City Life | 4 April 2009

‘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.