A delight to spend the afternoon in Wythenshawe with Doreen Massey, one of our foremost geographers of space, place and social relations. Doreen has written in some depth (and from an autobiographical perspective) about living in Wythenshawe (in The Unknown City, Contesting Architecture and Social Space) and we literally retrod some of the ground covered in that seminal essay – the public spaces (Marketplace, civic forum, airport approaches, Wythenshawe Hall) and the private places (by an act of gracious coincidence, Doreen spotting an old neighbour and family friend on the road, whose home we ended up in for tea and ham and conversation, just across the road from the house where Doreen spent her childhood years).
A delight to see Wythenshawe on a sunny autumn afternoon. Back in the 1920s, Manchester council’s William Jackson and Ernest Simon championed the cause of creating a garden city out in the ‘healthy, non-polluted air’ of the Wythenshawe Hall estate, south of the Mersey, to which the overcrowded so-called ‘cave-dwellers’ of Manchester’s slums could be relocated. It was a political struggle which thankfully they won and over 100,000 people were rehoused in a green and spacious area which the garden city planner Barry Parker ‘dreamt of .. as the ultimate in garden cities and .. regarded .. as his masterpiece’ [source]. It’s still as beautiful today, the green and autumn gold vista of the public fields of Wythenshawe Park being echoed down every tidy tree-lined avenue (just as, I imagine, the boulevards of the Liverpool estates which I know will now be gorgeous with falling leaves).
People should live like this. People who live decent, modest, lives, working in support of their families and communities and unseen strangers who benefit from their duties. Many Wythenshawe people are employed as staff at Manchester Airport, which literally abuts the housing estate, so those unseen strangers are likely to be from all around the globe. Yet Jackson and Simon found that much of north Cheshire disagreed that Manchester’s people ought to be able to live like that. They wanted the unseen stranger with whom their lives connected, to remain unseen. Doreen’s essay records the statistic that 82 percent of the parishioners wanted to resist the advances of Manchester into their area; ‘yet nearly half of them worked [in Manchester]’.
I have learned a great deal from Doreen’s work about how to ‘read’ places. I’ve not opened many books on this journey but I’ve been learning how to open up places, in all their complexity, in their interaction with what Doreen has called ‘that shifting, complex, microspatiality of individual yet interconnected lives … set within a broader social history.’ Today in conversation some underlying ethics emerged. We shared our common passion for affirming the enormous worth of ordinary people, the white working class who are so often reviled by the loud and powerful, a majority whose rich, rich stories are generally hidden from view. Like the story of Wythenshawe. We also shared the necessity and spoke about the complexities involved in challenging injustices done to such as these, by outsiders and by insiders too (those whose behaviour damages their own neighbourhood, those whose denial of any injustices done to them makes protest impossible).
We celebrated heroes – like the Chartists and co-operative pioneers whose hidden histories I followed through Halifax and Rochdale, like the liberation theologians of 1970s and 80s Central America, like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela today. And we did a lot of this whilst sitting in the light, spacious and welcoming cafe in the new Wythenshawe Forum, a lovely civic space where leisure facilities, a library and adult education cente and a health centre converge in a cheerful open hall. It’s as good a civic space as I’ve seen on my journey (or anywhere, for that matter) and many people of Wythenshawe were in there enjoying it this afternoon. Which is very welcome; because of course, the people of Wythenshawe should live like this.
Thanks John for passing on the insights from your conversation with Doreen Massey. Lots of interesting stuff there including your shared (and mine)’passion for affirming the worth of ordinary people’ which I took with your comment about ‘those whose denial of any injustices done to them makes protest impossible’. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant but it reminded me of my time working as a bus driver – for one of the UK’s biggest operators. Among us were those like me (filling time and helping pay the bills whilst I waited a place at theological college), those who had retired from proffessional jobs early and needed a bit of extra cash, and those youngsters working their time for a year or so before trying to move on to a small private firm or start on their own. But the majority were long-timers and the injustices done to them included low wages, no real choice about the shifts or total hours they worked, and driver seats guaranteed to create back injuries if sat in for too many years – yet (even with an admitedly post-Thatcher butchered union) they were hemmed in by the need not to step out of line too much (which meant not speaking out of turn) for fear of losing overtime granting favours. From a completely different context I spoke with a local farmer recently – a hard working, grafting dairy man – the local hunt was gathering in the village and I asked him what he thought about hunting on his land- he didn’t tell me what he actually thought but he did tell me that saying what you thought was often inadvisable because those in power might not agree. It strikes me that an effect of both of those failures to protest is that a casual observer of their two very different communities might interpret noble graft, or rural idyll, as contentment yet beneath the surface lies a different story. Your journey is a wonderful reminder of why its important to scratch beneath the surface of communities and to interpret.
Adrian, thanks, I think you’ve explained very well by those examples what I meant by that phrase ‘those whose denial of any injustices done to them makes protest impossible’ … people silenced by some fear of the consequences of standing up for themselves / what is right.
There’s some hope in architecture then! A salutary read! Glad you had a good day with the Prof!
Keep well!
Phil
Yes, Phil, perhaps so… though not architecture alone of course, but an entire, ambitious, social project with housing at its core.
Yes, I agree about the social nature of the project, but I wonder if it is housing that should come first – most modern developments seem to ONLY plan the housing. Would a return to a menhir-based, landmark-based architecture at least give the social bones to development that are generally missing? I wonder if that old Commonwealth Games public art in Old Mill Street will help define something social that the people in the housing that comes later will benefit by?
Good walking and meeting!
Phil
(An important note of clarification from Doreen Massey which she’s happy for me to add in here):
Thank you for sending your lovely, generous, blog. The only thing I would add is that ‘people should live like this’ refers to the original intentions and the physical environment (the space, the trees, if not the degradation and litter of Holly hedge shops). Actual life on the estate can be poor, difficult, conflictual. Remember Benchill Ward, right next to ‘mine’, is one of the most deprived in the country. People should not live like that – especially after the early promise.