yards, oil refineries, automobile works, repositories for bonded merchandise, choke and foul the prospect’.
Post-War Lives
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| Lowry's painting of Orsdall Lane in Salford |
Salford, like Ardwick, is now undergoing a process of regeneration, spearheaded by the BBC’s relocation and the Lowry Theatre on Salford Quays, but in his autobiography The Gatekeeper, Marxist academic Terry Eagleton talks of a city which had changed little from Greenwood's time. If the city was no longer exhibiting the kind of Dickensian squalor highlighted by Engels, it was, in the 1950s, still grimly urban – Eagleton says that inhabitants ‘probably never encountered more than three trees at a time until they were well in their twenties’. At the time, Salford ‘could hardly boast a middle class, let alone an Opera house’. Growing up in the largely Irish community of Kersal, his life was dominated by a local Carmelite convent, but even this was underwhelming, ‘a squat, ramshackle building, its roof more corrugated iron than Gothic pinnacle’. The convent on Vine Street is now closed.
Eagleton suggests a lack of flair and imagination amongst civic leaders as a cause of Salford’s miserable condition, with one particular anecdote highlighting the way the local council was viewed: ‘The story is told of a meeting of the city council which was trying to agree a way of brightening up the town, a task which in my view would have required little short of divine intervention. Eventually, one councillor suggested erecting a few pagodas in the local park. The suggestion met with general approval, until the mayor rose heavily from his seat. 'It's all very well having these 'ere pagodas in t'park,' he growled, 'but what I want to know is this. Who's going to feed the buggers?'’
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| Statue of Lowry in Salford |
There is still a sense of people rising above their conditions, however, and Eagleton is keen to point out that ‘though Salford is the subject of a book entitled The Classic Slum, it could also boast a distinguished heritage,’ including the 1930s agitprop group The Red Megaphones, folk music legend Ewan MacColl and playwright Shelagh Delaney. In a close-knit community, these towering cultural figures could regularly be seen in the city: ‘my mother remembers young Walter Greenwood swanning around in his new found finery, en route to the big smoke. As a young girl, she saw LS Lowry painting by the roadside’.
Religion also loomed large in Morrissey’s North Manchester upbringing, most vividly in the shape of ‘a bearded nun who beat children from dawn to dusk’ at his primary school. A local convent, Loreto, was no more welcoming, being surrounded by ‘high walls with broken glass atop lest we, below, get any fancy ideas’. Always inclined toward the misanthropic and melodramatic, Morrissey characterises the locals as ‘non-human sewer rats with missing eyes’, or the washed up old crowd ‘who will tell you that life was so much better before it became slightly worse’. As Orwell did, Morrissey argues that slum clearances destroyed a sense of community, leaving the area ‘bereft of its narrow and once-crowded streets and stripped of its maze of illuminated corner shops’. A once-imposing church ‘now looks like a pathetic creature of pointless endurance’.
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| Strangeways Prison |
Later, though, the adolescent Morrissey finds some inspiration in the grime of the city, strolling like a flaneur around the area which has now been rebranded as NoMa: ‘an alley off Great Ancoats Street leads up nowhere; helpless against Edwardian decay and war damage… beyond leftover Shudehill and the deathbound dark shadow of Victoria Station, Jon and I would encircle Strangeways prison, still leaned on by slum streets and courtyards’. Despite the regeneration efforts in this part of the city, Morrissey would probably feel at home if he ever chose to retrace his steps, as the area between Great Ancoats Street and the redeveloped Shudehill bus station is still filled with dubious looking second hand bookshops, dingy bars and massage parlours.
The next blog in this series will look at modern day Manchester, as described by writers like Stephen Hall, Emma-Jane Unsworth, Nicholas Royle and Sam Mills
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