Manchester is in the south of northern England. Its spirit has a contradiction: the north and the south are united. Indomitable and unconventional; at once connected, worldly and self-aware.
This place is old and modern. The Romans came here. It is the most important city of the Industrial Revolution. The cradle of computing. Where Mr. Rolls met Mr. Royce. Where Rutherford split the atom. When Manchester’s days as England’s powerhouse were over, its music scene began. How many bands can you name? The Hollies, Freddie and the Dreamers, Joy Division, The Smiths, Oasis, Simply Red, New Order, Elbow. I have to stop because this isn’t a list, but frankly, it’s weird. And I’m not even talking about football. Or at Old Trafford.
There are all kinds of explanations for the Manchester Magic. Coal, canals, cheap accommodation (then, not now); even the weather. None are deep enough. Go deeper. It is under your feet, in the layers of soil and time. If this sounds fantastic, visit Jodrell Bank, 20 miles south of the city. One of its telescopes is near the site of a Bronze Age tumulus. What cannot be hidden behind the impressive distractions of the visitor experience is the energy itself. Powerful, disturbing and strange.
I think there is a connection between people and place. Between you and the earth, its history, its resonance. This is unique and cannot be replicated or Disneyfied. Like a good local cheese, it has a flavor you can’t find anywhere else. Manchester is local and global. There are more than 30 Manchesters around the world, descendants of this insatiable city. In the year 79 AD. C., when the Romans established a fortification here, Manchester was already looking outwards.
It is home to one of the largest Chinese communities in the UK. Many Asians have made the north their home. A Muslim taxi driver told me how much he appreciates the sense of community he finds on his street and the simple kindness. Yes, there is surely racism, like everywhere, but the spirit of the north – its way of being – suits it both culturally and personally. When I pressed him to summarize it, he said, “Energy.”
Manchester’s energy is particular. There is a vitality that wells up, whether you are rich or poor or somewhere in between. It’s the sense of humor, of course: the world’s first soap opera, Coronation Street, which aired in 1960 and is still successful, relies on that humor. When it rains every day, you need a dry wit.
The joy of the people of the north is not a postcard cliché. It is real and born from the resilience that fought for workers’ rights and the vote for women. Tough and frank people who talk easily with strangers. That can come as a shock, especially to Londoners, who assume that striking up a conversation is the ominous sign of a fraudster or a psychopath. When I first came to live in the south, I felt shocked and depressed for everyone on the streets in their own bubble. And that was before smartphones. Where, I wondered, was the ordinary human interaction that makes us less afraid of each other?
The “M People” like to show their replicas. At the train station recently, I was hesitating over a bouquet of melancholy flowers from the supermarket, when the woman next to me said, “Well, love, it’s up to you, but I wouldn’t waste the water in the vase on them.”
Canceling HS2, the high-speed railway that was supposed to connect the city even faster to the rest of the country, was foolish on the part of the UK government. There are many reasons for this, and Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham (Bambi crossed with a British bulldog) has expressed his opinion on most of them. I would like to add this: the South needs the North for reasons that go beyond economics. More so than the bottom line, because profit/loss is too simple a metric to measure the dazzle that is, or should be, human life. The people of Manchester love to dazzle, and it’s not about cash. Chanel Métiers d’art exhibition in Manchester last year was an inspired adjustment. The brand paid tribute to the city’s textile history and the skill of those who wove and sewed fabrics to the highest standards. The construction of a covered gallery over an alley and the parade of models dressed in wool and tweed down a rainy street sang of the spirit of the place in its most practical and extravagant form. As Mark Radcliffe puts it: “Manchester is a city that thinks a table is for dancing.”
At the beginning of the 18th century, Manchester was home to fewer than 10,000 souls. In 1830 it was full of slums that served 99 cotton factories. The world’s first passenger railway (Manchester being the first) began running between it and Liverpool in 1830, and in 1838 trains linked London, via Birmingham, to this place of crude alchemy. Passengers reported being assaulted from Stockport by the stench of their mephitic steamers. It was not for nothing that Manchester was nicknamed the Golden Sewer.
Charles Dickens, who visited the town frequently because his sister Fanny lived there, describes himself as equal parts “astonished” and “disgusted.” It was Dickens who ceremonially opened Britain’s first public lending library in Manchester in 1852, believing passionately in the value of reading for working-class men and women. The library was packed with people trying to borrow books, to the point that a police officer had to be stationed at the cash register.
Karl Marx, wandering through the city with his friend Friedrich Engels, drew from scenes of life in Manchester much of the theory in The Communist Manifesto (1848). When the Manchester writer Mrs Gaskell wrote about the cotton mills, she said: “I have seen hell and it is white.” It is not surprising, then, that the trade union movement began in Manchester in 1868, or that the Pankhursts, all born in the city, founded the Women’s Social and Political Union there in 1903. (One of the unexpected side effects of the hated factory ( The Pankhursts were middle class, but their support came from factory women radicalized by their own circumstances).
There is a statue of Abraham Lincoln just off Albert Square, in recognition of the support that most factory workers gave to the abolitionist North during the American Civil War; Knowing what hardship meant, they refused to process slave-grown cotton. The Manchester People’s History Museum chronicles the connections between the past, present and future. This is a city that lives through time.
It was in Manchester that the Bletchley Park cryptographers established their computer science department at Victoria University (as it then was). No visit to the city is complete without a trip to the Museum of Science and Industry to take in the scale of the world’s first (yes, another) stored program computer, completed in 1948. As we enter the AI revolution, we can Learn a lot from The Industrial Revolution. From the history of the industrial north. This time, could “progress” be for the many and not the few?
I was born in Manchester, just at the end of the city’s life as a thriving textile centre. My birth mother worked as an overlocker for a clothing factory that supplied Marks & Spencer. Like all the women around her (lively, cheerful northern women), she was a skilled seamstress and paid unskilled wages. When we finally met, 50 years later, she told me that every Friday she and her team finished their piecework quota early and then got together to sew costumes for a Saturday night on the town. These were made from scraps or coat linings. “The ’60s were fantastic,” she said. “A hole for your head. Two for your arms. A zipper on the back. Done.” She would have loved the Chanel show. By the end of the week, all the girls would be wearing handmade knockoffs, right down to the weighted chain at the bottom of the jacket (“Does your brother have a bicycle?”) .
I loved his energy; The taxi driver is right, energy is the right word. In her (and in the women of the north, then and now) perhaps there is a clue to the lush appeal of the place. The name is not Manchester at all. The Romans called it Mamucium. Back then the Iron Age Brigante tribe was in charge, ruled by Queen Cartimandua. Mam is mother, breast and perhaps the Celtic goddess of the River Medlock. A powerful spirit indeed.