‘From this filthy sewer, pure gold flows’: that was in 1835, but it could be today
Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French political commentator, visited Manchester in 1835 when the city was the capital of the world’s textile industry. He wrote: ‘From this foul drain, the greatest stream of human industry flows to fertilise the whole world. From this filthy sewer, pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish.’ This was ten years before Benjamin Disraeli coined his famous ‘two nations’ phrase about the rich and the poor in his novel Sybil. Disraeli was referring to England as a whole, but — thanks to his involvement in the Chartist movement — I suspect he had Manchester in mind. Neither de Tocqueville nor Disraeli, therefore, would have been totally surprised by the Centre for Cities report published this January, which suggested that Manchester was the most unequal city in Britain: 175 years after de Tocqueville’s visit, wealth and poverty continue to flow side by side through the heart of Manchester as unerringly as the River Irwell.
The most significant aspect of the Centre for Cities report is that Manchester’s ‘two nations’ are numerically, as well as financially, un-equal: Greater Manchester has a relatively tiny number of prosperous people, offset by huge swaths of poverty. In only one of Manchester’s ten boroughs, Trafford, do residents earn above the national wage. There are pockets of abject deprivation, notably the notorious Moss Side and Harpurhey, recently named as the worst place to live in England.
One teenager, speaking after yet another fatal shooting in Moss Side, said simply, ‘I’m not even scared any more because I’m used to it. It’s not even horrible any more. It’s just normal.’
Contrast this desperate portrait with the comments of a London-based Labour MP who, visiting Manchester recently, told assembled business leaders that he had no idea the city was doing so well. It’s easy to scoff, and clearly the MP hadn’t visited Moss Side, but a cursory stroll through the city centre backs him up. Imaginative regeneration projects such as the Great Northern Railway Company Goods Warehouse and the new Edwardian Radisson hotel, built on the site of the historic Free Trade Hall and the Peterloo Massacre, define the newly flourishing city centre, together with the magnificent 47-storey Beetham Tower and the revitalised retail area that was blown to pieces by a 3,000lb IRA bomb in 1996. Ten years after that atrocity, Manchester was named as the best city in which to do business in Britain; in 2007 the city’s economy was hailed as the fastest growing in the country.
Surveys are ten a penny and I’m sure other cities can unearth similar accolades. So let’s apply a sterner test. Commercial property is a reliable barometer of economic weather, so the news that fund managers paid £78 million for two city-centre office blocks in December is an endorsement of Manchester’s pulling power. Hansa Invest bought No 2 Hardman Street from Legal & General’s UK Property Unit Trust for £57 million — a 6.75 per cent yield — while BP’s Pension Fund bought No 4 Hardman Square from Aviva Investors Property Fund for £21 million, a 6.95 per cent yield. The buildings are fully let and within Allied London’s successful Spinningfields development, where occupiers include Deloitte, Grant Thornton and HSBC.
Average yields in Manchester are now 7 per cent and developers are prepared to take risks outside the city-centre core, with Leeds-based Town Centre Securities crossing the Pennines to pioneer the adventurous Piccadilly Basin scheme.
The news that the BBC is relocating some of its staff (many kicking and screaming) to Salford Quays on the historic Manchester Ship Canal will give further impetus to the geographical broadening of the city’s economic base. Much has been written about the despair felt by London-centric BBC folk at the prospect of moving up north. While Salford itself, inspiration for ‘Weatherfield’ in the peerless soap opera Coronation Street, is a bit grim, I suspect Manchester city centre will be a revelation to these pampered London media types. In any case, there are plenty of excellent broadcasters, producers and researchers in the north ready to step in if it’s a move too far for our BBC friends in the south.
There’s a major airport here, which might ease the pain of relocation. It also holds the key to untold riches. As the city looks for a much-needed injection of cash, following the demise of proposals for both a super-casino and a congestion charge, it could do much worse than privatise this golden goose. Shares in Manchester Airport Group — which is currently bidding to run Gatwick — are owned by the city and the boroughs. If the airport was privatised, it could generate up to £3 billion, enough to fund a world-class public transport system and the proposed £100 million Royal Opera House outpost in a revamped Palace Theatre, adding to the richness of the city’s artistic life.
No provincial city, with the possible exception of Liverpool, has such a proud and varied cultural heritage as Manchester. From the atmospheric paintings of Adolphe Valette, Manchester’s own Monet and tutor to L.S. Lowry, to Joy Division and the Smiths, both purveyors of a bleak, post-industrial Mancunian angst; from A Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess, born in Harpurhey, to 20th-century renaissance man Tony Wilson, with his protégés the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays, the city has been at the forefront of many an artistic movement. When the Ecstasy experience swept the country in the late 1980s, Wilson’s legendary Hacienda nightclub was the centre of the E-universe. Today, symbolically, it’s a soulless block of flats. For a couple of heady years, Manchester became Madchester (a pun on MDMA, the scientific acronym for Ecstasy) and forgot its woes.
But those woes live on, despite the successes of Manchester United, the favoured opiate of the masses. The Centre for Cities report does not lie — and it is no coincidence that Shameless, television’s most popular portrayal of welfare dependency and the social underclass, is set on a (barely) fictional Manchester housing estate. The report also underlines the size of the challenge ahead for One Nation Conservatives like David Cameron and Iain Duncan-Smith who want to mend Britain’s broken society. The gulf between rich and poor in Manchester appalled de Tocqueville long ago — and should still appal us today.
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