The Olympic sprinter Linford Christie provoked the title of Manchester’s most striking piece of recent public art. It was reportedly inspired by Christie’s claim that he always left the starting block on the “B of the bang”. So Thomas Heatherwick’s metallic explosion aims to suggest the primal energy surge which fires every progressive motion. Thoughtful commentators have noted how this might connect with Manchester’s recent story of rigorous regeneration, which might be said to have been sparked by the ignition of the IRA bomb at the Arndale Centre in 1996. Yesterday the lady at the Sportcity Visitor Centre repeated a view that I’ve heard before, numerous times, from Mancunians: that terrible though it was, the bomb woke the city up. It fired an explosion of vital new beginnings. “And no-one was killed,” she said.
Today Phil and I walked back into the centre – searching as we went for the epicentre, the B of the Bang which is Manchester. Our route was (perhaps deliberately) unpromising for such a quest. We started walking north through well-heeled suburbs (Alkrington Garden Village, Middleton), crossed the green estate lands of Alkrington Hall and through the forgotten footpaths of Alkrington Woods, went through a ghost-tunnel beneath the M60 (car wreck, ghoulish graffiti) into the suburbs of Higher Brackley, discovering the quaintly packaged Crab Village en-route. And then into places of inner-urban toil and struggle: Crumpsall, Cheetham Hill, Collyhurst, emerging in the centre via the redbrick viaduct garagelands and Traveller sites of Newtown / Victoria.
One thing which surprised me was the modesty of Manchester’s memorialising the explosive event of 15 June 1996. We couldn’t find anything except a small plaque on the wall of the Royal Exchange to note the events of that day (though I’ve since discovered that a pillar box that survived the blast, despite being only yards from the centre of the explosion, now carries a small brass plaque recording the bombing). It may have been different had there been fatalities, of course. Thankfully perhaps, even in this most commercial of cities, there was no great municipal urge to mourn the (temporary) loss of 50,000 square metres of retail space and 25,000 square metres of office space.
Interestingly perhaps the deadest place we visited, that with the least spark, was the epicentre of the IRA bomb. Standing on a balcony by M&S overlooking the entrance to the Arndale Centre we considered that for all the flows of people here the commercial flows suck money, power out of the city. The energies which shape these places emerge from corporate boardrooms elsewhere. We could have been anyplace, and we were, there. The B of the Bang of Manchester is not in its shopping malls.
Maybe the places through which we walked in to town had modest sparks of their own which ignited different movements in Manchester’s life. In the middle of a green in Alkrington, a cluster of trees marks the head of an old mine shaft, indicating the beginnings of industry in the area, and the source of the wealth and employment of some of its past and present residents. Alkrington Hall (still privately occupied) indicates a different form of energy: the investment of seriously wealthy families in the area which (for better or worse) has helped shape the place’s history. The M60 is an energy rush, sucking around its circuit thousands of busy travellers doing the business which fires the city’s life. The inner urban areas crackle with human life, sometimes breaking-up as the forces of life collide in them, sometimes sparking creativity (Nobby Stiles and Les Dawson come from Collyhurst) or influential movements (Sylvia Pankhurst’s name is being celebrated in a refurbished tower block on Dalton Street).
Today, after guzzling a generous lunch at a cafe in Collyhurst’s modest shopping square we enjoyed the energy of a red stone sculpture on the hill behind, overlooking the towerblocks of the city centre, a broken ‘cast’ of a very large ‘chocolate egg’. The locals call this place Red Bank and there is evidence that people often enjoy sitting here enjoying the sculpture, the view, and each other’s company. And I bet that these hilltop soirees ignite a hundred small sparks – of light, love, ideas – in those who share them. Future Les Dawsons or Sylvia Pankhursts perhaps. Not quite the sort of spark which we set out looking for, but the sort of sparks which re-ignite a city’s life, everyday. Modestly.
John,
Thanks for a couple of very fine days of walking. Good to be lost at 10.30 of an evening, full of curry.
Strange then, that i should return a little saddened, not by the experience of walking together, but at some of the contrasts in the terrain we crossed.
There were wonderful things – the sheer extent of urban moss, the smile of the woman in the first Barm shop we visited, the strange feeling of the late night hospital, the verger patrolling his patch, and most of all the joy of passing across and through the different ambiences of the city.
And yet such a wide-ranging wander as ours revealed, for me, some great weaknesses in the city. Few, but ourselves, were enjoying these contrasts, most were, rather, confined to more uniform and bounded sectors, motion restricted to smaller journeys within the bounds and longer journeys in cars, often on large urban arteries, mostly sealed off from the detail of the changes.
Park were confined, shafts capped, the travellers’ site walled in, the Crab Village with its restrictions chalked on the board outside,the woman who abruptly terminated our conversation about that capped shaft, the fenced off B of the Bang, the massive and yet discreet fences around the walk up to MCFC’s stadium, the blatant use of art to increase property prices in a limited zone.
So many missed opportunities – so litte public acknowledgement of anything. Given a recent orientation to architecture I found myself, surprisingly, thrown back to first principles. Of the need to make the city ourselves, from our everyday. Of the failure, but also perhaps the inevitable failure of the ‘public’ realm to cope in the face of opportunities.
Snatching precipitately at some shards of urban theology on my train ride to Manchester, I grasped at two contrasting slivers: Augustine’s heavenly city, bounded and full, spiritually policed and exclusive, contrasting with the immanent state of the Christian faithful under Rome, as “perigrines” – outsiders that might be “pilgrims”. And a Zizioulas-inspired idea of being as inseperable from, and identical to, relation; a (perhaps suprisingly)close theological formulation of Doreen Massey’s characterisation of space as (partially, but importantly) consisting of trajectories.
What was disappointing was the amount of heartless and uninspired boundedness – with a number of small regeneration (and security) projects evident. And the sheer ignorance and arrogance of that Pankhurst-referencing real estate sign – Emmeline and Christabel “sold out”!!
It was only once I was making my way to the station at the end of our two days that I passed through two streets that seemed to acknowledge something of the potential for hybrid. But two streets in so many miles? Just that one back alley laid out for collective leisure, all the others gated and filled with waste bins?
Equally, there was no sense of a celebration of social trajectory – only the 4×4 displayed in a weird rockery operation – almost exclusively the functional and the commercial.
I don’t feel sad, because I’m surprised that I’m surprised. But it is good to be reminded of the monstrous discrepencies and contradictions: between the pleasure that is so freely available and the public organisation of social trajectories to persuade people to pay for their enjoyment. We saw many faces on which such a cost was written deep.
Walking with you, John, has this time been a necessary and salutary lesson as we experienced both the incidental wonders of the city and the game of making being from relations and trajectories alone – to imagine a being that needs to be no more than the sum of its relations – could such a being be social, a social pilgrimage, in the sense of a city made of travel.
We were welcomed both by those whose job it is and spontaneously – by the woman visitor to the Sports City centre, by the man who told us about the shaft collapse and about moss, by the woman at the brewery who sold us Boggart beer sticking on the labels then and there… and yet there is little public ackowledgement of these relations. The most striking perhaps was the ‘Breaking Of The Mould’ at Collyhurst, a ‘new menhir’, and an informal forum, with a contemplative view of the urban centre.
Mostly such moments and places were more modest, but of equal impact. What is lacking is the common, everyday language that urban ‘pilgrims’ use to map and join up these hubs.
What if social, cultural and spiritual agencies were to change their ways of making space and their way of conducting their affairs to a pilgrim-like rationale.
Against accumulation and for connection, exchange without currency.
The utterly massive potential for joy and the width by which most opportunties for it are ignored – this contradiction is a huge motor, if we could only recruit it.
Once again, John – a wonderfully eye-opening two days.
Thank you,
Phil