JOINT MASTER OF ARCHITECTURE

course book 2

MANCHESTER
JMA Joint Master of Architecture
HES SO Haute Ecole Spécialisée de Suisse Occidentale
BFH Berner Fachhochschule
 joint master of architecture

TABLE OF CONTENTS

VIII Reader

Manchester: so much to answer for (by Owen Hatherley) 4

Liverpool: Exit (by Owen Hatherley) 22

Aged industrial countries (by P. Hall) 30

Economic transformation (by K. Müller) 32

Suburbanization (by M. Hesse) 34

The Gentrification of Consumption (by J. Massey) 36

Urban transformations in Manchester & Liverpool 1818-1939 (by C. Wildmann) 44

Why is landscape beautiful? (by L. Burkhardt) 58

Popular culture and inclusion/exclusion in urban public spaces (by K. Milestone) 62

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joint master of architecture

Owen Hatherley, A guide to the new ruins of Great Britain, pp. 115-156 © Owen Hatherley, Verso,
London, New York, 2010

MANCHESTER: SO MUCH TO ANSWER FOR

OWEN HATHERLEY
London

Greater Manchester, Cottonopolis, was once the

world’s most futuristic city. In the early decades
of the 19th century, architectural visitors like
Karl Friedrich Schinkel saw in the repetition,
inhuman scale and industrial materials of its
Mills a prophecy of the architecture of the fu-
ture. We now live in that future. The convulsions
in the Pearl River Delta have their antecedents
here. Nonetheless Manchester offers a rather
different aesthetic to the architectural traveller
than that of toil and material production. More
than any other city in Britain, Manchester has
become a flagship for urban regeneration and
immaterial capitalism. What other cities have
dabbled in with piecemeal ineptitude has been
implemented in Manchester with total efficien-
cy. If the regeneration that has taken place since
the mid-1990s has a success story, it is surely
here, and if we are to judge regeneration in its
purest, least botched form, we have to turn to
Manchester, a city which has neatly repositio-
ned itself as a cold, rainsoaked Barcelona. Sit
on Tadao Ando’s stained concrete furnishings
at Piccadilly Gardens, squint at the strolling and
coffee-sipping, and you could almost believe it.
An impressive thing about Manchester’s new
buildings is just how popular they are. In the
newsagents, you can buy postcards of the
Beetham Tower, Urbis or the Lowry, all sure
signs that they have entered popular affection
in a way relatively few modern buildings have
since the 1960s - so to knock Manchester’s pride
in its architecture could easily seem churlish,
Fig.1 The and the finer buildings here genuinely are su-
Hulme Arch,
perior to their equivalents in Liverpool, Leeds,
entrance to the
New Manches- Sheffield, Glasgow, albeit within rather limited
ter parameters. The populism of the new Manc Mo-
Fig.1
dernism should not be a surprise. Manchester’s
regeneration industry draws extensively on the
city’s legacy of extraordinary popular art, an
area in which it has been markedly unimpres-
sive since the early ‘90s, when the regeneration
game began, although this doesn’t seem to have
put anyone off. Regenerated cities produce great
pop music, great films or great art no more than
they do industrial product, though they may
produce notable art galleries or museums. What
they do produce is property developers – most
famously Urban Splash, who have spread their
‘creative’ approach from here to as far as Ply-
mouth; signature architects, such as Ian Simp-
son, subsequently much in demand elsewhere;
and regeneration experts such as the unelected
council leader Howard Bernstein, who is now
busy transforming Blackpool, where he already
finds a city devoted to leisure rather than having
to transform a city of production into one of
consumption.
Manchester City Centre has been repopulated
over the last two decades, to an undeniably
impressive extent, at least in statistical terms -

4 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool


Fig.2
in 1987 its population was 300 – now it’s over
11,000. As someone who has only the vaguest of
memories of the pre-regeneration city, I couldn’t
help but approach the transformed centre wit-
hout the requisite awe. The recession led to the
indefinite shelving of major projects like the Al-
bany and Piccadilly Towers, so the regenerated
metropolis has essentially found its final form.
We are dealing with an (unintentionally) finished
product, and the most complete attempt to re-
design an entire city on the basis of an alliance
between property development, the culture in-
dustry and ubiquitous retail. In the process, the
post-punk generation, even (or especially) those
who considered themselves ‘Situationists’, have
proved to be every bit as potentially corruptible
as the hippies they reviled. Much as an opposi-
tional, independent pop music has become a
new museum culture in today’s Manchester, the
Situationist critique of post-war urbanism has
curdled into an alibi for its gentrification.
I make no apologies for the Smiths quotation
that names this chapter - in the ultra-gentrified
context of 21st century Manchester The Smiths,
along with The Fall, seem to actually matter
much more than the Factory Records lineage of
sleek modernism, whether Morrissey’s unfor-
giving wallowing in the grim, grotty horrors of
Cottonopolis, their world of guilt, furtive desire
and miserablism or Mark E Smith’s encryptions
and denunciations contrasting with the blank
pseudomodernism that Factory’s industrial
aesthetic eventually produced.The continuities
are direct. The late, great Tony Wilson spent
much of the last years of his life as a propagan-
dist for what the billboards on Great Ancoats
Road call ‘New Emerging Manchester’, with the
added, Huxleyesque legend ‘History-Prosperity-
Technology’. However, maybe the Fall are not so
disconnected from the post-IRA bomb metropo-
lis. Among the many, many quangos who have
administered the regenerated Cottonopolis is
one with the acronym ‘the NWRA’ - the name of
the ‘North-West Regional Association’, a Lancas-
trian regeneration quango, which may just be
connected with Mark E Smith’s declaration that
the North Will Rise Again. This are no coinci-
dences in New Manchester.
Property Development as the new
Punk Rock
The Los Angeles-based property developer
John Lydon recently opined that he’d seen what
a failure socialism was, because he’d lived in a
council flat. This squares with the idea that punk
was a sort of counter-cultural equivalent to That-
cherism – a movement for individualism, cruelty
and discipline, against the woolly solidarity and
collectivism of the post-war consensus. Council
flats were always one of the emblems of punk, at
least in its more socialist realist variants. There
was a sort of delayed cultural reaction to the ci-
ties of tower blocks and motorways built in the
1960s, to the point where their effect only really
registered around ten years later, when a cultu-
ral movement defined itself as having come from
those towers and walkways. It wasn’t always
actually true, of course, but when it was – Mick
Jones’ Mum’s flat looking over the Westway, for
instance – it led to a curious kind of bad faith,
where on the one hand the dehumanising effect
of these places were lamented, but on the other,
the vertiginous new landscape was fetishised
and aestheticised.
Although post-punk was always a great deal
more aesthetically sophisticated, not bound by
nostalgia for the old streets, this bad faith fea-
tures here, too. Post-punk is usually represented
in terms of concrete and piss, grim towers and
blasted wastelands. This is best exemplified in
the poster to Anton Corbijn’s woeful Ian Curtis
biopic Control, where Sam Riley, fag dangling
from mouth, looks wan and haunted below
gigantic prefabricated tower blocks (which, as
we’ve seen, were shot in Nottingham, not the
Fig.2 Ancoats,
gentrified-out-of-recognition Manchester – al-
History - Pros-
though there are certainly parts of Salford that perity - Techno-
could still do the trick). Decades ago, when as- logy
5
joint master of architecture
ked by Jon Savage why Joy Division’s sound had
such a sense of loss and gloom, Bernard Sumner
reminisced about his Salford childhood, where
‘there was a huge sense of community where
we lived...I guess what happened in the ‘60s
was that someone at the Council decided that
it wasn’t very healthy, and something had to
go, and unfortunately it was my neighbourhood
that went. We were moved over the river into a
towerblock. At the time I thought it was fantas-
tic – now of course I realise it was a total disas-
ter.’ 1(My italics). This is often quoted as if it’s
obvious - well, of course it was a disaster. This is
the narrative about Modernist architecture that
exists in numerous reminisces and histories –
we loved it at first, in the ‘60s, then we realised
our mistake, knocked them down, and rebuilt
simulations of the old streets instead.
Decades on from the victories of punk and That-
cherism, after thirty years where the dominant
form of mass housing has been the achingly tra-
ditionalist Barratt Home or perhaps an inner-
urban ‘loft’, rather than a concrete maisonette,
this yearning for old certainties, cobbles and the
aesthetics of Coronation Street has a rather dif-
ferent resonance. The places punk and Thatche-
rism wanted to destroy were, in so many cases,
swept away, particularly over the last 15 years,
in favour of ‘urban regeneration’. Yet the effect
on the regenerated cities has been, in musical
terms, unimpressive to say the least. In the ‘00s,
the very few areas to have retained a distinctive
musical presence – forgotten estates in east and
south-east London, depressed Yorkshire cities
like Bradford or Sheffield – are those which
have largely escaped regeneration. Meanwhile,
Manchester – capital of regeneration, the UK’s
would-be Barcelona, with its loft apartments,
its towering yuppiedromes, its titanium-clad
galleries – has produced virtually no innovative
music since A Guy Called Gerald’s Black Secret
Technology in 1995. Jungle, garage, grime, all
largely bypassed Manchester, while ‘alternative’
music degenerated into the homilies of Badly
Drawn Boy, into innumerable ‘landfill indie’ acts,
with or without attendant macho Manc swagger.
You could blame this on the Stone Roses, or on
Oasis – or it could be blamed on the new city
created by an enormous and now pricked pro-
1 Jon Savage, Time travel (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 361.
6 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
perty bubble.
Post-Rave Urban Growth Coalition
Tony Wilson was evidently pleased that the
guru of the ‘Creative Class’, Richard Florida,
had designated the Manchester of young media
professionals and loft conversions as a ‘cultural
capital’, irrespective of the conspicuous lack of
worthwhile culture created in the regenerated
city, save for Mancunian auto-hagiographies
like The Alcohol Years, Control or the egregious
24-Hour Party People. At the end of the most
recent and most intelligent of these, Grant Gee’s
Joy Division documentary, Wilson reflected on
how Manchester had gone from being the first
industrial city in the early 19th century to, to-
day, Britain’s first successful post-industrial city
– after the blight of the 1970s it is now a mo-
dern metropolis once again, this time based on
media and property rather than something so
unseemly as industrial production. The old en-
trepreneurs built the Mills where workers toiled
at 12-hour shifts and died before they were 40;
the new entrepreneurs sold the same Mills to
young urban professionals as industrial-aesthe-
tic luxury housing.
Wilson squarely credited Joy Division and Fac-
tory Records with a leading role in this transfor-
mation, but he was by no means alone in this.
Nick Johnson, one of the directors of Urban
Splash, has given presentations where he dates
the beginnings of his company to the Sex Pistols’
gig at the Free Trade Hall. The company’s boss
and one of Britain’s richest men, Tom Bloxham
MBE, is as already mentioned an ex-bootleg pos-
ter salesman based in the former ‘alternative’
enclave of Affleck’s Palace. The academic and
Urbis co-founder Justin O’Connor claims that
Wilson ‘had found Richard Florida’s book and
thought it said all that needed to be said about
cities and that Manchester should pay circa 20k
to get him to speak... I tried (to convince him)
what a complete charlatan Florida was and how
a ‘cutting edge’ ‘creative city’ should not be 97th
in line to invite some tosser from Philadelphia.
He completely rejected this and never really
spoke to me again. The last time I saw him was
in Liverpool at a RIBA do. He was saying that
Liverpool was ‘fucked’ unlike Manchester - and
the reason was that Manchester (in the figure of
the unelected Howard Bernstein) had an enligh-
tened despot. Which more or less set a seal on
the increasing moral and political bankrupcy
of the post-rave urban growth coalition which
had taken over Manchester post-1996. Simp-
son, Johnson, Bloxham - now all millionaires - all
claimed to have the new political vision for the
re-invented city. Despite the fact that Bloxham
was given chair of the arts council and now VC
of Manchester university - a man of little culture
and and education, thus confirming the toadying
of arts and education to the ‘creative entrepre-
neur’ - it is Wilson who represents its saddest
failures. He made little money from it all, and
really believed in it. Now subject to a nauseating
hagiography by the city council that kept him
outside for years, until the last 4 or 5, bringing
him in when his critical faculties had been worn
down by years of punditry. He used to say, of the
post-rave coalition, ‘the lunatics have taken over
the asylum’; pigs and farm was more apposite.’2
The narrative of Sex Pistols-Factory-IRA Bomb-
Ian Simpson-Urban Splash has no room for the
post-war years, decades of decline which just
happened to coincide with the most fertile and
exciting popular culture ever produced in the
city (was it accidental, perhaps?). When Man-
chester is profiled or reminisced over, it most
often through a narrative which leaps from the
Victorian city of ‘Manchester liberalism’ – a lais-
sez faire doctrine with distinct similarities to
Thatcherism – to the city recreated and regene-
rated after the IRA bomb in 1996. The horren-
dous poverty of 19th century Manchester and
the gaping inequalities of today are entirely ef-
faced. Inbetween is a no-man’s land.
New Emerging Babylon
Both approaches have an essentially 19th cen-
tury idea of the city, as a place that should rise
autonomously out of the activities of entrepre-
neurs and businessmen. The unplanned cities
of the 19th century have long been a touchstone
of a certain school of psychogeography – a term
originally derived from the Situationist Interna-
tional, which has, under the influence of English
writers Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, come
to refer to an archaeological, vaguely occult
2 Comment left on my blog: http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/2008/
II/so-much-to-answer-for.html.
approach to the city, where that which already
exists is walked through at random, with the
rich historical associations leading to recon-
dite, occasionally critical chains of association
and reflections on the nebulous spirit of certain
areas. Although this school of psychogeogra-
phy is fiercely hostile to the glassy, security-ob-
sessed cities created by regeneration, it shares a
hostility to planning and to the planned cities of
social democracy. Both, though they come from
political antipodes, can agree with each other
about the ghastliness of council estates and the
deficient aesthetics of 1960s tower blocks. If a
certain strain in punk continues in much psy-
chogeographical writing, it is the element that
laments the destruction of Victoriana. That is,
the punk and psychogeographical preservation
societies, symbolised perhaps by John Betje-
man’s journey from the ‘Hates’ list on Bernie
Rhodes, Malcolm Maclaren and Vivienne Wes-
twood’s 1975 ‘Loves/Hates’ T-shirt to ‘loves’ on
the remake Rhodes put together in the 2000s.
Psychogeography, as originally defined by the
Situationist International, meant something ra-
ther different. While it certainly had an interest
in those areas untouched by renewal, regenera-
tion or prettification, the SI in the 1950s dared
to imagine a new urbanism, an entirely new
approach to the city which wasn’t based on two-
up/two-downs or on spaced-out, rationalist
tower blocks. To have an idea of what the Situa-
tionist City would have been like, you could read
Ivan Chtcheglov’s ‘Formulary for a New Urba-
nism’, an elliptical prose-poem imagining a self-
creating world of grottoes and Gothic spaces,
which, through the declaration ‘You’ll never
see the Hacienda. It doesn’t exist. The Hacienda
must be built’ inadvertently found its way into
the annals of Manchester history.3 Chtcheglov’s
city divided into pleasure-driven quarters is
not as unlike contemporary Mancunia as one
might assume, and a travesty of it can perhaps
be found in the Green Quarter, Salford Quays or
New Islington. There isn’t any trace of another
Situationist proposal for a new urbanism, howe-
ver - New Babylon, a proposal for a genuinely
new city, designed by the Dutch architect, pain-
ter and early Situationist Constant Nieuwen-
huis, as a proposal for the towns that could exist
3 Most recently reprinted in Tom McDonough (ed.), The situationnists and the
City (London: Verso, 2009).
7
joint master of architecture
when automation has eliminated the problem of
work. A ludic city, dedicated to play, where ‘crea-
tivity’ becomes its own reward rather a means
than the accumulation of capital. There are no
Le Corbusier tower blocks here, which Constant
called ‘cemeteries of reinforced concrete, in
which great masses of the population are
condemned to die of boredom’. But then you
won’t find here any homilies on behalf of back-
to-backs, redbrick mills or outside privies, nor
on the glories of the entrepreneurial city either.
If punk obsessed over the realness of the streets,
New Babylon doesn’t even have streets, in the
old sense – it is a construction based entirely on
multiple levels, walkways, skyways. It was a city
in motion for a population in motion, ‘a nomadic
town’ that functioned as a ‘dynamic labyrinth’
entirely through means of modern technology
and construction. Models of New Babylon show
tentacles of elevated bridges above the existing
city linking together megastructures sometimes
the size of a whole town in ‘a continuous spatial
construction, disengaged from the ground’. The
most important part of it seemed to be this ele-
ment of circulation, the walkways and bridges
themselves, designed to create accidents and
chance encounters. Fairly obviously, for all the
Situationist pretensions of Manchester’s rege-
nerators, neither the Hacienda nor New Babylon
have been built there.
‘Up the 10th floor, down the back-
stairs, into no-man’s land
Except, in a particularly accidental and ad hoc
manner, Manchester may have had a fragment
of New Babylon within it without noticing, in
the form of its only example of the architecture
known as the New Brutalism. The idea of the
multi-level city that Constant and the Situatio-
nists were arguing had the potential to create
a new city based on chance and on play was
very much in the air in the 1950s, particularly
through the international architectural group
Team 10. Though, as practising architects, none
of Team 10 were ever likely to be accepted by
the Situationists, there is evidence that they had
some contacts with Dutch members of the group
such as Constant. Team 10 were an oppositional
grouping which set itself up in opposition to the
mainstream of modernist architecture and plan-
8 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
ning, and the structures which they set up as
their emblem of what they wanted, as opposed
to the serried ranks of tower blocks that mains-
tream modernism was erecting en masse, were
based on walkways and the elevation of the
street above the ground. The nearest built equi-
valent to this in Britain, though no ‘Pro-Situ’ or
psychogeographer would dare admit it, is Park
Hill, a building which had a Mancunian offshoot
with a decidedly complex history.
After leaving his post as Sheffield’s City Archi-
tect, Lewis Womersley set up a private prac-
tice with another architect, Hugh Wilson, and
together Wilson and Womersley designed two
enormous structures in Manchester at the
turn of the 1970s. One of them, the Arndale
Centre, swallowing up a huge swathe of the
inner city and sucking it into a private shopping
centre under one roof, is the antithesis both of
New Babylon – dedicated as it is to work and
consumption – and of his work at Park Hill,
with montage and walkways replaced by a lum-
pen, grounded space, topped by a lone office
block, and the only use of multiple levels being
for the benefit of the car rather than the pedes-
trian. The other structure designed by Wilson
and Womersley was the Hulme redevelopment,
particularly the Hulme Crescents. These were
a shadow, a memory of Park Hill, a series of
labyrinthine blocks accessed by street decks.
The relative conservatism of the Crescents can
be ascertained from their names – John Nash,
Charles Barry, etc, all taken from architects of
the Regency period, to whose work in Bath and
London this was intended to be the modern
equivalent – and their prefabricated concrete
construction was markedly less solidly built
than Park Hill. Nonetheless, in the context of
Greater Manchester, where seemingly hun-
dreds of blocks from Pendleton to Collyhurst
rose out of the Victorian slums, gigantic spaced
out tombstones that amply made Constant’s
point about the boredom of post-war redeve-
lopment, the Crescents provided a modernist
labyrinth, with its street decks winding round
and interconnecting four vast, semicircular
blocks enclosing a seeming no-man’s-land of in-
determinate pedestrian space. Within a couple
of years of its 1971 completion, it was vermin-
ridden and leaky, as a result of costs cut during
the construction.
Hulme Crescents and its surrounding area
were demolished in the early 1990s, seemingly
yet another example of the failures of British
Modernism, and its demolition is seen as being
nearly as pivotal as the Hacienda, the Com-
monwealth Games and the IRA bomb for Man-
chester’s regeneration. ‘Now of course I realise
it was a total disaster’. There’s another story
about what went on within the street-decks,
which suggests that post-punk was not as
conservative in its urbanism as we might think.
Nonetheless, the early incarnations of Brutalist
Hulme fully support the concrete & piss version
of punk history. A 1978 World in Action docu-
mentary set out its stall early on, by describing
the deck-access, streets-in-the-sky system of
the estate, then stating baldly ‘it doesn’t work.’
The documentary depicts the new Hulme as a
rabbit warren, Constant’s labyrinth turned into
a hotbed for crime, fear and paranoia, a place
whose tortuous planning makes the seemingly
simple experience of getting a pram into your
flat into an ordeal, a place where rates of crime
and suicide are off the national scale. Yet at the
exact point that this documentary was being
shot, Hulme was becoming something else enti-
rely. Manchester City Council, which had at that
point a surplus of council housing, was imple-
menting a policy of re-housing the families that
found Hulme so unnerving on estates of houses
with gardens in Burnage or Wythenshawe, lea-
ving many empty flats. The Russell Club, which
was home to the Factory nightclub, opened in
1978 by the embryonic record label, was sur-
rounded by the estate’s concrete walkways -
and the club’s clientèle would follow suit.
Liz Naylor, fanzine editor and scriptwriter of
the Joy Division-soundtracked No City Fun,
and author of Various Times, a far from boos-
terist history of the area, remembers how,
after running away from home at 16 in 1978,
she asked the council for a flat. First of all, she
was housed in Collyhurst, then an area with a
heavy National Front presence. She asked for
a flat in Hulme instead, because it had already
acquired ‘a population of alternatives’, but ‘by
then the Manchester Evening News had been
running stories for years about how awful it
was’. Not only was the Factory based there,
but so were many of the bands, along with
fanzines like City Fun and recording studios.
One of the most famous images of Joy Divi-
sion was taken from one of the bridges over
the motorway that bisected the new Hulme.
Photographer Kevin Cummins later recalled
how ‘the heavy bombing, along with an ill-
conceived 1960s regeneration programme,
conspired to make Manchester redolent of an
eastern European city. Revisiting my pho-
tographs, I see the bleakness of a city slowly
dying. A single image taken from a bridge in
Hulme of Princess Parkway, the major road
into Manchester, features no cars.’4 Yet this
image of a depopulated, Brutalist Manchester
as a sort of English Eastern Europe resonated
in a less clichéd manner with those who chose
to live in Hulme – it was welcomed. Naylor re-
members that the entire scene was obsessed
with Berlin – ‘we weren’t sure whether east
or west Berlin’ - something that also dictated
what they listened to: ‘Iggy Pop’s The Idiot
and Bowie’s “Heroes”, was the music’. This
then extended to the films they saw at the
Aaben, the estate’s arthouse cinema, where
Fassbinder or Nosferatu would be eagerly
consumed by the area’s overcoated youth.
There was an attendant style to go with the
Germanophilia. In Various Times Naylor writes
that ‘during the early 1980s there was a “Hulme
look” when the whole male population of Hulme
seemed to be wearing the clothes of dead men
and everyone looked as if they had stepped out
of the 1930s with baggy suits and tie-less shirts.’
The early 80s scene in Hulme, where Factory
bands like A Certain Ratio or ‘SWP types’ like
Big Flame and Tools You Can Trust were based
in the area, was perhaps a romanticisation of
these surroundings, of the stark, ‘eastern Euro-
pean’ aesthetic, the sense of a Modernist utopia
decaying, gone crumbled and decadent. Naylor
remembers it being very comfortable in this
period, ‘not scary’, an arty scene rather than
the macho Mancunia that has dominated since
the late ‘80s. Although post-punk Hulme could
be seen as a sort of slumming, with the families
long since decamping to more hospitable areas,
Naylor argues that rather than being just a form
of urban tourism, this Hulme ‘became almost an
4 Kevin Cummins, ‘Closer to the Birth of a Music Legend‘, Observer, 12/8/07.
9
joint master of architecture
independent city, another town within a town
with a shifting stream of young, single people
with their own dress codes.’
Especially intriguing, however, is that this
scene constituted itself here, in this bastardised
approximation of New Babylon, this space of
walkways, streets in the sky and vertiginous
pedestrian bridges, rather than amidst old ter-
races or in-between serried tower blocks. Partly
this is happenstance, due to the fact that the City
Council were essentially giving away the empty
flats left by the families who escaped – but also
surely to do with the possibilities of the struc-
ture itself. All the things bemoaned in the World
in Action documentary as deleterious to family
life – the labyrinthine complexity of the blocks,
the noise and sense of height and dynamism, the
lack of a feeling of ‘ownership’ in the communal
areas – were perfect for the purposes of a self-
creating urbanism. In the minimal, atmospheric
productions of Martin Hannett you can hear the
ambiguous spaces created by the blocks’ enclo-
sures, in tracks like A Certain Ratio’s ‘Flight’
or Section 25’s ‘Flying’ you can hear the light-
headedness of attempting to live in crumbling
edifices somewhere in the air. This sense of
space is one of the most salient things about
Manchester’s post-punk, a dreaminess necessi-
tated by low land values, where the very fact that
the spaces were unused or even unusable led to
a sense of possibility absent from the sown-up,
high-rent city of today. Naylor stresses that rent
is the great unspoken factor behind culture, and
in Hulme, she points out, ‘hardly anyone was
even paying any rent, including the rent boys’.
The very emptiness retrospectively claimed as
the blight from which regeneration saved the
city was instead the source from which it drew
its power. ‘The centre of Manchester’, she says
now, ‘was like a ghost town. From 1979 to ‘81 I’d
walk around it, and no-one was there. Now, if you
go to the centre of Manchester at 10am there’ll
be a line of people from Liverpool queueing for
Primark’.
Although she warns me that her views now
might be coloured by nostalgia, Naylor raises
the possibility that Hulme ‘became functional
for people in a way that hadn’t been anticipated
Fig.3 Homes for by the planners’. Or rather, in a way that was an-
Change, Hulme ticipated by the people the planners had drawn
10 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
their ideas from, like Constant or the Smithsons,
but which they had long since forgotten.
Green Brutalism
Naylor remembers the overriding feeling of
Hulme being a sense of itself as an enclave, em-
battled but cohesive: ‘there’s no future, but if we
stay here we’ll be all right’. Nonetheless, from
the mid-80s, the drugs had shifted from speed
to heroin, muggings had become more common,
Tory election landslides led to despair, ‘people
started being mugged for their Giro’, and many
of those associated with the post-punk scene
moved on. Yet the New Brutalist Hulme went on
to become a (fairly crusty, by many accounts)
centre for the rave scene in Manchester, with the
Kitchen, a club made by knocking through three
council flats, being the Hacienda’s hidden re-
verse. When in the mid-90s the Crescents were
demolished as a ritual sacrifice to New Emer-
ging Manchester, there was another television
documentary made about the place, this time for
The Late Show. Only just over a decade later, and
we’re miles from the hand-wringing of the World
in Action documentary, with no condemnations
of the idiocies of planners from the inhabitants,
but instead a fierce defence from them of the
possibilities of the streets in the sky, of the light,
air and openness of the Crescents, and of the
richly creative community that had established
itself there, even in a context where crime and
deprivation was still rife. One comments that a
friend’s daughter ‘only found out she lived in a
slum when she heard it on the news’. Meanwhile,
if the streets in the sky had come full circle, back
to New Babylon, then this is entirely supported
by the documentary, which features images of
travellers’ caravans in the open space between
Fig.3

Fig.4
the blocks, reminding that the hypermodernist,
Situationist urbanism of New Babylon was origi-
nally inspired by gypsy camps.
When Brutalist Hulme was demolished, what was
built in its stead was a mix of social and private
housing, with styles ranging from Barratt rabbit
hutches to Homes for Change, designed by Mills,
Beaumont Leavey Channon in 1999 - an inter-
connected series of small but undeniably deck-
access blocks. To the planners’ surprise, when
the former Crescents residents who had formed
a co-operative for the purpose were consulted,
they insisted on the much-derided streets in the
sky. Alas, co-operatives with streets in the sky
did not become the basis for the new Manches-
ter. Contemporary Hulme is another enclave
(less gentrified than most) of a city which has
dedicated itself to the service industry and the
property market, bolstered by the propagation
of an ideology of culture and creativity, where it
matters little what actual cultural products are
produced, as the glories of the past can be lived
off seemingly indefinitely. Hulme Crescents was
one of the places where modernist Manches-
ter music was truly incubated and created, and
its absence coincides almost perfectly with the
absence of truly modernist Mancunian popcul-
ture. Yet what happened here – the utilisation
of spaces intended for working class families by
musicians, artists and so forth – is a strange in-
verse of what has been happening in the centre
of Manchester since, a gift returned and in the
process transformed into its opposite.
The Home of Credit-Crunch Chic
But for a picture of the the New Mancunian
metropolis that was built instead of New Baby-
lon, start in Spinningfields, towards the Irwell
and the border with Salford. Recently zoned as
the Business Quarter, it includes within it the
People’s History Museum, as if to quarantine the
city’s radical past on site. The new building for
the Museum is clad in a rusty red corten steel,
as some sort of ineffectual gesture against the
opaque glass all around. There is in Spinnin-
gfields an alignment of Capital, in the form of
buildings for barely solvent banks by Norman
Foster’s B-Team; Discipline, in the form of Den-
ton Corker Marshall’s Civil Justice Centre; and
Property, in the form of Aedas’ Leftbank Apart-
ments. The latter are typical of Manchester’s
many residential ‘stunning developments’, and a
skyway adds a mildly futurist dash to the usual
bet-hedging multiple materials and muddled
geometries. Festooned with property adverts
(a ubiquitous feature of contemporary Man-
chester), Leftbank is, according to a local pro-
perty rag Manchester Living, ‘the home of credit
crunch chic’ - which is something rather remar-
kable, given that only a year before they would
have been marketed as ‘luxury apartments’ or
‘living solutions’, and when we visit they’re fes-
tooned with an ad of a leering executive couple
asking ‘like what you see?’.
Fig.5
In a ‘marketing suite’ in Salford we picked up
a selection of free property magazines, which
proliferate here, as if they’re a substitute for Fig.4 Detailing
a real local press, something which just about at Homes for
survives in the form of the trenchant non-be- Change, Hulme
lievers at the Salford Star, a rare voice of sanity
Fig.5 Street
in New Mancunia. Amongst the magazines is sign, Spinnings-
one called Urban Life, and the copy we peruse fields
11
joint master of architecture
Fig.6
features a column by a local radio DJ, decrying
the 60s redevelopment of Salford as soulless
high-rises, next to hundreds of adverts for
new soulless high-rises. Irony does not sit
well here. There’s more proof of this asser-
tion round the corner, near the cute pop mo-
dernism of the Granada building, in the form
of Aedas’ Manchester Bauhaus, a mixed use
office/apartment complex. Walter Gropius’
estate must be irked they never copyrighted
the name – the new Bauhaus even replicates
Herbert Bayer’s original typography. But in
case we’re inclined to chart a simple, unbro-
ken lineage of serene modernism, it’s instruc-
tive to compare slogans. The Bauhaus, Dessau,
in 1926: ‘art and technology, a new unity’; The
Bauhaus Manchester, in 2009: ‘business and
life in perfect harmony’.
In comparison, The Civil Justice Centre (presu-
mably ‘Courts’ has too punitive a ring) is very
original, and refreshing for sheer aesthetic
fearlessness, for creating a genuinely striking
building, although one which is eventually as
unnerving as everything else here - the irregu-
lar protrusions at each end and the vast sheer
glass wall are sublime in scale, suggesting a
decidedly New Labour combination of domi-
nation and mock-transparency. Peering in, we
Fig.6 The Civil
Justice Center
and People’s
History Mu-
seum
Fig.7 Leftbank
Apartments,
home of credit
crunch chic
Fig.8 Café
Neo,Civil Justice
Center
Fig.7
12 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
see the ground floor has within it ‘Café Neo’, a
shimmering, cold non-space. You can’t possibly
imagine something so grubby as one of the city’s
many acts of petty crime being processed here.
Nearby, on Deansgate, are two of Ian Simpson’s
glazed apartment blocks. Simpson’s work is un-
deniably superior to the run of the regeneration
mill, if only by default. His first major buildings
– Number 1 Deansgate, the Urbis exhibition
centre – both employed a sloping form that has
been ineptly repeated by a series of lesser works
in Manchester and Salford; Assael’s grandio-
sely named Great Northern Tower, BDP’s Abito
Apartments, Broadway Malyan’s ‘The Edge’,
all following Simpson’s formula of sexy name,
contrived irregularity and machined sleekness
with rather less success, and all of them seemin-
Fig.8
gly half-empty.
Urbis is a curious gallery, its glass made opaque
to protect the exhibits. It’s a flashy, dizzy memo-
ry of Patrick Geddes’ idea for an urban exhibition
centre in an observation tower. Justin O’Connor,
partly responsible for the idea, comments on the
swift dumbing-down of the idea:
‘it was my idea and picked up in the absence of any
other. However, the process of choosing the name,
the architect and the building were done with no
input from me at all. It was about 2 years into the
project; after Ian Simpson had unloaded his pre-
prepared designs with no reference to content
(glass building for an interactive museum etc) and a
management team cobbled together; only then did a
stray question at a council meeting (‘what was going
to go into this building’) led the cultural supremo of
Manchester to track down the author of the original
8 page memo (me, with some input from Tony Wil-
 to a concept so abstract and arty as The City, by
the end of 2009 Urbis was emptying itself of its
original purpose, to become the National Foot-
ball Museum. It’s difficult to imagine any fate
more depressing.

Ian Simpson can’t be held responsible for any

of this, of course, though he can be for the way
his Beetham Tower dominates contemporary
Manchester, where a mix of empty flats and foot-
ballers’ penthouses looks out over Cottonopolis,
the Pennines and on a clear day, out to Liverpo-
ol. A good but not great building, the Beetham
Tower is distinguished by negative virtues, its
Fig.9 lack of the aesthetic bet-hedging and confusion
of most recent high-rises – it’s a mediocre archi-
tect at the top of his game, and the relative vir-
tues of the pugnacious local pride can be seen
here, in that a native Manc has given the city so-
mething more distinctive and thought-out than

Fig.10

son) and ask us to tell us what it was all about.’5

In typical Pseudomodernist fashion, form pre-
ceded function by several leagues. ‘In effect all
they had been concerned about was the buil-
ding as icon. Ian Simpson exemplified the no-
politics, no-intellect ‘intellectual’ - able to strut
with black polo-necked arrogance through his
building refusing any signage (like, entrance and
exit) in the name of aesthetic purity, even when Fig.11
rain was coming in from the roof.’ The first time
we visit, Urbis features an exhibition on video megacorps like Aedas, Broadway Malyan or BDP
games, some photos of ‘hidden Manchester’, would be able to offer; and Simpson’s towers in Fig.9 Urbis
drab recent New York art, and a small exhibit on Birmingham and Liverpool are far, far worse.
Fig.10 The
the city’s (somewhat beleaguered) greasy spoon The curtain wall is confidently unencumbered
Beetham Tower
cafeterias - all of it with little context or infor- by the insufferable ‘vernacular’ red terracotta
mation. As if as a final judgement on the ideas- and slatted wood, while its top-heavy massing Fig.11 The
above-the-station nature of a museum dedicated creates a clear, distinctive silhouette without Beetham Tower
Skybar (Great
resorting to the silly hats worn by its contem- Northern Tower
5 Comment on my webblog: http://themeasurestaken.blogspot.com/2008/II/
icon-fire.html.
poraries. Inside, the glass’ greenhouse effect is behind)

13
joint master of architecture
Fig.12
offset by lightness and opulent pseudo-minima-
lism. The skybar’s cocktail menu offers a range
of drinks named after songs by Manchester
luminaries – the Buzzcocks, the Smiths, Happy
Mondays (fancy a Hand in Glove?) Meanwhile, as
if intent on re-enacting the plot of J.G Ballard’s
High-Rise, Simpson himself purchased the pen-
thouse at the top for £3 million, which he pro-
ceeded to fill with an olive grove, revealed on
a short BBC film about the tower. ‘It is aspira-
tional’, he proclaimed. Post-punk Ballardianism
is, then, reborn in the Beetham Tower in a most
unexpected fashion.
The Bloxham Organisation
The most adroit users of Manchester’s pop
culture fame in the services of property deve-
lopment are, of course, Urban Splash, who evi-
dently share Wilson’s opinion that the eventual
point of Joy Division or Acid House was to lay the
groundwork for post-industrial speculation and
gentrification. After seeing how spectacularly
they’d fucked up Park Hill, it was interesting
to see some of Urban Splash’s successes. The
redevelopment of the Mills and Warehouses in
Castlefield are stylish and well-executed enough,
and if nobody is going to make stuff there I sup-
pose there are worse things than them being
occupied by what Tom Bloxham once called
‘decision makers’.6 It’s marginally better than
them being demolished - although the gated-off
nature of much of Castlefield makes it less fun
Fig.12 Manches- for walking around in than it ought to be. They
ter Modernism,
have helped preserve what is, by any measure,
Mk 1 - The Daily
Express one of the truly great industrial landscapes –
the criss-crossing chaos of railway and canal
Fig.13 The bridges is utterly exhilarating, however marred
Dutch moder-
nist CWS Buil- it might be by some dull newbuild flats, but the
ding
6 E. Jane Dickson, ‘Making a splash‘, Independant, 19/9/98.
14 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
true unpleasantness of the operation is never
far away. Along one stretch of Urban Splashed
ex-industrial ‘lofts’ is a banner, advertising their
never-begun (let alone completed) ‘Tutti Frut-
ti’ self-design scheme in Ancoats. It declares:
‘COME AND HAVE A GO IF YOU THINK YOU’RE
HARD ENOUGH’.
This ironic thuggery has another meaning in
Ancoats itself. The area between the centre and
here is marked by the sleek modern architecture
that is an arguable antecedent to the new city,
an American modernism more about machi-
ned precision, minimalism and cold affluence
than the earnestness and raw formalism of
Brutalism. Here there’s the black glass of Owen
Williams’ Daily Express printworks, and a set of
excellent buildings designed for the Co-Opera-
tive Society, pioneered up the road in Rochdale,
ranging from smart Dutch-issue interwar brick
modernism to the glacial monolith of Gordon
Tait’s CIS Tower, which vies with London’s Eus-
ton Tower and Sheffield’s Arts Tower as Britain’s
most elegant tribute to Mies van der Rohe’s
Teutonic America. The Co-Op’s main offices in
Stockport take glass modernism into bizarre
kitsch, rejecting tower-and-podium for pyramid.
The CIS Tower’s architect dabbled in politics,
as a Tory councillor, and while its service shaft
might now be clad in solar panels, stylistically
this is emphatically not the Modernism of noble
social programmes. Yet across the main road is
the famously impoverished district re-branded
by Urban Splash nearly a decade ago as ‘New
Islington’ (what could be more ‘aspirational’?),
it is, to frank, an awful bloody mess. Marked by
huge swathes of wasteland and scattered indus-
trial rubble, the area has as its centre a derelict
Fig.13

Fig.14
pub, named - with perfect conjunctural timing -
the Bank Of England. There are two completed
schemes, both funded by housing associations
rather than the developers – one by dMFK, the
other by FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste), both
suggesting that Urban Splash’s eye for architec-
ture contrasts with their fantastical ineptitude
as urban administrators. Both of these firms clo-
sely worked with residents to produce contra-
dictory results – FAT’s display of cartoonish
artifice, dMFK’s stern Brutalism – but show a
similar sensitivity towards their non-executive
residents. Yet they’re set amidst dereliction and
blight, loomed over by vast Mills (renovated or
rotting) and tower blocks in dire need of renova-
tion, dressed with dismal new architecture.
This farcical attempt at building a ‘Millennium
Community’ on the ruins of the Cardroom
council estate, a pop-PPP farrago which has le-
velled an area of social housing in one of those
gentrification frontiers on the edge of the ring-
road, has so far replaced it with one (apparently
very hard-to-sell) Alsop block, two small closes
Fig.15
of houses, and a whole lot of verbiage - the pro-
mised self-build enclaves, high streets, parks,
schools and health centres weren’t built during
the boom, so sure as hell won’t be now, for all
the Homes & Communites Agencies doubt-
less spinning in its direction. Irrespective of
the awfulness of the place, FAT’s scheme is far
more conscientious than a superficial glance at
its seeming jollity might imply. In the context of
New Islington their houses look great, obviously,
and only partly because almost everything else
around them is so awful - and the use of a sort
Fig.16
of trompe l’oeil wall/screen to pull the terrace
of clearly very modern houses together is clever
without being smug. These houses show more
actual ideas than all the other recent buildings
in the city put together. Yet the low-rise nature
of it (something also used by the very different
and similarly decent, if rather less intellec-
tually interesting dMFK housing, also based
on consultation with estate residents) makes
it seem rather beleaguered, given the vastness
of the Mills and the Yuppiedromes, and there’s
something deeply odd about creating a low-rise
suburbia in the heart of such a huge city - but
then people ask for some odd things. Sadly the
furnishings left around the site – a little bear,
sat near the broken millstones and fenced-off
wastes - imply something infantilising about the
whole affair, something more apparent in U.S’
own propaganda than FAT co-director Charles Fig.14 The
Holland’s own description of the place’s ratio- newly green CIS
nale (entirely coincidentally, he gave a talk about Tower
it the same day we visited). Holland explained Fig.15 The
in much detail the extent to which the estate wastes of New
was an attempt to meet the Cardroom tenants’ Islington
own desires – houses with gardens, decoration
Fig.16 Bank
– without patronising them. Even then, his docu- of England,
mentation of the alleged ‘wrongness’ of council Ancoats
15
joint master of architecture
Fig.17
tenants’ interior furnishings as a source of archi-
tectural inspiration had a (no doubt unintentio-
nally) queasily Martin Parresque side, especially
given that this ‘wrongness’ is purely in the eyes
of the architecturally educated. There was one
irresistible irony. After showing a set of pho-
tos from one Cardroom resident’s particularly
eclectic 1970s interior furnishings, it turned out
that, when the FAT scheme was finished, this
tenant filled his new house with Ikea-moder-
nist new furniture. ‘Because I was moving into
a modern house’.
Fig.18
FAT’s work here is an ambiguous statement
on the status of the ‘radical’ architect today –
their houses are both within and against the
overarching Urban Splash plan. The residents
chose them precisely because they seemed
Fig.17 FAT’s
houses at New
Islington
Fig.18 dMFK’s
houses, New
Islington
Fig.19 Bear,
New Islington
Fig.19
16 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
most interested in their own ideas, rather than
in slotting them into the slick towers and their
attendant loft-living lifestyle – they were cho-
sen precisely because their work was the least
Urban Splash-like of all that was on offer. At the
same time, the images of these houses – with the
wasteland all around invariably cropped from
the shot, perhaps combined with renders of the
never-built Tutti Fruitti scheme – became the
new fun and jolly face of real estate speculation,
of Urban Splash’s infantilist Innocent Smoothie
approach to urban design. Masterplanning and
population transfer with an irreverent touch.
But, as the many hostile reactions it has caused
from right-thinking aesthetes can attest, it is
genuinely other to the prevailing pseudomoder-
nism. When I first saw these houses in an Guar-
dian article, my immediate reaction was horror
– postmodernism returns, in the guise of urban
regeneration! Yet in the context of contempora-
ry Manchester they seem far more subversive, a
return of all that is repressed from regeneration
architecture – most of all, the way in which taste
and aesthetics are almost invariably determined
by the unspoken matter of class; and a serious
approach to designing social housing, contras-
ting with the deceptively simple drolleries. It’s
as if they decided to create a new aesthetic of
public housing on the basis of the additions te-
nants made to their flats in the 1980s after they
purchased them with Right to Buy. Architectural
historian Steve Parnell claimed that FAT are the
‘only avant-garde architects in Britain’, and if so
the avant-garde is in a strange place, where the
only way to return to something resembling the
original ideals of modernism is to break every
one of its formal rules. At the same time, to get
the houses built, FAT allowed them to become an
emblem for one of the most spectacularly bot-
ched attempts at redevelopment in the Blairite
era.
There’s no doubt that the non-Splashed areas
of the redevelopment are worse, without even
fragments of good ideas. At the entrance, Broad-
way Malyan’s Islington Wharf, with a certain
brash, supercity dynamism from its ‘good side’
(as Jonathan Meades pointed out in his rege-
neration diatribe On the Brandwagon, ‘iconic’
architecture always have a good side for photo-
graphs and another side blemished and pock-
marked), but stodgy and lumpen from all the
others. Curiously enough, its design appears to
be a slicker remake of the Mathematics Tower
at Manchester University, a Brutalist casualty
to New Emerging Manchester, perhaps as some
bizarre act of appeasement to the recent past.
Fig.20
To the north, ex-SOM firm Jacobs Webber’s hila-
rious Skyline Apartments, a car-crash of ‘luxury’
new-build clichés – the proliferation of excres-
cences all happening here all at once, the mess of
materials, the inept patterning, the glass protru-
sion at the top, the nails-down-blackboard yel-
low - is so awful that we were left incredulous.
The website for the towers promises all manner
of opulence, including a ‘Zen Room’. ‘Prepare to
be seduced’, it begins, then suggests you have
your celebratory drinks the moment you get
in (it’s furnished, you see!) and finally reminds
that it is aimed, of course, at ‘savvy city dwel-
lers’, by which they presumably mean buy-to-let
landlords. To the south is Design Group 3’s Milli-
ners Wharf, an imposingly long, featureless, loft-
living version of an Aylesbury Estate slab-block.
Will Alsop’s nearly completed Chips, the only
other Urban Splash scheme after the housing
association enclaves, appears in this context a
more imaginative version of a generic pseudo-
modernism. If dMFK or FAT had been allowed
Fig.21
to design a whole area of social housing rather
than tiny closes of 10 or 15 houses, this place
could have been a genuine achievement, with or
without its absurdly aspirational name, rather
than what it is in the recession’s unforgiving
light - a failed confidence trick.
Chimney Pots and Conran Interior
– The New Salford
Salford is the constituency of the disgraced
Communities Minister Hazel Blears, who resig-
ned due to her particularly impressive venality
in the expenses scandal that formed a serendi-
pitous distraction from the bank bailouts throu-
ghout 2009. One of the most authoritarian of
Labour Ministers (launching the nannying ‘five
a day’ nutrition campaign as Under-Secretary
of Health, defending various repressive mea-
Fig.22
sures as Minister of State at the Home Office,
and echoing the rhetoric of the British Natio-
nal Party as ‘Communities’ and Local Govern-
ment Secretary), Blears is also one of the few
prominent New Labour figures from a working
class background. Accordingly, her upbringing
itself is mythologised as a subject of austerity
nostalgia – she grew up amongst the deserving
poor of Salford, and was featured as one of the
child extras in a fine instance of austere Nor-
thern mythography, Tony Richardson’s film of
that bleakest of kitchen sink dramas, Shelagh
Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. Her somewhat That-
Fig.20 Islington
cher-esque rhetorical combination of 1950s
Wharf
schoolteacher and 2000s motivational mana-
ger led to a seemingly meteoric rise in New Fig.21 Skyline
Labour, now perhaps only temporarily halted apartments
by a resignation elicited by the thrifty, if not Fig.22 Milliners
especially austere matter of huge, and possibly Wharf
17
joint master of architecture
Fig.23
criminal, mortgage fiddling. A Times interview
in December 2008 showed that Blears’ public
persona was based on a curious combination of
homely wartime rhetoric combined with utter-
ly ruthless Blairite modernisation, and as such
is grimly intriguing as an exemplar of austerity
nostalgia, the only deficiency in her case being
a lack of the requisite ironic distance. Much
of the interview reads as a document from a
country where the second world war never
ended. Not only is Blears’ office decorated with
the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster itself, her
rhetoric is pervaded by a strange combination
of Victorianism and Blitz spirit platitudes. You
can see a frankly impressive performance of
Blairite dialectic in her clear desire to play to
every constituency at once, mocking bankers
on the one hand but earlier talking about (in a
symptomatically progressivist metaphor) how
the ‘train’ which they presumably commandee-
red bafflingly didn’t transport every member
of society; defending the strict working class
Salford that created her but sticking up for the
ending of ‘deference’ and backing off from the
possibility that she’d ever stand in the way of
anyone’s fun; an obvious contempt for the Wel-
fare State combined with a belief that the ‘un-
derclasses’ need to be surveilled at all times...
but the most interesting phrase used in the
interview is that, in the recession,’we’ve all got
to do our bit’.
In the Times she decries, with austere rectitude,
the 1980s as a time when yuppies caroused and
Fig.23 Chimney others suffered, seemingly unaware that this is
Pot Park by now the public perception of the boom of the
last decade (while the irony that it described
Fig.24 Public
art at Exchange her behaviour too, as we now know, is another
Quays, Trafford matter). She represents one of the most une-
18 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
qual places in the country , but one which has
been very keen on remaking itself under her
watch, via a series of high-profile regeneration
strategies. Most prominent among them is the
transformation of the former Salford Docks into
an exclusive entertainment and luxury housing
enclave, soon to be occupied by a large section
of the British Broadcasting Corporation; and in a
less high-profile example, the selling of terraced
houses condemned by the government’s Path-
finder ‘Housing Market Renewal’ scheme (in
which, as we saw in Sheffield, a property market
was artificially stimulated in former manufactu-
ring towns by the wholesale demolition of wor-
king class housing) to the aforementioned Ur-
ban Splash, who turned them into ‘Chimney Pot
Park’, a proletarian theme park for Manc media
workers. Yet, when in the Times interview she
talks of her love of modern buildings. What this
means in the Salford context is Urban Splash’s
austere/luxury enclaves, or the jerrybuilt new
condos. She certainly wasn’t referring to any
new housing for her the Salford working class
she perpetually invokes. Rather, Blears explicitly
distanced herself from council housing in favour
of the spectacularly severe solution of ‘mother
and baby homes’. Blears’ make-do-and-mend
rhetoric was, as we now know, combined with
mandarin corruption, without her ever seemin-
gly being aware of the contradiction.
Yet Blears is incessantly keen to exculpate her-
self and her government by referring to what
they’ve done for Salford, so a trip over the
Irwell, to a place that preposterously continues
to administer itself as a separate city, was essen-
tial. You could cross via a swanky bridge by ins-
tant regenerator Santiago Calatrava, but to get
the true measure of the place it’s best walked
to through the bleak dual carriageways, retail
Fig.24

Fig.25
parks and industrial estates of Trafford, where
you get to see the bizarre Yeltsin-Constructivism
of Old Trafford Stadium. It’s a staggeringly mis-
judged mix of domineering symmetries, bared
structure with a homoerotic statue of Dennis
Law, George Best and Bobby Charlton locked in
an embrace (‘the United Trinity’), exemplifying
the sheer silliness of contemporary Mancunian
vainglory.
The area near Salford Central station is full of
mediocre 2000s highrises, the districts near
Salford University loomed over by their simi-
larly drab, if less pretentious and more spacious
1960s forbears. So in the form of the serried
Lidl Mondrians that march along in Pendleton,
Salford already has some appalling form - but
at least their straightforward geometries mean
their badness is more easily ignorable than what
got built since 1996, and at least they rehoused
people in something better than what they re-
placed - and at least nobody kidded themselves
these towers were part of some elite, exclusive
Lifestyle. I spent a bit of time in the company of
newbuild chronicler Penny Anderson, whose
blog Renter Girl profiled with wit and anger the
block in central Salford she called home, ‘Dove-
cot Towers’, expanding into a wider critique of
the shoddy tat marketed as the height of execu-
tive chic, revealing the hidden grimness of even
the new middle class enclaves. We visited Dove-
cot Towers, a chillingly bleak redbrick thing sho-
ved into a Salford side street that she insists re-
mains anonymous, but for a real negative equity
dystopia she recommended the ‘Green Quarter’,
a super-dense mess of blocks dissolving into
Cheetham Hill. We watched as a BNP van, com-
plete with megaphone, sped past the CIS tower
in that direction.
Regardless of the straggling mess of much of
the regenerated city, Salford Quays is where
the icons are. Here is Britain’s most sustained
push for the Bilbao effect, built on the site of the
Manchester Ship Canal, a now useless but once
technically astonishing feat of of Victorian engi-
neering that turned a city well inland into a port.
Aside from Michael Wilford’s messy but occa-
sionally interesting Lowry, a building which, as
if to prove Meades’ point, is from some angles
clumsy and straggling, in others sharp and stri-
king; and Libeskind’s minor but at least vaguely
memorable Imperial War Museum, my main
thought was ‘wow, this is bad enough to be in
Fig.26
Southampton’. The two icons are a strange pair
indeed, linked by a Wilkinson Eyre bridge, with
the cladding nodding with amusing blatantness
at Gehry’s Basque blob. The Imperial War Mu-
seum ‘symbolises’ carnage through the imagery
of a World Torn Asunder (it says so when you
enter the building), but what Wilford’s building
might have to do with the miserable marionettes
of L.S Lowry’s Salford is rather more mysterious.
Libeskind and Wilford’s two buildings might
have made the magazines and brochures, but are
entirely dominated by DLA Architects’ woeful,
Fig.25 Joy Divi-
sion urbanism
at Pendleton,
Salford
Fig.26 The
Lowry, in its
natural climate
Fig.27 Imperial
War Museum
North
Fig.27
19
joint master of architecture

hear the outline of it, the sound of enclosure, of

barricading oneself into a hermetically sealed,
impeccably furnished prison against an outside
world seldom seen but assumed to be terrifying.
We await the Joy Division of the dovecots with
anticipation.

Fig.28

stone-clad high-rises, more luxury tat by Broad-

way Malyan and a nondescript slab for the now-
defunct City Lofts, with more enclaves to follow
– the BBC’s Media City is under construction,
and while it’s nice to see it moving at least some
of its functions from the over-favoured capital,
it’s moving into a securitised enclave, much un-
like the way the Granada offices insinuates itself
unassumingly into the city’s heart.

Looking out through the torrential rain over the

Manchester Ship Canal at this, the most famous
part of the most successfully regenerated ex-in-
dustrial metropolis, we can’t help but wonder
– is this as good as it gets? Museums, cheap spe-
culative housing, offices for financially dysfunc-
tional banks? What of the idea that civic pride
might mean a civic architecture for the residents
of Greater Manchester’s crumbling tower blocks
and condemned terraces? Cottonopolis might
still be a vision of the future, but if so, it’s only
marginally less unnerving than the 19th centu-
ry’s industrial inferno. After the crash, we can
see it as the ultimate failure of the very recent
past, a mausoleum of Blairism. But what can be
done with these ruins? The sheer stark strength
of the remannts of the post-war settlement in
the unforgiving light of the late 1970s inspired
something equally bracing and powerful. How
do you react to something which already tries
incredibly hard not to offend the eye, respond
critically to an alienated landscape which bends
over backwards not to alienate, with its jolly rhe-
toric, its ‘fun’ colour, its ‘organic’ materials? How
do you find an atmosphere in something which
tries everything to avoid creating a perceptible
mood other than idiot optimism? It’s difficult at
first to imagine what the ruins of New Labour
Fig.28 Salfrod could possibly inspire – but in places like the
Quays Green Quarter or Salford Quays you can almost

20 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool

21
joint master of architecture

Owen Hatherley, A guide to the new ruins of Great Britain, pp. 331-350 © Owen Hatherley, Verso,
London, New York, 2010

LIVERPOOL: EXIT
OWEN HATHERLEY
London

Coming as I do from Southampton, I have long

regarded Liverpool as everything my hometown
could have been but wasn’t. The port that suc-
ceeded it in the 1910s was never interested in
emulating its architectural grandeur, and some
seem to find this a good thing – both those who
fear a Solent City, and the occasional Liverpu-
dlian sentimentalist. In 1984 Beryl Bainbridge
wrote an English Journey in tribute to Priestley,
and she too started in Southampton. Although
she seemed to have spent all of five minutes in
the city - at least, unlike in her account of Mil-
ton Keynes, she managed to get out of her car
- she was pleased to find that the port that had
‘done in’ Liverpool was not, unlike her home-
town, somewhere big, dark and grandiose, but
a mere ‘holiday village’, jolly and quaint, and
good for yachting. Maybe all of Britain could be
one big holiday village. Maybe, as Prince Charles
once advocated, Toxteth could turn ‘back into
countryside’, as has parts of Detroit.1 Hell, let’s
just dissolve the cities altogether, destroy the
tower blocks and write off the last 150 years as
a mistake.
The great thing about Liverpool is that, at first
sight, it has no truck with this whatsoever. It is
not a village. It’s a dramatic, great city, and at its
centre is the most wholly and thrillingly urban
environment in England, outside of London. Cli-
ché it may be, but with Liverpool comparisons
are never really to Manchester, Leeds, Bristol,
let alone Southampton, but to Berlin, Hamburg,
New York. Walking round the commercial centre
built up around the Pier Head, there is alterna-
tely a crucible of modern architecture, in the
Fig.1 A view
down to the
Pier Head 1 Quoted in Patrick Wright, A Journey Through Ruins (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009), p. 314.
Fig.1
form of the steampunk iron and glass experi-
ments of Peter Ellis’ 1864 Oriel Chambers or
the mutilated 1906 Cotton Exchange; the strip-
ped classical, steel-framed interwar towers of
C.H Reilly’s Liverpool school; bizarre eruptions
of 60s modernism, like Bradshaw Rose and
Harker’s former HSBC Building, a Czech Cubist
experiment in black glass; a telecommunica-
tions tower of the sort a Canadian or German
city would find entirely normal but the English
faintly hubristic; and at the head itself, W.A Tho-
mas’ Tower and Liver Buildings, the latter the
only English work of the 20th century to have
influenced skyscraper design elsewhere, rather
than vice versa. The architectural richness here
is so overwhelming you feel almost spoiled by
it. Further up, the Georgian terraces and the
brilliantly ludicrous competing cathedrals offer
views of an astonishing skyline, easily the finest
in Britain. It’s not enough. The problem is amply
demonstrated by the fact that this magnificent
metropolis was supplanted so quickly and easily
by Southampton. Liverpool’s recent history is
a massive demonstration of the unnerving fact

22 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool

that many don’t seem to want cities, even one as
good as this. The reasons for this are not wholly
aesthetic.
The Last Days of Municipal Socialism
Liverpool has experienced a resurgence, not
necessarily in economic terms – it is still the
poorest city in Britain – but in terms of natio-
nal prominence. Its year as European Capital of
Culture in 2008, leaving a legacy of Superlamba-
nanas and unfinished museums, acquired a cer-
tain arthouse grandeur through Terence Davies’
vainglorious Of Time and the City, a sometimes
witty but mostly thumpingly banal city portrait,
all tourist-board shots of the Pier Head’s ‘Three
Graces’ and booming renditions of startlingly
obvious poetry half-remembered from school
(‘Ozymandias’, ‘Into My Heart An Air That Kills’
- you half expect him to intone ‘To Be Or Not To
Be, That Is The Question’). As Sukhdev Sandhu
was almost alone in pointing out, Davies’ film
said nothing about time other than ‘it passes’
and nothing about the city other than ‘it ain’t
what it used to be’, but it fixed in celluloid with
undeniable visual assurance an accepted nar-
rative – the city was betrayed, and betrayed by
the planners. So the post-war towers rising from
the slums, or from the picturesque ruins left by
the Luftwaffe - ‘we were promised paradise’, he
wonderfully intones, ‘but municipal architec-
ture, combined with the English talent for the
dismal, made for something far from Elysian’ -
is mixed in with footage of far more interesting
Fig.2
Fig.3
1930s schemes, when Liverpool’s municipal
architect Lancelot Keay was considered one of
the best designers and planners in the country.
What Davies’ doesn’t feature is the fact that
these schemes nearly all went down in their
turn, at the hands of the last great municipal
socialist experiment in Britain.
Most recent accounts of Liverpool will men-
tion Militant, along with the Toxteth riots, as an
example of the ‘basket case’ the city had become.
For much of the 1980s, until the ‘Liverpool 47’
were forcibly removed from office, the Labour
council was essentially controlled by Militant, a
Trotskyist organisation operating semi-clandes-
tinely within the Party, which after mass expul-
sions now enjoys occasional moderate electoral
success in Preston or Coventry as the Socialist
Party. The council’s heads, Derek Hatton and
Tony Mulhearn, seemed to represent the two
stereotypes of both Liverpool and of Marxist
politics – one a dodgy geezer, whose fame has
endured since, and another a quiet, academic
figure, still politically active but lacking his for-
mer comrade’s business ventures and talk radio
shows. Regardless, ever since Neil Kinnock ill-
advisedly decided that attacking his own party
was the best way to win an election, Liverpool
City Council has stood in for failure and chaos,
the final death of the long-standing Labour tra-
dition of reforms through local government,
at the hands of those who had always claimed
reform was impossible anyway. Oddly enough, Fig.2 Superlam-
however, Militant’s municipal legacy is much banana
unlike that of their reformist forbears. No Karl-
Fig.3 Liverpool
Marx-Hof, no Park Hill or even Byker was left
Futurism - the
by them, although they built thousands of hou- Playhouse and
sing units. It was the diametric opposite of for- the TV Tower
23
joint master of architecture
Fig.4
mer Trotskyist T Dan Smith’s dirigiste ‘Brasilia
of the North’ - in architectural terms Militant’s
policy was perhaps the widest scale attempt to
give people what most (if not all) always said
they wanted – a house and garden, close to their
place of work.
The effect, frankly, is bizarre, warping a metro-
polis into Beryl Bainbridge’s ‘holiday village’
– it’s as if the city was straining all efforts to
actually become as boring as Southampton.
Accounts from the ‘60s, like that of Ian Nairn,
argue that post-war architecture in the city was
far less interesting than that of say, Sheffield, and
Davies’ footage of some humdrum system-built
blocks generally supports this – but the case
is quite different with the 1930s’ ‘tenements’,
which feature just as heavily. These brick blocks
of flats, designed after more unambiguously
municipal socialist precedent of the cities with
which Liverpool is rightly compared – Hamburg,
Vienna, Berlin, Rotterdam – were designed as
an attempt, conscious or otherwise, to make
a city where giant office blocks and cathedrals
dissolved into back-to-backs and two-up two-
downs into something more coherent and ge-
nuinely metropolitan, giving the working class
Fig.4 St An-
drew’s Gardens,
designed by
John Hugues
under Lancelot
Keay
Fig.5 Militant
semis
Fig.6 Park Road,
Dingle
Fig.5
24 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
areas of the city the kind of dramatic urban grain
that the commercial centre took for granted.
These too were demolished, first by Militant and
then by the various more politically conformist
regimes that followed it – one tenement complex
in Old Swan went down as late as 2001, to be
replaced by a Tesco’s. By way of comparison, in
Glasgow it had been commonsensical for years
that tenements were as decent a form of hou-
sing as any other, with ‘tenement rehabilitation’
Fig.6
well into its third decade. So an experiment in
convincing the English to live in low-rise apart-
ment blocks, in making an English city as honest
about its urbanity as a Scottish or European one,
became another smugly accepted failure.
The reasons for this, however, are easily unders-
tandable. Liverpool is the only British city to have
really experienced the kind of drastic population
drop considered normal in post-war American
cities – it declined by around half between the
1940s and 1990s, from around 850,000 people
to something around 400,000. So what possible
need could there be for apartment blocks? If
there was enough space and few enough people,
why shouldn’t every council tenant have their
own house and garden? The only counter-ar-
gument is aesthetic, due to the incontrovertible
fact that due to this policy, whole swathes of
inner-city Liverpool look utterly ridiculous. One
moment you’re in Berlin, the next in Basings-
toke. Walking along Park Road in Dingle, you can
see how Militant took up the theories of ‘defen-
sible space’ and Alice Coleman’s walkway turd-
counting, so that the semis are not arranged in
terraces, for the most part, but in closes and cul-

Fig.7
de-sacs, with brick walls screening them from
the street and all its unpredictability. In his spi-
rited self-defence Liverpool – A City That Dared
to Fight, Tony Mulhearn even quotes Coleman’s
approval of his housing policy, not pausing to
wonder why an architectural adviser to Marga-
ret Thatcher might be praising low-density hou-
sing in inner cities.
It’s horribly sad. They’re not bad houses, in their
drab way, and residents have often dressed the
exteriors up in a manner which would be difficult
in the tenements and towers. They cost much
less in upkeep than a block of flats, so nobody
has to reckon with piss-stained or broken lifts.
They cater for the very people – working class
families – who have been designed out of Man-
chester or Leeds. They have the virtue of being
in the centre of a city, rather than in the suburbs
from whence they borrow their forms; but they
just look so utterly wrong. It’s not dignified for
the city centre to mimic the ‘burbs. It leads to de-
pressing juxtapositions – as at the point where
the grand sweep of the surviving ‘30s tenement
block, St Andrew’s Gardens (now gated student
flats) meets a piddling close of ‘90s semis, with
the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King in
Fig.8
the background – the scale is preposterous, with
the houses seeming to desperately want to be
somewhere less dramatic, a murmur of discon-
tent with the idea of getting above your station.
It’s not for the likes of us. Walk from Dingle to
the centre and wasteland punctuates the cul-de-
sacs, revealing the sudden howl of Giles Gilbert
Scott’s other Cathedral, beamed in from ano-
ther planet, until you get to a set of bungalows.
Bungalows, for God’s sake, you think, as it all
becomes a tragicomedy. Why didn’t London hit
on the idea of building bungalows in Whitecha-
pel? One of the bungalows has ‘GRASS’ spray-
painted onto it. Then you see a black car park,
a ‘GROSVENOR’ sign, and you’ve entered one of
Militant’s more unexpected legacies in the city.
The One is Not
After defeat in the battle with the Thatcher
government over rate-capping, Liverpool City
Council sold off a swathe of publicly owned land
in the centre, around Paradise Street. This in
turn was bought up by a developer who sat on
it for years, and then they were bought out by
Fig.9
the Duke of Westminster’s property company,
the aforementioned Grosvenor. The result has
been alternately lauded or reviled depending
Fig.7 Semis,
on whether you’re reading a newspaper or an Metropolitan
architecture magazine. It was criticised before it Cathedral
had even been completed by Paul Kingsnorth in
Fig.8 Militant
the Guardian, for creating a ‘mall without walls’,
bungalows, next
a privatised city-district where public rights of to Liverpool
way were irrelevant, an enclave shutting itself off One
and boasting its own private security force and
Fig.9 The
a policy of keeping undesirables off its streets. private city-dis-
Anna Minton features it in her brilliant indict- trict
25
joint master of architecture
ment of Blairite urban policy Ground Control as
a prime example of the creeping securitisation
and privatisation of the British city, motivated by
fear and greed. I don’t intend to disagree with
either of these accounts when I say that my fee-
ling upon entering Liverpool One was not horror
at entering a new dystopia, but a feeling of relief,
after so much visual impoverishment along Park
Road – some architecture, finally, aside from the
distant silhouettes of the cathedrals and the Li-
ver Building. Some planning, some urban cohe-
rence, some sense that I was somewhere special
rather than somewhere trying desperately not
to be special.
Before I went to Liverpool One I spoke to an ar-
chitect at BDP, the firm who masterplanned the
scheme and hired a diverse group of architects
to design the individual buildings. He recom-
mended to me a route where I would not be
able to see the join between the old city and the
new roofless shopping complex in its midst, in
response to my Minton-influenced arguments
about its exclusive demarcation between itself
and the surrounding area. That might be the
case at one exit, but at all others the screens,
signs and fittings immediately announce a rup-
ture – but then why should it try to blend in? The
maniacal megalopolis of the Pier Head owed
very little to the Georgiana of Hope Street. More
contentiously, he dismissed worries about the
privatisation of public space by pointing out that
a local council would be unwilling or unable to
look after such a development, claiming that re-
generation schemes elsewhere – like BDP’s own
Ropewalks - had fallen into dilapidation because
of this. He included most developers in this too,
claiming someone like Hammerson would be far
less inclined to treat this area in the way Grosve-
Fig.10 FAT’s
Liverpool One
Pavilion
Fig.11 Glenn
Howell’s tower,
Liverpool One
Fig.10
26 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
Fig.11
nor have done – as if money is no object, which
in the case of the Duke of Westminster it is not,
so finishes on the buildings are of a far higher
standard than almost anything else built over
the last decade. Feudalism, it seems, is able to
achieve results where neoliberalism or munici-
pal socialism have failed.
BDP were also the designers of WestQuay, and
Liverpool One marks one of the many ways that
the Mersey port has taken revenge on its sou-
thern rival. Architecturally, there’s no doubt
that Liverpool One is good, especially compa-
red with the appalling WestQuay, and some of
the attacks on it seem misplaced. Hans van der
Heijden and BIQ Architecten’s new buildings
for Bluecoat Chambers might be a redbrick ver-
nacular attempt to create serious architecture
in the midst of Liverpool One’s commercial fri-
volity – but not only is this a misreading of the
far from traditionalist architecture of central
Liverpool, his structures also slot rather well
into the panoply of registers and references,
and at first I don’t realise that they’re from a dif-
ferent project. The buildings on the ground are
mostly excellent - FAT’s sweet shop kiosks are
as garishly playful as one would expect, Dixon
Jones’ arcades as chic and sober, but even those
by often mediocre practices are fine - CZWG’s
‘Bling Building’ is as embarrassing and en-
joyable as old men talking about ‘bling’ tend to
be, but more surprising is Glenn Howells’ row of
shops culminating in a tower, its golden frame
the most striking element in the whole scheme –
until, that is, you start to traverse the walkways

Fig.12
and escalators that lead up to BDP and Allies &
Morrison’s South John Street, where suddenly
all the walkways that we were told led to crime
and desolation are in place, swooping across
each other, a Piranesian spectacle in pink and
green. The stairs from here lead to a raised park,
concluding what is one of the very few actually
pleasurable walking experiences created by the
Urban Renaissance, a school of thought that
otherwise remains boringly earthbound. There
is more than a ghost of Park Hill or Thamesmead
here (the BDP architect I spoke to talks of his
admiration for the Smithsons), and it finally in-
jects a bit of excitement into the prosaic act of
getting from A to B, a form of planning based on
movement through spaces, for once, rather than
for sitting in wanly sipping a coffee. At this point
I’m suddenly disarmed – I had expected to hate
this place, to see it as the culmination of the idio-
cies of Blairite urbanism, but in fact, it’s almost
everything I like about architecture, albeit under
some heavy disguise.
After the triumph of the walkways and Chavasse
Park, the reality of the place begins to sink in,
and I notice how much of the architecture is
actually quite poor – Aedas’ dull Hilton Hotel,
Fig.13
Cesar Pelli’s silly, strained One Park West tower
- and I realise that I have absolutely no desire
to buy anything, which means at least that the
place is a functional failure in my case. To see
architecture this good housing Waterstones and
Tie Rack creates a definite bathos. And to praise
the buildings and the plan does not automati-
cally mean that the claim by the Stirling Prize
judges that Liverpool One ‘single-handedly re-
versed the city’s fortunes’ stops being insulting
nonsense. This is still somewhere unashamedly
designed for consumers from Cheshire rather
than Bootle (hence the many car parks), and it’s
still a CCTV-ridden enclave where civic virtues
are secondary to the imperative to spend spend
spend. Yet the unexpected brilliance of Liverpool
One is perhaps appropriate. Every society erects
its finest buildings for what it considers to be
the most important function, whether it be the
glorification of a deity, of capital, or of council
housing. Liverpool One is our finest monument
to shopping, to the dazed purchase of Chinese-
made consumer goods and the precarious just-
in-time production behind them. Its buildings
are display fronts, with little underneath – FAT
even draw attention to it, with their Liquorice
Allsorts wall giving way to a void and an escape
staircase. I would love something with this much
care and attention to be devoted to a function of
some genuine worth, but this at least has the vir-
tue of macropolitical neatness.
Over the Wall
To see how little other functions are valued, walk
to the other side of the Pier Head, where culture
and accommodation are encompassed by some
extremely shoddy and banal buildings, and walk
from there to the remnants of the docks. First
the Pier Head itself, where three very different
buildings have been fixed forever as the ‘Three
Graces’, and two new buildings which sum up
the problem of British architecture with depres-
sing acuity now share the riverfront with it.
One is the Museum of Liverpool, unfinished but
nearly complete at the time of writing. Desig-
ned by Scandinavian architects 3XN, it stands Fig.12 Liverpool
as the current mutation of the north European One walkways
urbanism of which Liverpool was the finest, and
Fig.13 Liverpool
arguably only English example. However, be- One from Cha-
cause Liverpool’s architecture has not itself kept vasse Park
27
joint master of architecture

Fig.16

Fig.14 Further on from here are a cluster of towers,

almost all far duller than what would be built in
apace with developments in its fellow northern Manchester or Glasgow (as in Liverpool, nobody
ports, it is treated as an alien intrusion onto an is looking), by Ian Simpson, Aedas and AHMM –
ensemble fixed in time. But the worry about the of the latter’s two skyscrapers, one has a certain
appropriateness or otherwise of this building, kitschy, sci-fi joie de vivre, the other is a banal
an immaculately stone-clad, snaking structure barcode façade. As a cluster distance flatters it,
standing back at a respectful distance from the but up close this is inept urbanism, randomly
graces, is perhaps less offensive than the first scattered towers with wasteland and howling
positive reaction to its presence. That is, the new main roads inbetween. That is, until you get to
Pier Head Terminal, by prolific hacks Hamiltons, the start of the docks, the kind of port where one
which is quite precisely a bonsai version of the can enjoy walking, the opposite of Southamp-
Museum, only tricked out in a much cheaper ton’s vast, screened-off container reservation.
stone with additional jagged sub-expressionist This is an anachronistic impression, and the
windows cut into it, housing a Beatles Museum
and a new Terminal, providing an introduction
to a city which wants to be a passenger port once
again. It stands in front of the Liver Building,
taking the piss, and was the justified winner of
the 2009 Carbuncle Cup, the award for worst
building of the year given out by Building Design.
In its pathetic, Lidl version of the New Thing, it
is a new gateway to a servile, provincial nation,
unable to produce anything of worth but cheap
imitations of other, less hidebound peoples’
ideas.
Fig.17
Fig.14 The
Museum of Li- thing you can look at here is not a working, living
verpool, under dock – it’s a ruin. There’s miles of dereliction be-
construction
fore you reach the entity which still functions and
Fig.15 Hamil- trades (lucratively enough) as the Port of Liverpo-
ton’s Pier Head ol. Here, in the mid-1990s, was one of the last major
Terminal
industrial disputes in Britain, the Liverpool Dock
Fig.16 The Strike, one of those evanescent moments where
new Liverpool a strike stopped being just about Pay And Condi-
skyline
tions, but became about abstractions – casualisa-
Fig.17 AHMM’s tion, de-industrialisation, a declaration of solida-
Unity Tower rity. It disappeared from prominence as quickly as
Fig.15
28 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool

Fig.18
it arose, but Liverpool has a long memory.
It’s walled, the derelict dock, but the walls them-
selves are architecturally detailed, and the gates
and the walkable road that runs along them pro-
Fig.19
vide constant sights, snatches and views into a
seafaring architecture, which even in its most
prosaic moments has a romance to it, a feeling
of potential escape, the sense that you could just
get on a boat from here and get out of Britain, a
feeling I have never had in Southampton – and
the reason why is that you no longer feel like
you’re in Britain here, but an international zone,
a space where transit is romantic rather than a
matter of mere distribution. Along the dock wall
Fig.20
you can see a litany of industrial curios with a
similar strange power and ruthless ambition to
the century-old office blocks in the centre – a
cyclopean ventilation shaft like one of Antonio
Sant’ Elia’s futurist power stations, the enor-
mous arch of the Tate & Lyle Grain Silo, a rare
reminder of the dubious money and Caribbean
labour distantly behind the Tate Gallery a mile
Fig.21
upriver, but interrupting it all – blocking the
road, in fact – is the Stanley Dock, the place
where this journey ends.
It’s blisteringly, skin-scrapingly cold, in the dead
centre of the longest, bleakest winter for decades,
a winter which has passed without the expected
discontent – a vague, confused anger and despair
is the prevalent mood instead, here as much as eve-
rywhere else. Fluttering in the wind is some torn
Police tape, and the mechanical bridge over the dock
is blocked by several caravans, with a pink wheelie
bin and a pink child’s tricycle in front of them. Adja-
cent to this mobile architecture is the rotting black
and red masonry of the 1901 Stanley Dock Tobacco
Warehouse, reputedly the largest brick building in
the world. Together they provide two possible ways
out – the monumentalism of industry, gigantic crea-
tions of production and distribution, the forbears of Fig.18 The
the giant distribution sheds of our times, only put voids of regen-
ration
at the centre of a culture rather than hidden away
somewhere off the motorway. Or there’s the cara- Fig.19 The
van itself, a home on which you’ll never have to pay Wasteland on
the other side
a mortgage, a fearlessly modern architecture that is of the wall
no longer even tied to a fixed site. Both of these buil-
dings are utterly ruined, here at Stanley Dock, and Fig.20 The
other Tate
you can smell their decomposition. Yet they seem so
much less ruinous than the desolate city of property Fig.21 Caravans
and tourism just a couple of miles away. at Stanley Dock
29
joint master of architecture
Philipp Oswalt, Tim Rieniets (Eds.), Atlas of shrinking cities / Atlas der schrumpfenden Städte,
pp. 144 © Peter Hall, Hatje Kantz, Berlin 2006
AGED INDUSTRIAL COUNTRIES
PETER HALL
Bartlett University College London
One can identify three types of city worldwide
at the start of the twenty-first century: the city
coping with informal hypergrowth, the city co-
ping with dynamic growth, and the mature city
coping with aging. The third of these categories,
located in the countries of the developed world-
Europe, North America, Australasia, and Japan-
is distinctly different from, even opposite to, the
other two, for, in sharp contrast to them, these
cities are faced with shrinkage or the prospect
of early shrinkage.
Shrinkage can take the form of population
decline, economic decline, or a combination of
the two. And it is not always immediately clear
which is the primary force. Decline due to purely
demographic forces, particularly diminishing
birth rates, may directly lead to an economic
downturn as the labor force and the market
shrink. Conversely, economic decline, due to the
contraction of a basic industry, may lead to out-
migration and population loss. Indeed, the two
may operate in tandem, in a problematic fee-
dback loop. But it is useful analytically to look
first at demographic forces, because they tend to
operate with a basic uniformity across national
territories or even continents.
As has long been evident, in the course of eco-
nomic development populations have gone
through two demographic transitions. The first
was the rapid rise of population during early
industrialization, as improved public health and
nutrition caused a rapid fall in death rates, par-
ticularly infantile mortality, while birth rates re-
mained constant. The second, typically a centu-
ry later, was a slower but progressive fall in the
rate of growth, as contraceptive understanding
30 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
diffused and as traditional incentives to child-
bearing declined in an industrial or post-indus-
trial society with a developing welfare state.
This stage was evident as early as the 1870s
in some European countries; by the 1930s and
1940s it was concerning demographers, who
even then were forecasting eventual decline. In
many such countries, the predictions were up-
set after the Second World War by an upsurge
in births which went beyond the «baby boom»
resulting from delayed births; but, by the 1980s
and 1990s, the long-term trends had reasserted
themselves, leading again to the prospect of ear-
ly population decline from the early twenty-first
century onwards.
Given that basic fact, cities could avoid shrin-
kage only if they proved attractive to migrants,
either from other parts of the same country or
continent, or from overseas. By this mechanism,
cities in certain regions of certain countries-
London and southeast England, Baden-Wurt-
temberg and Bavaria in Germany, Madrid in
Spain-have managed to show continuing dyna-
mism, even while cities in their remaining natio-
nal territories have been declining. These cities
tend to be the most successful in their national
territories, acting as magnets to migrants from
less developed countries; in addition, many of
these migrants are from rural areas with tra-
ditional social or religious structures and so
tend to have high birth rates, further contribu-
ting to a strong demographic upturn in recent
years after decades of shrinkage. Contrastingly,
in the United Kingdom, many of the shrinking
cities are concentrated in the old-industrialized
regions of the Midlands and Northern England;
in West Germany, urban shrinkage is occurring
particularly in the Ruhrgebiet. And in North
America, because of continuing high rates of
in-migration to cities in the Sun Belt regions of
the South and West, urban growth has become
almost the norm and shrinkage the exception,
localized in the industrial Rust Belts of the East
Coast and Midwest or in remote rural regions
like the Great Plains.
This is because the economies of such places
are also shrinking. Of course, a falling popula-
tion eventually will also mean a declining labor
force, as drops in the birth rate work through
childhood into productive ages; such areas may
eventually demonstrate extreme demographic
dependency, with a relatively small workforce
supporting an army of old-age dependents. In
addition, these countries and regions are old
not only in a demographic sense but also in an
economic sense. They grew on the basis of the
first industrial revolution in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries {sometimes-as
in the Ruhrgebiet of Germany or the Ohio-Penn-
sylvania region of the United States-in a later
midnineteenth-century phase of it, and even-as
in Turin in Italy or Detroit in the United States-
in a subsequent early-twentieth-century stage
based on automobiles or electrical industries);
since the end of the 1960s, they have shrunk as
basic industries, like coal, iron, steel, and heavy
engineering or port industries have declined.
Invariably, new high-technology manufacturing
industries, or related advanced service indus-
tries, seem to have grown in different regions
unsullied by the traces of the first industrial re-
volution, such as southeast England, southwest
Germany, Italy’s Emilio-Romagna, or California.
Here, they tend to grow around larger and me-
dium-sized cities in broad urban belts alongside
transport corridors: Reading or Cambridge in
England, Stuttgart or Augsburg in Germany, San
Francisco and San Jose in California, Bologna in
Italy.
However, even then the picture has been com-
plicated by differential out-migration from cities
to suburbs. In the Anglo-Saxon world (England,
the United States, Canada, Australasia), subur-
banization began as early as the 1860s and
1870s with the development of commuter train
services and then (from 1900) electric rail and
streetcar transit. Even at that point, congested
inner city areas began to decongest and to lose
population, as in London. But the process in-
creased in scale and changed in form from the
1950s under the influence of rising mass car
ownership, which allowed suburbs to spread
widely beyond the fixed limits of transit routes.
Urban areas now sprawled at increasingly low
densities beyond city boundaries, a process
modified but not halted by planning policies in
countries like the United Kingdom or Germany,
which favoured compact cities. And, after 1960,
the process became widespread also around Eu-
ropean cities which had previously developed in
a more compact, high-density manner-including,
after the end of Socialist city-planning policies in
1990/91, the cities of east-central Europe.
Very recently, since the late 1990s a process
of urban renaissance has been notable in and
around the central business districts of many
European and some North American cities. This
tends to produce a «doughnut» form of deve-
lopment with a reviving core, extensive tracts
of declining middle and outer city areas, and
extensive (and spreading) suburban develop-
ments beyond the city limits, sometimes leap-
frogging in discontinuous urban growth far into
surrounding rural areas. In consequence, city
population figures may no longer convey an
accurate representation of urban reality. A city
like Detroit may exhibit catastrophic shrinkage-
losing half of its population between 1950 and
2004- while its suburbs grow and spread far out
into rural Michigan. A similar contrast is obser-
vable in many old industrial cities in Europe. As
similar changes affect cities in other parts of the
world, the most important future question is the
balance between these two forces.
31
joint master of architecture
Philipp Oswalt, Tim Rieniets (Eds.), Atlas of shrinking cities / Atlas der schrumpfenden Städte,
pp. 122 © Klaus Müller, Hatje Kantz, Berlin 2006
Translated from the German by Steven Lindberg
ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION
KLAUS MÜLLER
Osteuropa-Institut der Freien Universität Berlin
Ongoing structural change is both a feature of
the modern age and a global challenge that no
society can permanently escape. In the 1930s,
the economist A.G.B. Fisher first subdivided the
economy of a county into the three sectors of
agriculture, industry, and services, and linked
this with the thesis of an increasing «tertiari-
zation» of modern societies. This was based on
the observation that since the Industrial Revo-
lution, European societies had pursued a path
of accelerated change, the result of which was
that agriculture - to begin with - steadily lost in
importance in favor of the industrial sector. It
was extrapolated that in the course of technolo-
gical progress, industry would be overtaken by
services.
The history of the twentieth century has confir-
med that with certain regional nuances, all
industrial societies are subject to a tendency
toward tertiarization. The speed of structural
change can be gauged from the fact that around
1900, in Germany nearly a third of gross national
product was still being generated in agriculture
and forestry; this share had shrunk to not quite
six percent in 1960, and in 2003 it amounted to
only 1.1 percent. In 1960, fifty-four percent of
the value added was in industry; since as early as
the mid-1970s, however, the contribution of in-
dustry has fallen behind that of the tertiary sec-
tor. Today, seventy percent of the gross national
product can be attributed to services. In Great
Britain and the United States, three-fourths of
the value added falls into this area. Such structu-
ral shifts were accompanied by social fault lines
and political crises as well as massive shifts in
the urban systems of the respective countries.
Each of the sectors develops different locatio-
32 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
nal preferences and forms of centralization so
that the settlement structures of the respective
country will clearly shift along with sectorial
change. Previous areas of growth decline, while
new ones develop elsewhere. Examples can be
seen in the death of villages and small towns
within the context of industrialization processes
as well as in the crises of old industrial cities in
connection with tertiarization. A positive view of
the opportunities provided by structural change
has prevailed in Europe since the middle of the
twentieth century. French economist Jean Fou-
rastie spoke of «thirty glorious years» of high
economic growth, during which large sections
of the population climbed upward into a ser-
vice society with sophisticated intellectual stan-
dards, individualized mobility, and comfortable
living conditions. Sociologists declared that a
post-industrial age had arisen from changes in
the structures of needs and from technological
progress: education, culture, communicative
competence, and intellectual technologies are
increasingly gaining in importance in the eco-
nomy, in politics, and in everyday life.
From this viewpoint, tertiarization also offered
a prospect for overcoming regional structural
crises and the urban decline that characterized
deindustrialization in the 1980s. Only in a few
cities, such as Manchester (which during indus-
trialization already had a relevant service sector
at its disposal and is a city that fulfils the locatio-
nal demands of today’s new service- and know-
ledge-based economies), was such a structural
change successful. Elsewhere, however, econo-
mic transformation of this sort was carried out
only insufficiently, despite massive state contri-
butions, and was not able to offset the loss of
economic power resulting from deindustrializa-
tion.
Nevertheless, the global flow of information,
knowledge, and qualifications is of singu-
lar importance. According to the World Bank,
which is only too happy to showcase itself as a
«knowledge bank,» the transfer of knowledge
and technology is one key to overcoming glo-
bal inequality. From this perspective, processes
of structural change no longer take place wit-
hin individual national economies, but within a
global framework. Transnational corporations
are distributing not only their production lines
across several countries, but also their services.
Because of this, new information technologies
undermine the classic definition of services-na-
mely, their ties to specific locations, times, and
people: functionally specialized services become
just as tradable across borders as traditional
goods. Research, development, and educational
institutions; medical diagnostics; customer ser-
vice; and the production of films have become
transnationalized.
Under these conditions, the proportional rela-
tionship of a country’s sectors is no longer an
indication of the country’s stage of develop-
ment. The higher concentration of services in
the United States currently reflects a higher
degree of outsourcing of those services that in
Germany’s industrial enterprises, for instance,
are often still performed internally and thus are
statistically assigned to the secondary sector.
Conversely, no one will be able to draw informa-
tive conclusions from the fact that in both Japan
and Jamaica, two-thirds of the gross national
product is attributable to services. In fact, many
countries will never become «industrialized
nations» or modern « service economies,» but
will instead be forced to find their place within
a value added that is distributed globally. Their
structural character depends on whether they
remain extraction economies, on the strength of
their natural resources, on whether they become
places where industries will choose to settle-in-
dustries that are not ecologically welcome or
profitable in metropolises-or on whether they
represent attractive destinations for tourism
and the offshoring of intelligent services. Can
cross-border structural change accelerate the
catching-up process of peripheral countries?
One reason it might is that the tertiarization of
trade and investments has broken down the old
hierarchical pattern of the international division
of labor. In the last thirty years, the composition
of foreign investments from the «north» into
the «south» has continuously developed away
from the raw materials sector. Since 1990, more
than half the capital outflow has been aimed at
the service sector. In recipient countries, foreign
investments are increasingly shifting from the
industrial into the tertiary sector, while the pro-
duction of primary goods continues to occupy
third place. The high growth of «new globalizers»
is accompanied by rapid sectorial shifts and
urbanization processes: over the next decade,
the proportion of the urban population in China
will climb from thirty-six to fifty percent, and in
India from twenty-eight to thirty-two percent.
Several cities in a new Asia could assume post-
industrial characteristics-the Chinese industrial
city of Chongqing, however, is registering the
greatest influx; with more than 300 000 new
inhabitants annually, it is growing at a rate eight
times that of Chicago in the nineteenth century.
Admittedly, it would be unwise to infer a gene-
ral developmental model. The lucrative seg-
ments of global chains of value added have thus
far remained concentrated in the metropolises,
while competition between countries with in-
termediate stages of production lowers returns
accumulated there. Moreover, investments in
services in Latin America or Eastern Europe
signal that telecommunications, media, and the
financial sectors are passing into the control of
Western businesses. Finally, the significance of
post industrialization should not be overestima-
ted. In India, the poster child for post-industrial
globalization, intelligent services contribute
precisely 0.4 percent to jobs; China is achieving
its spectacular success with industrial goods.
In most peripheral countries it is at best the
«unorganized service sector» that is growing-
with low-paid jobs lacking future prospects.
Shiny new service cities will not arise on a large
scale under these conditions; more likely is the
emergence of the «planet of slums» anticipated
by Mike Davis. Clearly, what remains relevant is
the early experience of Western countries-that
structural change also means poverty, emigra-
tion, and political crises.
33
joint master of architecture
Philipp Oswalt, Tim Rieniets (Eds.), Atlas of shrinking cities / Atlas der schrumpfenden Städte,
pp. 96 © Markus Hesse, Hatje Kantz, Berlin 2006
Translated from the German by Jill Denton
SUBURBANIZATION
MARKUS HESSE
Université du Luxembourg
Suburbanization generally describes the sprawl
of urban settlements beyond the bounds of a
core city and into its hinterland. It ensues prima-
rily from migration of the urban population, yet
also from the relocation of business, industry,
services, and recreational facilities to outlying
districts and beyond. One can only describe this
process as suburbanization if there is an increase
in the total population or occupational activity of
the urban region (comprising both core city and
outlying areas). The relocation of population and
jobs to the suburbs is mostly accompanied by
the inverse densification of an urban settlement,
a process that becomes more extreme when the
total population of an urban region is no longer
growing, but stagnating or even shrinking. The
widely upheld model of urban development of
Van den Berg asserts that the suburbanization
phase is embedded in a cycle in which forces of
concentration and decentralization alternate.
In cases of classic urbanization such as have
occurred in industrial societies, the phase of a
concentration of usages in a city (urbanization)
is followed by the deconcentration of the urban
population or occupational activity from the in-
ner city to its outskirts (suburbanization). The
precise definition and measurement of suburba-
nization are, however, often thwarted by the way
municipal boundaries are drawn, for numerous
locations within a city’s limits may also meet the
defining criteria (of density or development),
while core-city levels of density and architec-
tural forms may also be found beyond the city
limits. Suburbanization is a central characteris-
tic of twentieth-century urban development in
almost all industrialized countries, notwiths-
tanding notable differences between European,
American, Canadian, Asian or Australian cities
34 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
with regard to its extent, its temporal dyna-
mics (origins, duration, cycles), or its spatial-
structural effects: the effects on the structure of
downtown areas, for example. Urban research
locates the origins of European suburbanization
in the emergence of villa districts in Victorian
England, a viewpoint disputed by those histo-
rians who consider suburban settlements to be
an even older phenomenon. It is undisputable
today, however, that rapid urban growth in the
period of industrialization was the primary pre-
requisite for the emergence of suburban towns
and districts. Since the early and mid-twentieth
century, sub-urbanization has unfolded at a rate
that largely corresponds to the emergence of a
middle class able to afford its own home and an
automobile. This development has continued
in the United States since the 1930s, sustained
by the availability of cheap cars, massive expan-
sion of the freeway network, and low-interest
loans granted to homebuyers. In most central
European countries, suburbanization became
a decisive factor in the postwar period. By the
end of the twentieth century, the great majority
of both the British and American populations
lived in suburbia as opposed to less than half
the German population. Processes of suburbani-
zation have become a normal urban phenome-
non in Asian countries as well. The merging of
village and town settlements has been evident
in Japan for some time, a process referred to as
desakota, meaning village-town. This phenome-
non derives from a chaotic and random pattern
of land use that has proved relatively resilient in
the face of planners’ procedural specifications.
Such random varieties of suburbanization are
particularly evident in developing or threshold
countries as well, where extensive formal and
informal patterns of «patchwork urbanization»
in slum districts alternate with upper-class re-
sidential estates that are increasingly enclosed
and guarded. Depending on their size, location,
and density, each of these might be considered
to be suburban. Suburban spaces were tradi-
tionally characterized by their role as inter-
mediary between the city and the countryside.
Their location in a city’s catchment area made
commuting to work a viable and significant fac-
tor. Suburbia was dependent on the inner city. A
further dominant feature was a lesser den-sity
of population and land development than in the
inner city. In the course of its ongoing expansion,
however, this typical and ideal face of suburbia
has dramatically changed: suburbia has become
increasingly urban. The causes of suburbaniza-
tion are complex. The demand for lots of a size
unavailable in the city center was an initial im-
pulse. Planners met this demand by releasing
affordable greenfield lots in outlying districts
and by creating suitable traffic access: first of
all for public transportation, followed by provi-
sions for private vehicles. The political interests
of the state, corporations, and the financial and
real estate mar-kets (for credit and contractual
building loans) have generally played a central
role. Homeowners have opted for suburban
locations primarily on account of qualities that
are either un-available or unaffordable in the
core city. Alongside generous living quarters,
these include the advantages of gardens, recrea-
tional spaces, and a child-friendly environment.
Businesses relocate to suburbia because space is
more gen-erously available than in the inner city
and transport links are more convenient. This
is particularly true of industries requiring large
spaces, but also of wholesale and retail distri-
bution, freight haulers, and logistics companies.
Branches that are not exclusively or primarily
geared to customers in the inner city and have
a wide sales radius benefit from a suburban
location. They generally move far enough «out-
side» to be able to profit from suburbia’s advan-
tages without having to renounce the core city’s
potential supply of customers and employees.
From the viewpoint of municipal authorities,
suburbani-zation is inherently problematic and
a burden. «Creeping conformity»-suburban sett-
lements monotonous appearance is often cri-
ticized. Suburban growth also takes up a lot of
land, which is a source of conflict because subur-
ban cityscapes might alternatively be attractive
ecological loca-tions. Suburbanization can also
contribute to urban traffic problems, simply by
fact of it extending the area that subsequently
needs to be served. Suburbanization is synony-
mous with higher costs for the provision and
maintenance of all public amenities, particu-
larly when these have to be assured in areas
where, compared to the core city, the number
of users is very low or regressive. It is against
this background that suburbanization has long
since been negatively judged. Neither attempts
to curb plan-ning excesses nor campaigns
against «sprawl» have had much success, howe-
ver, which is mainly due to competition among
communities to attract new businesses and resi-
dents and to the increased mobility of the latter.
In the meantime, suburbia is judged in a more
differentiated fashion, not least because subur-
banization itself is not the problem, but rather
the attitudes, decisions, and behavioral patterns
of suburbanities. At the same time, suburban
spaces, desirable or not, have come to be reco-
gnized as an existing element of urban regions.
In the past, suburbanization occurred primarily
in conditions of growth. This is not to say that
partial or selective suburbanization processes
will not occur in conditions of shrinking. Indeed,
an inverse indication is that much older suburbs
have already found themselves subject to shrin-
king processes.
35
joint master of architecture
Sociological Research Online (Ed.) © Joanne Massey, socresonline.org.uk
THE GENTRIFICATION OF CONSUMPTION
JOANNE MASSEY
Manchester Metropolitan University
1. Millennium
quarter in Man- References
chester «There were a significant number of angry and
discontented voices - notably those concerned
with the treatment of employees and retailers
in the Corn Exchange and Royal Exchange.» The
central objective of this article is to bring into
the public arena the views of those excluded
from the rebuilding process, via the power me-
chanisms discussed over the following pages.
Though the sample analysed here is relatively
small their views are nonetheless germane
(could you back this up by saying that they
are one sub-set of your data and although it is
beyond the scope of this paper other groups had
similar stories of exclusion). Before commencing
this story though it is salient to give an overview
of the debate surrounding gentrification and its
meaning.
Defining Gentrification
«Gentrification refers to a process of class suc-
cession and displacement in areas broadly
characterised by working-class and unskilled
households first identified in the East End of
London by Glass (1964)»(Atkinson 2000).
2.1 Gentrification can be broadly defined as the
renewal of urban property by the middle and
upper classes, especially in working class neigh-
36 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
bourhoods. However, the physical and visual re-
sults of such a process are underpinned by more
complex issues as «underlying all these changes
in the urban landscape are specific economic,
social and political forces that are responsible
for a major reshaping of advanced capitalist
societies: there is a restructured industrial base,
a shift to service employment and a consequent
transformation of the working class and indeed
the class structure in general [....] Gentrifica-
tion is a visible spatial component of this social
transformation» (Smith and Williams, 1986).
2.2 One of the reasons gentrification is impor-
tant is that it is a key theoretical and ideological
battleground (Smith 1996). This battleground is
occupied by two opposing sides; one concerned
with culture, individual and consumer choice
and the other with the importance of class, capi-
tal and shifts in social production (Smith 1996).
These two antithetical views are compoun-
ded by Zukin in her 1995 work ‘The Cultures
of Cities’. How do the forces of gentrification
affect the cultural and consumption options
open to the individual? Indeed this is a question
raised by Zukin who asks how can the city offer
democratic culture when the city is being up-
graded to appeal to the affluent? (Zukin, 1995).
Hackworth, in agreement with this view, states
that gentrification can also be defined as «the
production of urban space for progressively
more affluent users.» (Hackworth, 2002).
2.3 The displacement of one population and its
culture by a more aspirant one has often been
accompanied by a power struggle. In this sense
gentrification can be viewed «as a struggle of
contending interests vying for control» (Betan-
cur, 2002).
2.4 However, there is evidence to show that due
to state intervention such struggles are now
subsiding, therefore the views of the working
classes are more easily contested and less pro-
tected (Hackworth and Smith 2001).
2.5 Hackworth and Smith (2001) argue that
gentrification has experienced three waves with
the most recent taking place between 1994 and
1999. Third wave post-recession gentrification
is bigger and more powerful than in previous
years, as corporate developers rework whole
neighbourhoods, usually with state support.
Gentrification traditionally focuses on the trans-
formation of residential areas (see Butler and
Robson 2001 and Atkinson 2000). However,
more recently housing has been coalesced into
the category of ‘real estate’, as Gibb and Hoesli
argue «real estate, encompassing housing, land
and commercial property, is a key driver of the
urban economy - in terms of economic develop-
ment, the distribution of opportunities across
space and through the evolution of the local
built environment» (2003).
2.6 Whilst rising property prices and a healthy
housing market are fundamental to gentrifica-
tion, it is evident that gentrifiers are no longer
simply entrepreneurial individuals, looking to
invest into what they consider to be an up and
coming residential area. Gentrifiers are now
large property development corporations, who
often have state support. Arguably this has a
detrimental impact on some who consume,
produce or sell culture, specifically smaller in-
dependent traders who cannot compete with
or afford to pay rental to large corporations. In
addition to this the state sees fit to intervene to
create gentrified areas as redevelopment is a
way of generating tax revenues (Hackworth, J.
and Smith 2001). Whilst the involvement of cor-
porate developers and the state usually result in
little opposition or struggle from existing com-
munities there are exceptions to this (see for
example Smith 1996[1]).
The Political Economy of Gentrification
3.1 What do Local Governments in the UK
stand to gain from creating gentrified areas?
In short they stand to gain revenues from resi-
dents and businesses in the region (Hackworth
2002, Hackworth and Smith 2001). In this way
smaller cities such as Manchester can establish
themselves as Headquarters cities (Taylor et al
1996)[2]. It is unsurprising that local economic
developments are increasingly ‘business- led’ in
urban areas. This involves the building of par-
tnerships between local and national govern-
ment and the private sector. Peck and Tickell 2. Devastation
argue that these partnerships are quite selective of the city by
the 1996 bomb
and unbalanced (1995). In other words these (the Corn
partnerships are careful to include to certain Exchange buil-
groups and exclude to others, in fact, «ironi- ding is visible
just behind the
cally, given their democratic origins and their crane)
effective exclusion of women, the unemployed,
black people, community groups and other mar-
ginalized interests, a defining feature of these
new ‘partnerships’ is their claim to ‘speak for
the city’, and sometimes also for local people»
(Peck and Tickell (1995). This means that local
democracy becomes overtaken by private deve-
lopment interests.
3.2 In the case of Manchester there are a num-
ber of significantly powerful private partners
who have emerged. They are known collecti-
vely as the Manchester Mafia as a result of the
amount of power they have in the city[3] (Peck
and Tickell 1995). The emphasis is on promo-
ting the growth of the city for those involved in
setting the local economic development agenda.
This has only been possible in Manchester, due
to the City Council’s willingness to work with a
small and powerful elite group of businessmen.
In short the involvement of private businesses
in public/private business partnerships in Man-
chester has resulted in a ‘privatisation’ of urban
politics, as power is apportioned between the
‘Manchester Mafia’ and the City Council. This
‘privatisation’ is of course a cause for concern as
«local business leaders are more likely to get in-
volved with opportunistic ‘shaking’ than purpo-
seful ‘moving’» (Peck and Tickell 1995). Ultima-
tely these people are businessmen with their
own agendas and interests, which will probably
become the interests of the city and its citizens
as a whole.
3.3 The new logo for Manchester ‘Making it
Happen’ (1990) in contrast to ‘Defending Jobs
Improving Services (1985) reflected political
shifts within the city (Williams 2000). The idea
was to enhance Manchester’s ‘liveability’ based
around three assumptions: that Manchester was
37
joint master of architecture
evolving along a post-industrial trajectory, that
it must compete in a global market and therefore
create its own unique brand image and finally
class based divisions in the city must be over-
come and a local ‘team effort’ made to ensure
success (Williams 2000). Part of this approach
was the centralisation of culture and leisure in-
dustries as tools for improving economic growth
and quality of life in the region. The Central Man-
chester Development Corporation (CMDC) came
into existence, its aim being to promote econo-
mic diversity by attracting investment from the
private sector into the city.
3.4 In 1996 central Manchester suffered im-
mense physical, social and economic damage
due to the IRA bombing. This resulted in the loss
of around 49,000 square metres of prime retail
space. An International Urban Design competi-
tion was launched to facilitate a planning res-
ponse along with the establishment of a Task
Force - Manchester Millennium Limited (MML,
which disbanded in 2000) to co-ordinate the
entire rebuilding process (Williams 2000). The
design competition facilitated the introduction
of a public-private partnership (MML) to the city
(Holden 2002). The brief for rebuilding the area
included «the restoration and enhancement of
the retail core and adding new cultural, enter-
tainment and leisure destinations; ensuring
accessibility, safety and security whilst creating
an inviting pedestrian environment; building
on historical strengths whilst delivering new
urban development quality and a greener envi-
ronment; and facilitating increasing residential
population» (Williams 2000).
3.5 EDAW construction won the competition
due to their design making visual linkages in the
city whilst maintaining key existing landmarks,
linking streets and squares to ensure a pedes-
trian route and proposing an integrated trans-
port system. More importantly they showed the
most potential for enhancing the quality and
potential for investment into the area, rather
than merely redistributing previously existing
activity (Williams 2000). It is crucial to note that
given much of this investment would be private it
would make sense to such investors to appeal to
those who would bring them the biggest financial
gain i.e. the affluent. Whilst the city council were
initially concerned about funding for the rebuil-
ding process, their chief concern was to ensure
38 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
that Manchester took advantage of the entrepre-
neurial opportunity it had been given (Holden
2002). The funding infrastructure consisted of an
injection of public funds (£83 Million[4]) which
attracted £380 million of private sector invest-
ment. The contribution from the public sector
reduced the risk for private investors who viewed
the area as a relatively safe bet, given that the
Government were investing so confidently in it
(Hackworth and Smith 2001). The public funding
was earmarked for five specific elements: public
realm improvements, transport infrastructure,
the Urbis centre (a project to mark the millen-
nium and chart the development and experience
of the city), meeting new developments affected
by deficit funding and management and promo-
tion of the master plan programme (Williams
2000). The key issue here is what impact would
such a large private investment have on those
able to consume, produce or sell culture in this
newly regenerated area of the city?
The Gentrification of Consumption?
4.1 Early literature on gentrification focused
on the middle class and its significant role in
the transformation of the inner city. Part of this
transformation involved issues such as in-mo-
vers, individual choice and of course consumer
preferences (Betancur 2002). Later literature
focuses more specifically on the causes rather
than the effects of gentrification. It has been
argued by Smith (1996) that capital, state po-
licy, class, urban restructuring, investment and
disinvestment are amongst the causes (Betan-
cur 2002). In a political environment of priva-
tisation it is predictable that both early and to
a certain extent later literature is relevant with
reference to Manchester’s story.
4.2 In terms of consumption one of the ways in
which gentrification physically manifests itself
is via the appearance of exclusive designer bou-
tiques and stores selling expensive goods. The
inclusion of such retail outlets on the cityscape
immediately excludes a large portion of the ur-
ban population, as those with limited income
cannot afford to shop there. In this way the
working classes are designed out of such areas
which often don’t appeal to them anyway[5].
The most extreme example of the gentrification
of consumption in Manchester was the repla-
cement of the Corn Exchange (which housed
various market stalls selling everything from mi-
litary memorabilia, to second hand records, co-
mics and knives) with the Triangle (which sells
nothing but luxury goods from champagne, to
Calvin Klein underwear to nail manicures). The
owners of the Corn Exchange building played
a significant role here as «before the bomb,
the owners of the Corn Exchange, the London-
based Frogmore Investments Limited, had been
the archetypal absentee landlord. With little
interest in investing in either the stimulation of
business activity or the Corn Exchange building
itself, Frogmore’s investment had become cha-
racterised by inertia and neglect [...] In Decem-
ber 1996 Frogmore terminated all the existing
leases and announced its intention to refurbish
the Corn Exchange in order to attract higher-
quality retail units» (Holden 2002).
4.3 This step towards gentrification had a severe
negative impact on those allowed to trade in
what was to become the Millennium Quarter.
Inflated rents and Frogmore’s desire to create
a more upmarket image (which coincided with
Manchester City Council’s desire to be a more vi-
brant European city) priced certain consumers
and traders of culture out of the area.
Winners and Losers
5.1 Betancur (2002) argues that gentrification is
(unsurprisingly given that it is essentially about
struggle and contest over urban space) a highly
political process. In short the politics of gen-
trification is ultimately about the power of the
existing community. This power refers not only
to political prowess but also to economic capi-
tal. The intervention of the state is of paramount
importance here, as ultimately the state will be
more powerful than any existing population.
«The hidden hand is not so hidden in the pro-
cess of gentrification [..] in fact it has a face - a
set of forces manipulating factors such as class
and race to determine a market outcome. In the
end, it shows that community formations are as
strong as their political and economic power. The
most traumatic aspect of this analysis is perhaps
the destruction of the elaborate and complex
community fabric that is crucial for low-income,
immigrant and minority communities - without
any compensation» (Betancur 2002).
5.2 In the case of Manchester one example of
displacement caused by the bombing was that
of the traders in the Corn Exchange. Their relo-
cation led to their dislocation from each other,
as they were scattered around the city centre in
a fragmented way.
5.3 This displacement provided a short cut to
gentrification and brought little conflict. There
are three reasons for this:
1.the building was structurally unsafe and would
be for a number of years, therefore the traders
had to find new business premises
2.the then owners of the building (Frogmore)
had recently taken over ownership of the buil-
ding and were already running down the leases
of established traders, with a view to attracting
more affluent businesses
3.the traders were dispersed all over Manches-
ter thus their daily contact was reduced and the
pressure of trying to find new business premises
left little time for campaigning.
5.4 Thus their political power was reduced due to
the fragmentation of their community, as a result
of the bomb and their already limited economic
power was adversely affected. Indeed for many
their only form of income came from the post bomb
Lord Mayor’s Fund (established by the City Council
and consisting of donations from local businesses)
as few were covered by insurance policies. This
type of situation is not uncommon «as gentrifica-
tion continues and the working class is less able,
as a whole, to afford rents in neighborhoods close
to the central business district (CBD), prospects
of an oppositional collective-consciousness are
reduced» (Hackworth 2002).
5.5 Clearly the Corn Exchange traders were
‘priced out’ of having businesses in the Millen-
nium Quarter post-bomb. This has an impact on
who can sell their wares or culture in this cen-
tral urban space. The city council were more
concerned with making «the city centre into a
cosmopolitan circuit of work and play intended
to maximise its appeal to investors, so enhan-
cing its image as the front stage for the region»
(Mellor 2002).
5.6 The independent traders from the Corn
Exchange did not fit with such an image and
thus were excluded from the newly regenera-
ted Millennium Quarter. Whilst there was little
visible conflict or protest on the part of the tra-
ders post-bomb, this does not mean it was not
felt, as the following interviews highlight.
39
joint master of architecture
Methodology
6.1 In total seven traders affected by the bomb
were interviewed. All interviews were semi-
structured. This group was chosen for investiga-
tion as the aim was to articulate the experience
of those who are usually absent from consul-
tation and the political decision-making pro-
cess. They proved to be quite a difficult group
to locate as none of them occupy a centralised
space in the city and the majority of them are
no longer trading due to the economic damage
they experienced. The traders were approached
on an ad hoc basis. This involved going into the
premises in which the respondents worked and
informing them of my research. The majority
of respondents were happy to oblige and gave
an interview within one week of my approa-
ching them. All interviewees gave their ‘infor-
med consent’ (Silverman 2000) as they were all
informed that the research was part of a PhD
thesis being undertaken at Manchester Metro-
politan University, which aimed to give a view
on how use and perceptions of the Millennium
Quarter have changed over time. All interviews
were voluntary and anonymised (does your na-
ming what type of trader they were compromise
this or where there for example many stamp tra-
ders?). The interviews were tape recorded and
transcribed. It is acknowledged that semi-struc-
tured interviews are open to criticism as they
allow selective discussions to take place, thus
making it easier for the researcher to produce
biased data (Mann 1985). However, given that
the aim of the research was to establish people’s
opinions and views qualitative methods were
the most appropriate choice as «qualitative
research is concerned with individuals’ own
accounts of their attitudes, motivations and
behaviour. It offers richly descriptive reports of
individuals’ perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, views
and feelings, the meanings and interpretations
given to events and things» (Hakim 1997).
6.2 The research was carried out employing
grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss
1995) which is defined as «one that is inducti-
vely derived from the study of the phenomenon
it represents. [.....] data collection, analysis, and
theory stand in reciprocal relationship with
each other. One does not begin with a theory,
then prove it. Rather, one begins with an area of
study and what is relevant to that area is allowed
40 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
to emerge» (Strauss and Corbin 1990).
6.3 The objective is not to prove a hypothesis, but
instead to allow the theory to emerge from the
data. Whilst there were key areas of investigation
such as how urban space is used and by whom,
who is included and excluded and what inter-
viewees thought about the newly regenerated
area, they were not tested but rather explored.
The Traders’ Reality
7.1 As previously stated the principal aim of this
paper is to make public the opinions of the tra-
ders, who were excluded from the consultation
process. More specifically it is hoped that the
interview data will highlight the impact gentri-
fication has had on the traders. Many traders
spoke with fondness of the Corn Exchange, the
different stalls there and the character of their
owners. What is explored here is firstly, how
the traders felt they were treated post-bomb in
order to demonstrate how they felt they were
excluded from the decision making process and
the resultant changes and secondly, what they
think of the ‘improvements’ made by the regene-
ration programme and the impact they believe
the changes have had on the city centre and the
lives of those who use it.
The initial impact
7.2 Opinions were fairly mixed on how the tra-
ders felt they were treated by the council. Eve-
ryone was in agreement that the Lord Mayor’s
Fund was a positive thing, though obtaining
funds from it was not an easy process as those
handling the funds were often fairly cynical
about genuine cases. «well everyone was ob-
viously saying ‘I need this I need that I need the
other’ but lot of them speaking to someone fairly
high up in McVities and they gave a considerable
chunk of money to that appeal and they were
not happy with the way the money was handled,
it was given as a gift and it was to be distributed
as such. A lot of the people that actually went to
the Lord Mayor’s Fund they were given a loan
rather than, although a lot of it was never asked
to be returned, but there were people that were
asking for silly thing and silly amounts of money
I personally just asked for the amount for tables,
desks and paint». (Stamp Dealer)
7.3 Arguably this quote also indicates that some
traders may have been asking for a larger sum

than they needed, but given that they had no ac-
cess to their business premises for 8-10 weeks
this is unsurprising - what were they supposed
to be selling given that most of their stock lay
damaged in a building which was not structural-
ly safe? The fact that traders had highly restric-
ted access to their stock was another cause for
concern «I remember people it was getting on
for months and then people had things nicked
because there was workmen in there and you
know there must have been a bit of grief really. A
lot of the stock was obviously destroyed anyway
because of you know the whole glass ceiling.»
(Skate and Workwear trader )
7.4 There doesn’t appear to be a common pro-
cess that all the traders went through in terms
of getting back on their feet financially. Some
received money from the Lord Mayor’s Fund,
others also received business start up loans
and even those lucky enough to have insurance
policies were fairly cynical about this process.
One trader commented that there was a definite
pecking order in terms of insurance claims, with
Marks and Spencers at the top and smaller tra-
ders way down on the list of priorities. Whilst
there is no hard evidence to substantiate such
claims there was an incisive impression that the
traders felt they were inconsequential to the
rebuilding process. In terms of council support
there is some disagreement amongst traders,
with some saying that the Council were reaso-
nably sympathetic up to three years after the
bomb and others saying after 6 months they
didn’t want to know.
7.5 As already stated initially traders were dis-
persed all over Manchester but most of them
relocated to the Northern Quarter, an area asso-
ciated with small cultural or creative businesses
and youth subcultures for the last ten to fifteen
years - some went to the Emporium which ope-
3.4.5. The
ned on Oldham Street, others to Affleck’s Palace Corn Exchange
and those from the Royal Exchange were housed Building during
on the third floor of Lewis’s department store. the rebuilding
process circa
Some attempt was made to offer a more uni-
1997- 2000
fied space for the displaced traders when the
Coliseum opened two months after the bom-
bing. Not all the traders moved there straight
away though, as some were already committed
to leases on other premises. Sadly the Coliseum
closed in June 2002 though three or four of the
traders whose businesses have survived over
the years now occupy a large unit in premises on
Dale Street (Where is this? Is it an evidence that
they have been excluded from the centre. If you
don’t know Manchester the implications of what
you are describing are not transparent).
7.6 Opinion on the way the then owners of the
Corn Exchange (Frogmore) reacted to events
was mixed. Some traders felt that the month’s
rent compensation offered was decent, though
many knew that this was a small price to pay for
the profits the Corn Exchange Building would
bring in the future. For one trader there was no
doubt that Frogmore saw the bombing as a defi-
nite window of opportunity
«Well basically we were all like low life slappers
who were paying minimal rent you know, post
card stalls and record shops and herbalists that
were paying nothing rent, thirty quid, forty quid
a week and of course they wanted rid of them
and they wanted to get brand name companies
in. It was so lucky for them, so lucky because
like I said it did it all in one fell swoop and like
I said they weren’t renewing people’s contracts
anyway so they had that and obviously because
people had length of contracts still to run they
couldn’t have got hold of them until they ran out
so I mean it was just the luckiest thing» (House
and Garage Record Imports trader).
7.7 How the traders were treated immediately
41
joint master of architecture
after the bomb is relevant as it highlights the
way in which their needs as small independent
businesses were seen as insubstantial. Arguably
this was because they did not ‘fit’ with enhan-
cing Manchester’s ‘liveability’ (Williams 2000)
and certainly were certainly no match for selec-
tive and unbalanced public private partnerships
(Peck and Tickell 1995) such as MML.
The long term impact
7.8 The former traders were asked what they
thought of the area as a whole now and more
specifically the Triangle (formerly the Corn Ex-
change). In terms of the Millennium Quarter as
a whole, most traders thought that the area was
more heavily used post regeneration, though
there was still room for criticism. «Just the sun-
ny day pubs really it’s nice to sit there it’s a nice
area it’s a sun trap and it’s nice to sit and watch
the world go by there apart from that there’s
nothing there really. I would have thought that
it could have been better used by maybe I don’t
know just some land where like when you go to a
foreign country and you go to France and there’s
like an area where you’ve got people trying to
sell you things but there’s people performing
and stuff I thought maybe a little bit more of that
might have been going on». (hooded top trader).
7.9 Although the area is used by more people
most traders agreed that the area has been de-
signed with the affluent in mind and those in
a higher income bracket are the main users of
the area. Interestingly the Millennium Quarter
has also attracted quite a large population of
would be skateboarders, particularly on a Satur-
day afternoon (as most of them are teenagers).
The attraction of a youth population is nothing
new though as traders recalled that there were
always loads of kids hanging about around the
fountain during the years they occupied the
Corn Exchange.
7.10 Everyone was in agreement that the
Triangle was quite tastefully decorated both
inside and out. However, one trader did use the
term ‘architecture without feeling’ to describe
the building. The design was not a problem on
the whole but who was trading in there was.
Some traders felt that the Triangle was ‘Ame-
ricanised’ and full of chains and brands, thus
the building no longer had the ‘looser environ-
ment’ of previous years. The issue of what the
42 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
Triangle had to contribute to Manchester as a
city was high on most traders list of priorities
«Well I think it’s quite tastefully done but I think
that’s all I can say about it. I don’t know whether
it, because before it served a purpose didn’t it?
I think it served a purpose, it was a focal point
for a lot of people admittedly in their own little
group or circle but it was a focal point ». (House
and Garage Import records trader)
7.11 One trader expressed amusement that his
war and military memorabilia unit was now
selling ladies underwear, but on a more serious
note there was also a sense that the Triangle
had little sense of community, little to offer the
visitor and little for the local to be proud of. «I
would have been more proud to visit because it
had that feeling and it was more than anything
Manchester people more or less, all the people
weren’t necessarily from Manchester but it very
much had that community to it and like-minded
appeal because we were all doing markets and
you know more or less had the same kind of
interests and it’s more or less faceless now isn’t
it?» (Skate and Workwear Seller)
7.12 Those occupying retail space in the Triangle
were seen as dramatically different to the for-
mer traders. «Well it’s a different ball game alto-
gether, it’s upmarket, the other was like a mar-
ket stalls on the inside and it’s nothing like that
now, all the big people there you know, big rents
as well» (Second hand record dealer).
7.13 This difference was not only in terms of
access to economic capital, though having ex-
perience of trying to set up a small business in
a city was a key concern. Most traders agreed
that starting a business in Manchester now was
close to impossible. «Not at all no. I mean in that
way you won’t get as many businesses like my-
self where you have an idea but you can’t always
get backing from a bank and you can like test it
you can market research it by actually having
a little stall and seeing if it works. Now you’ll
be committed to like leases you know 2 years
whatever». (Hooded top trader)
7.14 Everyone was agreed that unless Manches-
ter offers small businesses an area with less ex-
pensive rents, that small businesses could not
get started and become bigger businesses and
that this process does take 2 to 3 generations
to occur. One trader had quite vivid yet dis-
tant memories of bygone Manchester when all
 6. The triangle
2003

stores were small and independent, before the

Arndale displaced them just as the bomb led to
the displacement of the Corn Exchange by the
Triangle. He recalled that «going way, way back
before the Arndale was built when you had
Market Street with every little side street with
lots and lots of small businesses, everything
you ever wanted you could find somewhere off
Market Street and then they built the Arndale
and all those little businesses just disappeared,
it just reminded me of that. I mean when I was
a kid my Dad used to bring me up Market Street
and on a Saturday morning round there, there
was anything and everything, you know any-
thing you wants, Saddlers anything you wanted
you could find somewhere off a side street, any-
thing you wanted every conceivable business
just all disappeared with the Arndale and it just
gave the same impression». (Stamp seller)
7.15 The main concern for most traders though
was what the bomb and what followed meant
for the future of Manchester, not only in econo-
mic terms but in terms of the identity of the city
and arguably in turn for those using the city as
a base for the creation of identity via consump-
tion. The following quote speaks for itself:
«It gives the city an identity, I mean the Triangle could
be any shopping centre in any city, anywhere and I
mean yeah, it’s done up nicely and you’ve got to thank
them for that but it doesn’t provide anything in way
of substance to the city in any way shape or form»
(House and Garage import record trader).

43
joint master of architecture
The Historical journal 55, 1 (2012) , pp. 119-143 © Charlotte Widmann Cambridge University Press 2012
URBAN TRANSFORMATIONS IN MAN-
CHESTER & LIVERPOOL 1818-1939
CHARLOTTE WILDMANN
University of Manchester
Liverpool and Manchester have come to typify
twentieth-century urban decay. Writing in 1982,
economic historian Sheila Marriner suggested
that Liverpool was « synonymous with vanda-
lism, with high crime rates, with social depriva-
tion in the form of bad housing, with obsolete
schools, polluted air and a polluted river, with
chronic unemployment, run-down dock systems
and large areas of industrial dereliction »1. Simi-
larly, Manchester’s image « is invariably gloomy
» as « twentieth-century changes have created a
sense that the city and its people have been de-
serted and abandoned ».2 In particular, Liverpool
and Manchester’s demise is strongly associated
with their experiences between the two world
wars. The lasting influence of contemporary left-
wing commentators, especially George Orwell
and Waiter Greenwood3, and autobiographical
writers such as Pat O’Mara and Helen Forrester,4
caused northern England to be stereotyped as a
place of deprivation and poverty in comparison
to the prosperous south.5 Economic historians
have reinforced notions of a geographical divide,
stressing higher unemployment rates in the
north and its inability to recover from the eco-
nomic depression of 1929-316. Both cities’ pasts
are however being reassessed following recent
regeneration and economic growth7 and this
article seeks to develop recent scholarship and
1 Sheila Marriner, The economic and social development of Merseyside (London,
1982), p. 1.
2 Dave Haslam, Manchester, England: the story of a pop cult city (London, 2000),
pp. VIII-IX.
3 George Orwell, The road to Wiganpier (London, 1989); Waiter Greenwood,
Luue on the dole (London, 2004).
4 Pat O’Mara, The autobiography of a Liverpool Irish slummy (London, 1934);
Helen Forrester, Twopence to cross the Mersey (London, 1974).
5 See J. B. Priestley, English joumey: being a rambling but truthful acrount of what
one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a joumey through England
during the autumn of the year 1933 (London, 1977).
6 Derek Aldcroft, The inter-war economy: Britain, I9I9- I939 (London, 1970), pp.
79-94; John Stevenson and Chris Cook, The slump: society and politics during the
Depression (London, 1977), pp. 48- 50.
7 Chris Couch, City of change and challenge: urban planning and regeneration in
Liverpool (Aldershot, 2003); Jamie Peck and Kevin Ward, eds., City of revolution:
restructuring Manchester (Manchester, 2002).
44 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
undermines stereotypical understandings of
interwar Liverpool and Manchester, challenging
perceptions of urban decay.8
Narratives of the decay of northern England’s
in dustrial cities have usually been associated
with accounts of the decline of local govern-
ment Historians have typically viewed 1914 as
a turning point in the dramatic demise of civic
power.9 Robert Morris, for instance, suggests
that the powerful municipal culture of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries relied
on « the integration of local political, econo-
mic and social elites and the local identity and
ownership of capital ». By the 1920s and 1930s
however, « key institutional structures which
had supported all this began to be diminished,
undermined and replaced... The towns were
abandoned by their elite ».10 Yet, Richard Trainor
has drawn attention to J. B. Priestley’s assertion
in 1934 that England was « the country of local
government ».11 By highlighting the involvement
of the middle classes more generally, rather than
the industrial elite, Trainor suggests that « per-
ceptions of decline in the 1920s and 1930s have
been exaggerated ». 12
This article does not deny that there was a
north-south divide in terms of unemployment
and economic growth, but argues that a focus on
poverty and on the relative decline of the power
of local government in comparison to its Victo-
rian heyday has overshadowed the level of dyna-
8 See John Belchem, ed. Liverpool 8oo: culture, character and history (Liverpool,
2006), and Viv Caruana and Colin Simmons, « The promotion and development
of Manchester airport, 1929-1974 the local authority initiative », Local Historian
(2ooo), pp. 165-77.
9 Simon Gunn, The public culture of the Victorian middle class: ritual and autho-
rity and the English industrial city; 1840-1914 (Manchester, 2000), pp. 190-1.
10 R.J. Morris, « Structure, culture and society in British towns », in Martin
Daunton, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Btitain, III ; 1840-I950 (3 vols.,
Cambridge, 2000), III. pp. 417 and 426.
11 Richard Trainor, « The «decline» of British urban governance since 1850: a
reassessment », in Robert J. Morris and Richard H. Trainor, Urban governance:
Britain and beyond since 1750 (Aldershot, 2000), p. 37.
12 Ibid.
mism and innovation shown by local rulers in Li-
verpool and Manchester between the two world
wars. Although interwar local government was
marked by a greater involvement of the middle
class more generally, here attention is drawn to
the enduring contribution and leadership of tit-
led politicians and academic intellectuals. The
article incorporates a broad range of material,
including the history of transport,13 housing,14
planning,15 urban government,16 and civic pride17
with recent cultural histories of the city18 to il-
lustrate the scale and ambition of local govern-
ment in Liverpool and Manchester, triggered
by economic and political instability after the
First World War. The study also develops scho-
larship on the Liverpool School of Architecture
and, in particular, on the contribution made by
the Liverpool-based architect Sir Charles Reilly,
to show Liverpool was at the forefront of deve-
lopments in urban planning and civic design.19
Together, this approach reveals a dynamic urban
culture too often eclipsed in accounts of the «
hungry thirties ».20 The years after 1918 were
turbulent Liverpool, in particular, experienced
a tumultuous transition to peace: despite waves
of racially motivated riots in several port cities
in 1919, including Cardiff and London, which
targeted black seamen and were provoked by
concerns about unemployment and miscegena-
tion, Liverpool saw the worst of the violence and
with murderous results21. In the same year, the
city witnessed the most extensive police strikes
in comparison to the rest of England : more
than half of Liverpool and Birkenhead’s and
three-quarters of the Bootle police forces went
on strike (compared to 10 per cent offorces in
13 Colin Divall and Winstan Bond, eds., Suburbanizing the masses: public trans-
port and urban development in historical perspective (Aldershot, 2003).
14 J. W. R. Whitehand and C. M. H. Carr, Twentieth-century suburbs: a morpholo-
gical approach (London, 2001).
15 Frank Mort, « Fantasies of metropolitan life: planning London in the 1940s »,
Journal of British Studies, 43 (2004), pp. 120-52.
16 John Davis, « The government of London », in Duncan Tanner, Wil Griffith,
Chris Williams and Andrew Edwards, eds., Debating nationhood and governance
in Britain, 1885- I945: perspectives from the « Four nations ». (Manchester, 2006),
pp. 211- 32.
17 Patrick Joyce, The rule of freedom: liberalism and the modern city (London,
2003).
18 Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: perils and pleasures in the sexual metropo-
lis, I9I8- I957 (Bristol, 2005); Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: people, streets and
images in nineteenth-century London (London, 2000).
19 Peter Richmond, Marketing modernismus: the architecture and influence of
Charles Reilly (Liverpool, 2001), and Christopher Crouch, Design culture in Liver-
pool 1880-1914: the origins of the Liverpool School of Architecture (Liverpool,
2001).
20 Ultimately, such an approach adds to the study of English modernity, which
Martin Daunton and Bernhard Rieger suggest should be understood « through
close readings within specific locales and venues ». Martin J. Daunton and Bern-
hard Rieger, « Introduction », in Martin J. Daunton and Bernhard Rieger, eds.,
Meanings of modernity: Britain from the late Victorian era to World War II (Ox-
ford, 2001), p. 3.
21 The fatality was a young black sailor, Charles Whootton, who jumped or was
pushed into the docks as the crowd shouted « Let him drown! ». Michael Rowe, «
Sex, «race» and riot in Liverpool, 1919 », Immigrants and Minorities, 19 (2000),
pp. 53-70, at p. 55.
London), provoking considerable unrest and
looting22. Meanwhile, the advent of mass demo-
cracy prompted considerable debates about the
nature of the electorate.23 Although the impact
of mass suffrage on national politics has attrac-
ted scholarly attention, especially regarding the
implications for political marketing,24 the impact
on local politics remains notably under-resear-
ched.25 Thus, this article draws attention to the
way investment in urban redevelopment was
extensively marketed to local citizens in Liver-
pool and Manchester in the form of publicity
material and civic celebrations.26 Their strategy
reflected the desire of municipal leaders in both
cities to involve inhabitants in local government,
appealing to the classless (and, to some extent,
genderless) citizen. As case studies, Liverpool
and Manchester show that, as a result of econo-
mic and political turbulence, local government
moved towards a more demotic and inclusive
civic culture. Policies focused on large-scale and
grandiose projects, such as the Mersey Tunnel
and Wythenshawe municipal housing estate,
that boosted both employment opportunities
and the morale of the local population. The sym-
bolic impact of these schemes - including those
that remained incomplete by 1939, such as hou-
sing reform - was profound.
I
National levels of unemployment peaked in
1932, when 22.7 per cent of the workforce was
out of work.27 Regional rates varied, from 8 per
cent in London and the south-east to 22 per cent
in Wales and northern England.28 In Liverpool,
unemployment rates hit 33 per cent in 1932.29
Dudley Baines has stressed Merseyside’s ina-
bility to diversify its economy after 1929 as its
22 Ron Bean, « Police unrest, unionization and the 1919 strike in Liverpool »,
Journal of Contemporary History, 15 (1980), pp. 633- 53.
23 Duncan Tanner, « Electing the governors - the governance of the elect », in
Keith Robbins, ed., The British Isles, 1901-11 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 43-71.
24 Laura Beers, « Education or manipulation? Labour, democracy and the popu-
lar press in inter-war Britain », Journal of British Studies, 48 (2009), pp. 129-52;
David Jarvis, « Mrs Maggs and Betty: the Conservative appeal to women voters in
the 1920s », Twentieth Century British History, 5 (1994), pp. 129-52; T.J. Hollins,
« The Conservative party and film propaganda between the wars », English Histo-
rical Review, 96 (1981), pp. 359-69.
25 There is some work on urban governance that includes the interwar period,
but this does not directly address the issue of mass suffrage. See Morris, « Struc-
ture, culture and society in British towns ».
26 Liverpool hosted Civic Week exhibitions annually, 1924-28. Manchester
hosted a Civic Week in 1926 and more extensive celebrations in 1938, the cente-
nary anniversary of the city’s incorporation.
27 Aldcroft, Inter-war, p. 41.
28 Tim Hatton, « Unemployment and the labour market in inter-war Britain », in
Roderick Floud and Deirdre McCloskey, eds, The economic history of Britain since
1700 (3 vols., Cambridge, 1994), II, pp. 359-85.
29 Sam Davies, Pete Gill, Linda Grant, Martin Nightingale, Ron Noon and Andy
Shallice, Genuinely seeking work: mass unemployment on Merseyside in the 1910s
(Birkenhead, 1992), p. 13.
45
joint master of architecture
port lost an annual average of 1 per cent of trade
per annum to other British ports between 1919
and 1939.30 The greatest problem was, however,
the erratic nature of trade, rather than straight-
forward decline: for example, the percentage of
Britain’s raw rubber imports handled by Liver-
pool fluctuated between 5 per cent and 35 per
cent over this period.31 Liverpool was never offi-
cially designated a depressed area and suffered
less than other northern towns and cities32 and
its interwar economy was therefore characte-
rized by instability, rather than simple decline,
which shaped how urban redevelopment was
marketed to inhabitants.
Lancashire’s famous cotton industry collapsed
irrecoverably during the 1920s and, by 1939,
cloth exports amounted to only one fifth of their
1913 levels.33 Mill towns throughout the re-
gion were severely affected, such as Blackburn,
where the cotton industry had accounted for 6o
per cent of employment but had an unemploy-
ment rate of 46.8 per cent in 1931.34 By contrast,
the city of Manchester was better equipped to
cope with the cotton industry’s collapse and
overall levels of unemployment never reached
the national rate.35 It was also a period of stri-
king innovation and commercial diversification.
Manchester’s Ship Canal (completed in 1894)
became particularly important in developing
and diversifying trade between the wars. Traf-
ford Park attracted significant investment and
was home to over 200 American firms by 1933,
whilst a municipal airport opened in 1929.36 The
economic context explains why Manchester’s
urban transformation was presented in a way
that highlighted its diverse economy and por-
trayed a break from the city’s Victorian image of
‘Cottonopolis’.
Alongside economic turmoil, the decades fol-
lowing the First World War were characterized
by political change with the advent of mass suf-
frage. The Conservatives remained the majority
party in municipal elections in both Liverpool
and Manchester throughout the interwar period,
but lost some seats following a rise in support
30 Dudley Baines, « Merseyside in the British economy: the 1930s and the Se-
cond World War », in Richard Lawton and Catherine M. Cunningham, eds., Mer-
seyside: social and economic studies (London, 1970), p. 6o.
31 Marriner, Merseyside, pp. 98-9.
32 Marriner suggests Liverpool maintained its relative position as a port in the
UK. Ibid., p. 99.
33 Alan Kidd, Manchester (Edinburgh, 2002), p. 187.
34 Aldcroft, Inter-war, p. 95.
35 Kidd, Manchester, p. 219.
36 Ibid., pp. 188.
46 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
for Labour,37 largely mirroring national trends38.
The dramatic decline of the Liberal party at a
national level was not reflected in Liverpool and
Manchester, suggesting stronger continuities in
support at a municipal level39. Both cities had si-
gnificant Catholic populations, but religion was
more politicized in Liverpool, as shown by histo-
rians such as Phillip Wailer and John Belchem40.
Nevertheless, the commonalities between both
cities should also be stressed and the approach
to citizens was notably similar, despite Liverpo-
ol’s stronger sectarian influence.
Liverpool’s and Manchester’s urban transforma-
tion and the way redevelopment was marketed
to local inhabitants can be seen as part of a broa-
der scheme by the Conservative party to engage
with the new mass electorate. Municipal publi-
cations were released regularly in both cities,41
and were central to the way local government
publicized and marketed urban redevelopment
The link between urban planning and promo-
ting citizenship in the age of mass suffrage is no-
teworthy: in 1925, Manchester’s Town Planning
Special Committee was instructed to prepare a
general survey of the city’s needs because « the
publication of a survey as suggested should do
much to assist the municipal government and
the Citizens in general to visualise living and
other conditions within the city and to create a
greater sense of citizenship ».42 The approach of
both corporations reveals similarities to marke-
ting tactics adopted by the national Conserva-
tive party, as studied by Ross McKibbin, David
Jarvis, and Jon Lawrence, in response to anxie-
ties about mass suffrage in the early 1920s.43
Alongside the influence of the Conservative
party, Manchester’s key figure was Lord Earnest
37 In the early 1920s, around go council members in Liverpool were Conser-
vatives, 25 each of Liberals and Independents, and around 6 members of the
Labour party. In 1936, there were 78 Conservatives, 14 Liberals, 7 Independents,
12 Protestants, and 53 Labour. In Manchester, the gap between the number of
Conservative and Labour council members also narrowed: in 1936, there were
62 Conservatives, 25 Liberals, 3 Independents, and 52 Labour.
38 For an overview of these developments in national politics see John Davis, A
history of Britain, 1885-1939 (Basingstoke, 1999).
39 The Liberal party never seriously challenged the Conservatives in interwar
municipal elections, but consistently held around 15 seats in Liverpool and 25
seats in Manchester throughout the period.
40 P.J. Wailer, Democracy and sectarianism: a political and social history of Li-
verpool, 1868-1939 (Liverpool, 1981), p. 325; John Belchem, Irish, Catholic and
Scouse: the history of the Liverpool Irish, 1800-1939 (Liverpool, 2007), p. 297.
41 In Manchester, they included the Manchester Guardian’s Commercial year-
book published from 1921, which also aimed to ensure that citizens « become
more familiar with the progress which the city is making », Manchester Guardian,
Commercial yearbook 1921 (Manchester, 1921), p. 1. In Liverpool, the corpora-
tion published the City of Liverpool official handbook from 1924.
42 Town Planning Special Committee, 7 Oct. 1925, Manchester Central Library
Local Studies Collection (MCL LSC).
43 Ross McKibbin, The ideologies of class: social relations in Britain, 1880-1950
(Oxford, 1990); Jon Lawrence, « The transformation of British public politics
after the First World War », Past and Present, 190 (2006), pp. 185-216; David
Jarvis, « British Conservatism and class politics in the 1920s », English Historical
Review, 111 (1996), pp. 59-84.
Simon who donated land at Wythenshawe to the
city of Manchester.44 An ardent socialist, Simon
was politically active at both a national and local
level and was particularly interested in impro-
ving housing for the working classes. Simon
also campaigned for a more comprehensive
approach to town planning with greater state in-
volvement and advocated the municipalization
of urban land.45 Alderman Sir Percy Woodhouse
was also central in establishing a Civic Commit-
tee in Manchester in 1930 to ‘take advantage
of any and every opportunity arising to retain
existing industries in Manchester and to seek
the introduction of new industries’.46 Manches-
ter was notable for appointing a city architect,
Henry Price, in 1902, who retired in 1932 and
was replaced by George Noel Hill, charged with
overseeing all municipal building projects and
advising on planning and civic design.
Sir Charles Reilly, architectural expert and Eme-
ritus Professor at the University of Liverpool,
was instrumental in driving redevelopment in
Liverpool and, to a certain degree, also in Man-
chester.47 Reilly’s own architectural work was
limited and, impressed with what he witnessed
in East Coast America just before the First World
War, he became devoted to promoting the role
of architecture in British society and, on his
return, Reilly became a prolific journalist.48
Reilly’s architectural critiques of Liverpool and
Manchester, published in the early 1920s, can be
seen as landmarks in the emergence of a grea-
ter interest in planning and urban redevelop-
ment in both cities.49 Reilly was highly effective
in developing the professionalization of town
planning through the University of Liverpool’s
School of Architecture, which established the
Town Planning Review, and he convinced Lord
Lever to finance the first-ever professorship in
planning in 1912. Reilly’s friend, Patrick Aber-
crombie, holder of the chair from 1915 to 1935,
was also important in developing the discipline
44 Lord Simon was the Liberal MP for Withington, 1923-24, and again, 1929-31,
and parliamentary secretary for the Ministry of Health in 1931. Simon was also a
member of Manchester City Council, 1911-25 and chairman of the Housing Com-
mittee, 1919-23. He became lord mayor of Manchester in 1921 and chairman of
Manchester University Council, 1941-57.
45 E. D. Simon, as quoted, Manchester Guardian (MG), 4 Sept. 1937.
46 27 Jan. 1930. Manchester Council Meetings, vol. 2, p. 212.
47 See Joseph Sharples, Alan Powers, and Michael Shippobottom, Charles Reilly
and the Liverpool School of Architecture, 1904- I933 (Liverpool, 1996).
48 In 1910, he wrote: ‘This interest by the general public is very striking. New
buildings are objects of intense public curiosity; the daily papers not only illus-
trate them profusely, but gave the careers of their designers, treating them as
public benefactors, or the reverse, with highly salutary frankness.’ As quoted,
Richmond, Marketing modernisms, pp. 38-39.
49 Charles Reilly, Some Liverpool streets and buildings in 1921 (Liverpool, 1921),
and idem, Some Manchester streets attd buildings (Liverpool, 1924).
and together they pursued a holistic approach to
regional planning.50 John Brodie, city engineer
from 1898, provided a direct link between the
corporation and the university, after a special
lectureship was created for him in engineering.
Brodie’s achievements were striking: he was one
of the first to suggest an electric tram system
for Liverpool, designed the Mersey Tunnel, put
forward the scheme for building the East Lan-
cashire Road, led experimental use of pre-fabri-
cated housing, assisted in the planning of New
Delhi, and, his proudest achievement, invented
the nets used in football matches.51
Within the Conservative party in Liverpool, the
role of Sir Archibald Salvidge (chairman from
1892 to 1928) was fundamental in shaping the
party’s approach to local politics. ‘King of Liver-
pool’, Salvidge fashioned a deliberate ‘Tory de-
mocrat’ image for the Conservatives in reaction
to Labour’s first parliamentary seat in Liverpool
in 1923.52 Salvidge remained concerned about
the rise of Labour and the implications of uni-
versal suffrage on local politics. Following the
municipal elections in May 1926, Salvidge la-
mented the loss of three key districts and ‘urged
councillors, in their own interests, to give more
time and attention to the affairs of the respec-
tive Wards to meet the ceaseless propaganda of
their opponents’.53 Yet such concerns were not
limited to the Conservative party. In the preface
to Simon’s 1926 publication, A city council from
within, for example, the political psychologist
and educationalist, Graham Wallas, explained
that the book was aimed at younger members
of the Labour party and warned that the ‘inevi-
table transference of power from the middle to
the working classes in our English cities might
be so directed as to be disastrous in some cases
to administrative efficiency’.54 Salvidge and Wal-
las thus exposed the tensions and anxieties both
between and within the Labour and Conserva-
tive parties on a local level over the issue of mass
suffrage.
The corporations were able to finance their
50 Abercrombie championed a threefold approach to planning: urban impro-
vement, external growth of towns, and country planning. Patrick Abercrombie,
‘Clearance and planning: the re-modelling of towns and their external growth’,
Town Planning Review, 16 (1935), p. 196.
51 Brodie’s work has largely gone under-acknowledged and there is no entry
for him in the Dictionary of National Biography, for instance. ‘Obituary: John
Alexander Brodie’, Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers,
240 (1935), pp. 787-9.
52 Waller, Democracy, pp. 290-7.
53 Liverpool Conservative Party Conference Minutes, 3 May 1926, Liverpool
Local Studies Collection (LCL LSC).
54 Graham Wallas, preface, E. D. Simon, A city counci1 from within (London,
1926), p. XVI.
47
joint master of architecture
ambitious programmes of urban transforma-
tion and accompanying propaganda campaigns
because their rateable incomes and loans from
central government increased (above inflation)
between the two world wars, as did profits from
public transport and amenities such as electri-
city and gas. Liverpool Corporation had a total
income of £5,366,155 in 1924 (£2,753,508 from
rates), rising to £9,400,589 by 1935 (£4,367,220
from rates).55 Manchester Corporation’s income
also rose substantially, from £4,947,920 in 1924
(£2,872,912 from rates), to £8,62 1,477 in 1935
(£4,623,80 1 from rates),56 partly because rates
nearly doubled between 1915 and 1922.57 Both
corporations invested heavily in their respec-
tive cities. For example, Manchester Corpora-
tion consistently invested far more money in
libraries and art galleries (£126,864 in 1935),
than on maternity and child welfare (£83,732 in
1935). There were also revealing distinctions in
how each corporation spent their income. Man-
chester Corporation spent significantly more
money on streets: £450,528 in 1926, compa-
red to Liverpool’s expenditure of £229,027. By
contrast, Liverpool’s civic leaders invested more
in policing, perhaps by way of response to the
1919 police strike, and in 1927, Liverpool Cor-
poration spent £799,562 on policing, in compa-
rison to Manchester’s £484745.58
II
Housing was a national priority after the First
World War ended and significant steps were
taken to demolish inadequate dwellings and to
construct statesubsidized replacements.59 As Li-
verpool and Manchester were home to some of
the poorest housing in the country in 1918, it is
unsurprising that both corporations embraced
housing reform.60 In Liverpool, much of the work
was undertaken by Sir Lancelot Keay, City archi-
tect and director of housing from 1925 until
55 £5,366,155 would have been worth £5,801,349 in 1935, based on a calcula-
tion using the GDP. Lawrence H. Officer, ‘Five ways to compute the relative value
of a UK pound amount, 1830-2005’, MesuringWorth.Com, 2006. www.measurin-
gworth.com calculator (accessed 27 Feb. 2011).
56 £4,947,920 was worth £5,349,195 in 1935, using the GDP. Ibid.
57 Rates were 8s 8d, 1910-15, and 15s by 1921-22. Arthur Redford, The history
of local gouvernment in Manchester, III : The lost half century (London, 1940),
p. 359.
58 Statistics collated from the Annual Local Taxation Returns published by the
Ministry of Health, 1925-35 editions used.
59 Madeline McKenna, ‘The suburbanisation of the working-class population of
Liverpool between the wars’, Social History, 16 (1991), pp. 173-90.
60 See Colin G. Pooley and Sandra Irish, ‘Housing and health in Liverpool, 1870-
1940’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 143 (1994),
pp. 193- 219, and John Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester: an architectural history
(Manchester, 2000), pp. 39-45.
48 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
1948. 140,000 people (15% of its population)
were re-housed by the corporation between
the wars, in 33,355 purpose-built suburban
houses.61 In 1934, the Social Survey of Mersey-
side reported that 96% of corporation houses
built after 1919 were in the suburbs.62
Progress made in housing reform was striking,
yet incomplete: in July 1928, the Housing Com-
mittee abandoned a plan to clear congested
areas near the city centre in favour of supplying
cheap houses nearby to relieve the acute shor-
tage of affordable accommodation.63 Scotland
Road, the area between the port area and the
city centre, was home to a large Irish-Catholic
population and epitomized ‘squalid Liverpool’
to late Victorian health reformers.64 It remai-
ned a site of great poverty and unemployment
intetwar and was not subject to major clearance
until the 1950s. The alienation felt by those
who were rehoused to the suburbs due to the
lack of community and social amemues is well
documented.65 Although Liverpool Corporation
included the provision of shops, such businesses
struggled financially and newly emerging chain
stores such as Woolworths were denied per-
mission to open in the new estates. 66 Although
this process of housing reform was varied in
Liverpool, municipal leaders publicized their
progress to encourage confidence in the city’s
economy. ‘Nowhere has the appalling post-war
problem of house shortage been more bra-
vely and successfully tackled’, announced Lord
Mayor Thomas Dowd in 1924. It would have
been impossible for the city to undertake works
of such magnitude as this if its financial stability
were not impregnable. But happily, Liverpool’s
financial credit is high - so high, indeed, that on
more than one occasion it has been able to bor-
row money in the open market more cheaply
than the Imperial Government itself.67 These
61 Mc Kenna, ‘Suburbanisation’, p.173.
62 David CaradogJones, ed., The social survey of Merseyside (3 vols., London,
1934), 1, p. 262.
63 Liverpool Housing Committee (LHC) minutes, 19 July 1928, 352 MIN/HOU
1/10, LCL LSC.
64 Scotland Road was described as ‘inhabited by the very lowest and worst
population in the whole city. Disorder is perpetual, and disease is never absent’.
As quoted in Belchem, Irish, p.63.
65 Madeline McKenna, ‘Municipal suburbia in Liverpool, 1919-1939’, Town
Planning Review, 6o (1989), pp. 298-9.
66 In 1934, a large number of shopkeepers in the Walton, Norris Green, and Do-
vecot Estates applied fora reduction in rent because ofaffordability. LHC minutes,
13 Sept. 1934, 352 MIN/HOU 1/10, LCL LSC. McKenna suggests some suburban
dwellers preferred to return to town for their shopping. McKenna, ‘Municipal
suburbia’, p. 310. In 1935, the Housing Committee rejected Woolworth’s second
application to open in Norris Green due to restrictions on the kinds of trades
shops could have; however, they accepted that some tenants believed it would
bring more customers to the area. LHC minutes, 11 Feb. 1935, 352 MIN/HOU
1/to, LCL LSC.
67 Liverpool promotional map, Civic week, 18-25 sept. 1924, LCL LSC.
sentiments were repeated in 1931, when Lord
Mayor Edwin Thompson also turned to the
changing urban environment to express opti-
mism in the city’s commercial future. ‘Evidence
of this faith in the future meets us at every hand
on both sides of the river’, he declared, ‘it is to be
read in ... the vast development of our suburbs;
in the contemplated attacks on our slum areas;
in our new arterial roads and town and regional
planning schemes’.68 Municipal leaders acknow-
ledged that Liverpool’s programme of housing
reform wasincomplete, but claimed it was ‘pro-
gressing step by step, thanks to enlightened civic
management and courageous private enterprise
... Liverpool, believing in its own future, is equip-
ping itself for the good times ahead, and at the
same time lengthening her lead over all rivals,
both as a city and as a port’.69 There was thus a
clear attempt to promote the city’s progress wit-
hin a broader narrative of optimism concerning
the city’s economy.
In Manchester, 21,859 new suburban council
houses were built by 1933.70 Manchester’s
famous Wythenshawe Estate provided subur-
ban homes specifically for the working classes:
71
40,000 inhabitants occupied 8,145 homes in
Wythenshawe by 1939, which was nearly hal-
fway towards the corporation’s goal of 100,000
people.72 Simon claimed that there were no cel-
lar dwellings remaining in Manchester by 1938
and whereas there had been 10,000 back-toback
68 Edwin Thompson, ‘Merseyside and its industrial potentialities’, Liverpool
Post and Mercury (LPM) , 1 June 1931, p. 1.
69 William Morrison, ‘Liverpool’s architectural development’, LPM, 1 June 1931,
p. 23.
70 Manchester Corporation, How Manchester is managed: a record of munici-
pal activities (Manchester, 1933), pp. 138, 140-1. This number excludes those
in areas beyond the corporation’s jurisdiction including Sale and Stockport; and
Manchester Corporation’s boundary was extended in 1926 to include Wythens-
hawe, and again in 1931 to include Northenden and Baguley.
71 Financial burden was expressed by a significant proportion of a survey un-
dertaken of 304 families living in housing estates in Manchester by the Manches-
ter Evening News (MEN) in 1935. MEN, 16 Nov. 1935, MCL LSC cuttings: box 421:
Architecture: housing, planning, Manchester Corporation.
72 Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester, p. 158.
Fig. 1. ‘Houses
houses prior to 1918, there were, by then, less - Old and
than 40: ‘Really bad slums, which are still com- New’. Source:
mon in other cities, do not exist in Manchester.’73 Manchester
City Council,
For Brian Rodgers, historian of urban planning
Centenary
and design, Manchester Corporation’s interwar celebration of
investment in housing represented ‘the last Manchester’s
incorporation,
grand gesture of that supreme self-confidence
May 2-7 1938
that was bred in Victorian Manchester’.74 Yet (Manchester,
municipal publicity material presented the new 1938), p. 84.
suburbs as symbols of a clear break with the
city’s Victorian past A brochure, published in
1938 to celebrate the corporation’s centenary
anniversary, encouraged citizens to recognize
the improvement in the city’s housing stock.
During the Victorian years, slums were crowded,
and street after street of cheap little houses was
rushed up, often without foundations, and vvith
walls half a brick in thickness, crowded together
to make the builder’s profit out of a piece of land
as high as possible ... we are now in the city of
today, as clean and as healthy as the town we
have just described was dirty and horrifying.75
Figure 1 shows how the corporation directly
contrasted housing from the midnineteenth cen-
tury and the 1930s. Indeed, corporation publi-
city material consistently presented a negative
image of Victorian Manchester, particularly fol-
73 MG, 16 may 1938, p. 15.
74 Brian Rodgers, ‘Manchester: metropolitan planning by collaboration and
consent; or civic hope frustrated’, George Gordon, ed., Regional cities in the UK,
1890-1980, (London, 1986), p. 44.
75 William Barker, ed., Your city: Manchester, 1838-1938 (Manchester, 1938), pp.
8 and 16.
49
joint master of architecture
Fig. 2. ‘A vision lowing the collapse of the cotton industry.76 The
of the future Manchester City News also compared the Vic-
of Kingsway’. torian slmns with the new suburbs in an article
Source: Li- entitled ‘Hulme Vs Wilbraham Estate’. ‘Instead
verpolitan, Jan. of dreary, depressing long rows of houses ope-
1935, p. 15. ning onto the street front ... and backing onto
narrow, dirty passages’, the article claimed, ‘we
have ... houses into which the sunlight can pene-
trate ... with good gardens and plenty of space.’77
Manchester’s inhabitants were encouraged to
see the new suburbs as a symbol of change and
were presented as a tangible example of the
city’s broader development. Representations of
housing reform in Manchester masked a darker
reality, however. In 1930, the pressure on hou-
sing was acute and Manchester Corporation
decided to delay the clearance of Hulme until re-
housing was available to its inhabitants.78 There
were 10,000 people waiting for corporation hou-
sing in 193179 and a report in 1932 found 30,000
houses in Manchester needed clearing. Since
that was impossible, the report recommended
that a target of 15,000 by 1938 was more realis-
tic.80 Under pressure, Manchester Corporation
modified its plans for housing reform. In 1932,
a report for the corporation on the Hulme Qea-
rance Area was undertaken by the Manchester,
Salford, and Counties Property Owner’s Associa-
76 For further examples, see also, Manchester Corporation, How Manchester
is managed: a reward of municipal activities (Manchester, 1935), p. 7· Progress
from the Victorian era was also the key theme to the 1938 centenary celebrations
of the city’s incorporation; see Manchester City Council, Centenary celebration of
Manchester’s incorporation, May 2-7 1938 (Manchester, 1938).
77 ‘Hulme Vs Wilbraham Estate’, Manchester City News, 26 Oct. 1933, MCL LSC
cuttings: box 421.
78 Manchester Corporation Housing Committee minutes, 1930-1 , p. 481, MCL
LSC.
79 ‘The housing problem in Manchester: facts and figures, 1931’, Report for
Manchester and Salford Housing Week, 18-25 Oct, 1931, M383/8 2/5, MCL LSC.
80 Manchester Corporation minutes, 1932-33, vol. 2, p. 652, MCL LSC.
50 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
tion, which claimed there were no back-to-back
houses in Hulme, that each had a private yard, all
but nine had water carrier systems, and at 4-43
persons per house ‘cannot be taken as serious
overcrowding’.81 The report suggested that the
Wythenshawe Estate was an impractical alter-
native location for Hulme residents because of
travelling expenses and that 75 per cent had
already refused to move to the Platt Lane Estate,
which was much closer. Qearing the area, re-
commended the report, would merely increase
overcrowding in the surrounding areas.82 In
response, the architect’s report suggested that a
better alternative was the destruction of half the
houses in Hulme, whilst its plans show that the
aim was to create as many open spaces as pos-
sible, by reducing density to twenty-five houses
an acre with a focus on reconditioning surviving
houses.83 Corporation propaganda was careful
to ensure that older types of housing that did
survive, such as that in Hulme, were oversha-
dowed by the grandiosity of the Wythenshawe
Estate, which was a striking and ambitious pro-
ject, but did not represent the reality of all hou-
sing in Manchester by the mid-1930s.
III
Impressive transport networks were established
in both cities. By as early as 1924, trams in Liver-
pool covered Allerton, Woolton, and Walton on
the city outskirts and, during the morning and
evening peak hours, 300 cars entered and left
the Pierhead.84 By 1939, Liverpool Corporation
claimed that its public transport system carried
282,045,776 passengers and covered 2462o,o64
miles each year.85 Public transport expansion en-
sured that large numbers of people congregated
in two key areas of the city, notably the Pierhead
and St George’s Hall. The Pierhead became the
‘the transport hub of the city’ and ‘a bustling
interchange between ships and trains, ferries
and trams’.86 From there, the ‘majority of routes
radiate in fanlike formation’ and an estimated
81 Manchester, Salford, and Counties Property Owner’s Association, ‘The Hulme
clearance area. Memorandum on the treatment of the area, 1932’, MCL LSC.
82 Ibid.
83 Architect’s report on the City of Manchester Hulme clearance area, 1932,
MCL LSC.
84 Liverpool Corporation, City of Liverpool official handbook 1924 (Liverpool,
1924), p. 25.
85 Liverpool Corporation, City of Liverpool official handbook 1939 (Liverpool,
1939), p. 95.
86 Peter de Figueiredo, ‘Symbols of empire: the buildings of the Liverpool wa-
terfront’, Architectural History, 46 (2003), p. 249.
4000 trams visited the Pierhead each day. 87
The enhanced role of St George’s Hall as a tram
terminal in the 1930s cemented its position as
Liverpool’s civic centre. As Figure 2 shows, the
expansion of Liverpool’s public transport sha-
ped representations of St George’s Hall, which
had become the main terminus by 1935. The
picture depicts how planners understood the
impact of the Mersey Tunnel (completed in
1934) as they envisioned St George’s Hall to be
the centre of all forms of transport. By presen-
ting an image of a coherent and ordered trans-
port system around Liverpool’s grandest and
most impressive building, a sense of grandeur
is evoked. Liverpool’s other impressive Victo-
rian buildings are featured alongside St George’s
Hall, including the Walker Art Gallery and Lime
Street Station. Planners in Liverpool appropria-
ted symbols of Victorian civic pride to nurture a
sense of continuity. The foundation stone of St
George’s Hall was laid to commemorate Queen
Victoria’s coronation, although the building was
not actually completed until 1854.88 The site
was specifically chosen because it was situated
above the city and adjoined Lime Street Station
(built in 1836 and rebuilt in 1850 and 1871) and
expressed ‘the pride and confidence of the thri-
ving town’.89 By placing St George’s Hall at the
centre of the city’s public transport network, at-
tention was drawn to Liverpool’s strong history
of commercial success, to inspire confidence in
its future.
The Mersey Tunnel, connecting Liverpool and
Birkenhead, was championed by Salvidge as
a strategy to deal with unemployment pro-
blems and to improve infrastructure. Salvidge
was awarded the Freedom of Liverpool for his
success in obtaining 50% funding from central
government with the passing of the Mersey Tun-
nel Act in 1925.90 Designed by Brodie, the tunnel
was inspired by the Holland Tunnel, connecting
New Jersey and Manhattan under the Hudson
River, which had been begun in 1920 and com-
pleted seven years later.91 The Mersey Tunnel
was formally opened by King George IV on 18
87 Liverpool Corporation, Liverpool, 1924, p. 61.
88 For a detailed account of the design and aesthetic style of St George’s Hall,
see Frank Salmon and Peter De Figueiredo, ‘The south front of St George’s Hall,
Liverpool’, Architectural History, 43 (2000), pp. 195-218.
89 Sharples, Powers and Shippobottom, Liverpool p. 50.
90 Stanley Salvidge, Salvidge of Liverpool: behind the political scene, 1890-1928
(London, 1934), p. 283. The Tunnel cost 26 per cent more than original esti-
mates allowed and a further £ 1,369,044 had to be borrowed from the Ministry
of Health. Thomas White, Memorrandum of the chairmam of the Mersey Tunnel
Joint Committee on the present financial position (Liverpool, 1932).
91 Ibid.
july 1934 and during the ceremony, ‘Liverpool
looked to history to seek confidence in its fu-
ture’, which reflected a broader celebration of
the city’s past in municipal publicity material.92
The chairman of the Mersey Tunnel Commit-
tee described the Tunnel as ‘a mighty piece of
engineering, the tunnel will rank as one of the
wonders of the world, as well as a monument
to the civic enterprise of the city of Liverpool
and the borough of Birkenhead’.93 In a similar
fashion to the corporation’s investment in hou-
sing, the Tunnel was presented in the local press
as a symbol of confidence in the city’s economy:
‘What, indeed, is the great new Merseyside Road
Tunnel but an act of faith unmatched probably
in all of Europe?’ asked the lord mayor in 1931.94
Investment in public transport was also impor-
tant to Manchester’s redevelopment. Manches-
ter’s buses carried 6.9 million passengers in
1925, increasing to 20.2 million in 1929, and by
1938, at least one tram passed through the main
shopping street in the city centre, Market Street,
every twenty-four seconds.95 Again, there was a
link between improving transport and allevia-
ting unemployment in the area: in 1929, a Re-
port of Works for the Unemployed Special Com-
mittee proposed a comprehensive programme
of road works in Manchester over a period of
five years, with 6o per cent of the cost expected
from central government.96 Municipal publicity
material consistently presented developments
in Manchester’s public transport as a symbol of
the city’s progress. Manchester’s Commercial
Yearbook of 1925 declared ‘transport is vital to
a modem city’ and offered statistics to ‘enable
every citizen to study our great municipal enter-
prise’.97 Public transport was one of the main
attractions in Manchester’s Civic Week of 1926,
when the Electricity and Tram Departments col-
laborated to produce ‘a very brilliant spectacle’:
a tram covered in electric light, with ‘3,000
lamps of 30 watts each, which will require near-
ly 13 electrical horsepower to light The whole
car is to flame, not with a steady illumination,
but with a ripple which should get the best out
of the red, white and green.’ One side spelt ‘1901
Still the Best’and the other, ‘1926 Stood the Test’,
92 John Belchem, ‘Celebrating Liverpool’, in Belchem, ed., Liverpool p. 36.
93 LPM, 1 June 1931, p. 7.
94 Ibid, p. 1.
95 Ian Yearsley and Philip Graves, The Manchester tramways (Glossop, 1988),
pp. 98 and 108.
96 Manchester Council Records, 1928-9, 15 Aug. 1929, p. 547, MCL LSC.
97 Manchester Guardian, Commercial yearbook 1925 (Manchester, 1925), p. 19.
51
joint master of architecture
Fig. 3. The new
Central Library.
Easily reached
by tram or bus’,
1934. Source:
Manchester
Central Library
1934.
in lights to emphasize a sense of progression.98
In the 1930s, municipal publicity material conti-
nued to stress progress made in the city’s public
transport in comparison to the Victorian years.
In 1935, the corporation asked its citizens to
contrast the ‘early motor buses’, which ‘were a
somewhat doubtful proposition from the point
of view of reliability and were anything but quiet
and smooth’, with Manchester’s newer system of
operating ‘motor buses parallel with and sup-
plementary to the tramway services, each type
of vehicle functioning to the best of its ability’.99
The article further claimed that ‘Manchester has
always been a pioneer in transport’.100 Public
transport was also an important aspect of the
centenary celebrations of Manchester’s incor-
poration in 1938 and the Manchester Guardian’s
article, ‘From horse bus to motor bus’, contrasted
Manchester’s first omnibus of 1824, ‘a relatively
exclusive conveyance’ and ‘narrow and cram-
ped’ with the sophisticated and comfortable
public transport available in 1938.101
IV
Whereas representations of public transport
expansion in Liverpool drew greater attention
to the city’s existing architecture, investment in
public transport changed Manchester’s urban
environment and defined a clearer ‘Civic Centre’.
98 MG, 21 Sept. 1926, MCL LSC: Civic Week, 1926.
99 Manchester Corporation Transport Department, A hundred years of road
passenger transport in Manchester (Manchester, 1935), p.25-26.
100 Ibid, p. 31.
101 MG, 16 May 1938, p. 25.
52 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
The tram system terminated in Piccadilly and
many ran past the rear of the Victorian Town
Hall (completed 1877). ‘The routes extend from
the districts beyond the City on all sides and pass
through the centre of the City, thus affording the
opportunity of transferring from one route to
another’, described one public transport hand-
book in 1928.102 The area behind the Victorian
Town Hall (St Peter’s Square) became the focus
of civic culture with the building of Manches-
ter Central Library (1934) and the Town Hall
Extension (1938). The impact of public trans-
port expansion was fundamental to this shift.
Indeed, Figure 3 suggests municipal investment
in the Library and public transport went hand
in hand.103
The area where the new library and Town Hall
Extension were built was the focus of a new
interest in planning and development from the
early 1920s. In 1924, the area, then known as
Jackson’s Row’ and covering 1,618 square yards,
was described as the ‘heart of the city’ and ‘an
exceptional site’. A report commissioned by the
corporation suggested that the area should not
be left vacant but warned against piecemeal allo-
cation and recommended that a representative
‘should be appointed and charged with the duty
of immediately preparing comprehensive sche-
102 Manchester Corporation Transport Department, General statistical informa-
tion and descriptions of depots (Manchester, 1928), p. 11.
103 The poster also depicts the Manchester Cenotaph, designed by Edwin Lu-
tyens, which was opposite the front of Central Library. Terry Wyke charts the
controversy around the memorial as there were many disagreements about its
location and form: ‘some reacted to its modernity’. It eventually found popula-
rity after its completion in 1924, perhaps partly as a result of the corporation’s
investment in transforming the area into the city’s Civic Centre. Terry J. Wyke,
Public sculpture of Greater Manchester (Liverpool, 2004), pp. 130-1.
mes for the u tilisation en bloc of these extensive
and important sites’.104 Led by Reilly, criticisms
of Manchester’s city centre were particularly
common from the early 1920s and focused on
the lack of comprehensive planning and disap-
pointing architecture.’105 The new approach to
the city centre was also influenced by America:
the town clerk’s report from a regional plan-
ning conference held in New York City in 1925
reveals that the redevelopment of Manchester
was to ‘be properly regulated in conformity with
a pre-determined plan of development’, in res-
ponse to broader American trends.106
In 1925, the Town Hall Committee - originally
set up to oversee the care of all monuments and
statues owned by the corporation - decided that
a new library was in ‘urgent need’, alongside an
extension to the Town Hall.107 By 1931, however,
the committee (now called Town Hall Exten-
sion Committee) reported that the Unemployed
Grants Committee no longer considered grants
towards town hall schemes and the plans for
Jackson Row were postponed for two years.108
Manchester Central Library was finally comple-
ted and opened by George V on 17 July 1934.
Costing almost £6oo,ooo, the library accommo-
dated one million volumes and seated over 300
readers in the Great Hall, which made it second
in size only to the British Library’s reading
room.109 Manchester Corporation presented the
library within a rhetoric of populist civic culture:
in 1938, municipal publicity material claimed
the building was ‘used by all classes in the com-
munity’.110 Again, the corporation presented the
library as a sign of the city’s progression and sug-
gested a ‘story of pioneer experimental work’.111
Adjacent to the library, the Town Hall Extension
was opened in 1938 as part of the centenary
celebrations of Manchester’s incorporation.
Costing £750,000, the extension included a new
council chamber, Gas and Electricity Depart-
104 Town Hall Committee Council Minutes (TH CM) 1924-5, vol. 2, p. 439, MCL
LSC.
105 Reilly, Manchester, p. 47. The Manchester Guardian Yearbook of 1921 also
complained that Portland Street, though one of the richest thoroughfares in the
world, was ‘one of the blackest. .. Manchester does not rank highly among the
world ‘s beauty spots ... What is wrong with Manchester as a town ... it has no
organic plan ... (Manchester) is a conglomeration of architectural accidents that
sprang up as commercial interests of the moment dictated.’ Manchester Guardian,
Commercial yearbook 1921 (Manchester, 1921), pp. 3 and 213.
106 Development of Manchester, report of Town Hall clerk on Regional Planning
Conference, New York City, 20-5 Apr. 1925. TH CM 1924-5 E; p. 766, MCL LSC.
107 TH CM 1924-5, vol. 2, p. 439, MCL LSC.
108 TH CM 1930-1 E; p. 766, MCL LSC.
109 Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester, pp. 148-9.
110 In 1937, there were 7,407,910 visits to Manchester libraries and 4,609,872
books were issued. Manchester City Council, Centenary, p.71.
111 Manchester Corporation, How Manchester is managed: a record of municipal
activities (Manchester, 1939), p. 113.
ments with their own showrooms, cinemas, and
Fig. 4. Man-
demonstration rooms,112 and a 200 feet ‘Rates chester’s ‘Civic
Hall’, where people paid their taxes. Manches- Centre’. Source:
ter Corporation claimed the extension was ‘the Manchester
Corporation,
absolute property of the Citizens’,113 which was
How Manches-
‘designed with a view to the convenience of the ter is managed:
public’ and providing ‘the seat from which the a record of
municipal
city’s municipal affairs are directed, and is the
activities (Man-
centre of much of the social life of the commu- chester, 1938),
nity’.114 These buildings are noteworthy not only p. 16.
because they reflected ambition not normally
associated with northern England in the 1930s,
but also because of the inclusive and demotic ci-
vic culture fostered by Manchester Corporation.
As Figures 4 and 5 show, these new buildings
were not just considered to be the ‘Civic Centre’
of the city, but also represented ‘Modern Man-
chester’, from which the Victorian Town Hall was
noticeably marginalized.
Municipal leaders’ investment in civic archi-
tecture reflected renewed concern about the
city centres in the second half of the interwar
period, following key developments in housing
reform and public transport: in 1929, for ins-
tance, the city architect, Henry Price, claimed
demolition in the centre had already begun
112 Anne Clendlinning claims the gas showroom was ‘a public gathering place’,
thus suggesting the showroom in the Town Hall Extension reflected a specifically
female form of citizenship. Anne Clendinning, Demons of domesticity: women and
the English gas industry, 1889-1939 (Aldershot, 2004), p. 230. It was decided in
1924, however, that showrooms would be situated in the basement of the exten-
sion as ‘anything in the nature of shop windows would detract from the general
appearance of the building, and would not be a desirable feature.’ TH CM 1924-5,
vol. 2, p. 444, MCL LSC.
113 Manchester Corporation, How Manchester is managed: a record of municipal
activities (Manchester, 1932), p. 39.
114 Manchester Corporation, How Manchester is managed: a record of munici-
pal activities (1933 edn), p. 46 and Manchester Corporation, How Manchester is
managed: a record of municipal activities (1939 edn), p. 41.
53
joint master of architecture
Fig. 5· ‘Modern
Manchester’.
Source: Man-
chester Cor-
poration, How
Manchester
is managed: a
record of muni-
cipal activities
(Manchester,
1938), inside
cover.
and the ‘general appearance is fast changing’.115
The corporation’s new strategy paved the way
for a new form of commercial architecture to
emerge in the city centre that rejected Man-
chester’s Gothic heritage.116 Whereas Manches-
ter’s Victorian architecture was associated with
the cotton trade, the most notable buildings of
the interwar period reinforced the portrayal of
a commercially diverse and cosmopolitan city.
The Ship Canal Building (1926), the first in the
new architectural style, was much taller than
any other buildings in the city and requ ired an
act of parliament to overrule pre-existing regu-
lations on building height and was intended to
be ‘the focal point of a comprehensive develop-
ment of the area’.117 The period also reflected a
continuation of Manchester Corporation’s colla-
boration with private enterprise to enhance the
city’s architecture.118 Other important buildings
emerged in the 1930s and included Lee House,
Great Bridgewater Street (1931), Sunlight
House, Quay Street (1932), then the city’s tallest
commercial building, Kendal Milne’s, Deansgate
(1938), and Edwin Lutyens’s Midland Bank on
115 British Medical Association, The book of Manchester and Salford (Manches-
ter, 1929), p. 14.
116 Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester, p. 143.
117 Ibid., p.144.
118 See Helen B. Bertramsen, ‘Remoulding commercial space: municipal impro-
vements and the department store in late Victorian Manchester’, in John Benson
and Laura Ugolini, eds, A nation of shopkeepers: five centuries of British retailing
(London, 2003), pp. 206-25.
54 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
King Street (1935). The light Portland stone
of Manchester’s intetwar commercial archi-
tecture represented a clear break from darker
Victorian architecture of sandstone and ter-
racotta. The new architecture was celebrated
in municipal publicity material and the local
press. The Ship Canal building was ‘a sign the
city was progressing’119 and a central attrac-
tion of Manchester’s Civic Week, when it was
decorated with lights to provide an important
aspect of evening entertainment. As the Daily
Dispatch reported, this seemed to have a dra-
matic impact:
By far the most interesting building by the
night glares was the latest skyscraper- the new
offices of the Manchester Ship Canal Company.
The contractors had just removed the scaffol-
ding from the building in time for the celebra-
tions, and the clean bold lines stood out in all
their classic boldness.120
Significantly, municipal leaders chose to floo-
dlight the Ship Canal building and the Refuge
Insurance building (completed 1910), rather
than better-known Victorian build ings such as
the Town Hall or Trade Hall. Between 1926 and
1937, the Manchester Guardian’s semi-regular
feature titled ‘A new build ing for Manchester’,
celebrated the city’s new architecture.121 In
1927, the mayor praised Manchester’s ‘recent
improvement in its buildings’, suggesting ‘it
was good architects now studied not only the
framework of a building but the work that was
to be carried in it ... newspapers and especially
the «Manchester Guardian» were doing great
service by showing that there was something
in architecture than more building’.122 The new
buildings were consistently marketed in the
press to emphasize the diversity and strength
of Manchester’s economy: Rylands Building
was described as ‘another symbol of Manches-
ter’s enterprise’ in 1930123 and the new Kend
al Milne department store was considered a
‘modern building ... one of the largest in the
country’. 124There was a far more celebratory
attitude to architecture in Manchester’s local
press from the late 1920s onwards.
Liverpool did not aim to alter the city centre
119 MG, 8 Nov. 1927, p. 14.
120 Daily Dispatch, 4 Oct. 1926, MCL LSC: Civic Week, 1926, Volume I.
121 MG, 1 Mar. 1926, p. 7, and MG, 18 Nov. 1937, p. 13.
122 MG, 9 Dec. 1927, p. 14.
123 MG, 31 Oct. 1930, p. 4.
124 MG, 18 Nov. 1937, p. 13.
dramatically and did not make any significant
investment in civic architecture. Liverpool was
home to spectacular Georgian and Victorian
buildings, such as St George’s Hall and, in addi-
tion, the Pierhead buildings were completed
in 1916. Comprising the Royal Liver Building
(completed 1911), Cunard Building (1916), and
Port of Liverpool Building (1907), they were not
immediately popular but became celebrated and
admired.125 In contrast to Manchester, there was,
therefore, a desire to improve Liverpool’s exis-
ting urban fabric. Liverpool Corporation conti-
nued its pre-war town planning strategy that
focused on developing a garden suburb estate
and building the Queen’s Drive, a six and a half-
mile long circumferential boulevard around the
city that was begun in 1904 and completed in
1927. The boulevard was part of Brodie’s wider
municipal vision for Liverpool and shared simi-
lar influences to Daniel Burnham and Edward
Bennett’s 1909 plan for Chicago. Brodie saw the
‘planned city in terms of municipal development
in preference to the piecemeal approach of the
Garden Suburb’.126
Architects, civic leaders, and the local press all
sought to consolidate links between Liverpool
and New York City, a successful port and a place
of glamour and amusement, to inspire confi-
dence in Liverpool’s economic future.127 William
Lever became interested in American architec-
ture at the end of the nineteenth century, ope-
ning offices in New York City and Philadelphia
in 1895 and was responsible for Reilly’s first
visit to the East Coast in 1909. Reilly was very
impressed: ‘Ordinary American citizens ... even
knew the names of the architects of their chief
buildings. It was very different to the outlook
of the ordinary Manchester or Liverpool citizen
about his town to which I was not accustomed.128
The experience inspired Reilly to send up to six
architectural students to New York a year, until
the Wall Street Crash in 1929, whilst he also
imported American architectural periodicals
to the University of Liverpool’s library. Reilly’s
most famous student was Herbert Rowse, who
visited America at the same time as Reilly, but
125 Figueiredo, ‘Symbols of empire’, pp. 229-54.
126 Crouch, Design culture, p. 152.
127 On the contemporary power of the ‘American sublime’, see David Gilbert
and Claire Hancock, ‘New York and the transatlantic imagination: French and
English tourism and the spectacle of the modern metropolis, 1893-1939, Journal
of Urban History, 33 (2006), pp. 77-107.
128 Charles Reilly, Scaffolding in the sky: a semi-architectural autobiography
(London, 1938), p. 128.
stayed longer.129 Rowse’s experience of America
heavily shaped the style of buildings that emer-
ged in Liverpool during the 1930s, which ‘would
not be out of place in New York or Montreal’.130
New York’s influence on architecture in Liver-
pool is clear from 1930, when a flurry of neo-
classical and, later, modernist buildings were
completed. They included India Buildings
(1930), Martins Bank (1932), Philharmonic
Hall (1939), and George’s Dock Ventilation and
Control Station (1932), which were all designed
by Rowse.131 Again, changes to Liverpool’s urban
environment were marketed to citizens in a way
that encouraged optimism and faith in the city’s
economy. As early as 1924, Reilly claimed, Liver-
pool, like New York, is soaring skyvvard. In all
parts of the city splendid new buildings, such
as the Adelphi Hotel, reflect the influence of the
best modem American architecture. The face
of some leading shipping streets is thus being
gradually transformed, and the city’s business
houses bear witness in stone to the stability of
their trade.132 Keen to maintain links with New
York, the lord mayor of Liverpool visited the lord
mayor of New York City in 1931 and described
Liverpool to his New York counterpart as the
‘most American of English cities’, and claimed
Liverpool would also build skyscrapers.133
V
It is, inevitably, difficult to know how far citizens
accepted the images presented by municipal lea-
ders of Liverpool’s and Manchester’s redevelop-
ment There was considerable debate in both ci-
ties about the place and form of their First World
War cenotaphs, which exposes the corporations’
considerable sensitivity to public opinion. There
was also a rare moment of contrast, since sec-
tarian tensions were more evident in Liverpo-
ol’s quest for a cenotaph than in Manchester.134
Local politicians were criticized in both cities135
and, in particular, there were complaints about
the cost of civic celebrations: ‘a large number
129 Richmond, Marketing modernisms, p. 39.
130 Sharples, Powers, and Shippobottom, Liverpool, p. 31
131 William Morrison, ‘The ambassador of Merseyside’s industry and com-
merce’, LPM, 1 June 1931, p. 23.
132 Liverpool the mart of nations, Promotional Map, 1924, LCL LSC.
133 LPM, 6 May 1931, LCL LSC: Visit of the lord mayor of Liverpool to the mayor
of New York City, May 1931.
134 Wyke, Public Sculpture, pp. 148-9 and James O’Keefe, ‘First World War me-
morials and the Liverpool Cenotaph, 1917- 1934’ (MA thesis, Manchester, 2004).
135 In 1932, Liverpolitan, a middle-brow monthly periodical, complained, ‘local
municipal politics have reached a crisis requiring statesman like handling ...
Financially, the city is suffering from the same complaint as the nation - over-
spending.’ Liverpolitan, May 1932, p. 1.
55
joint master of architecture
of citizens are much opposed to such a scheme
at the present time’, complained one corres-
pondent to the Manchester Evening News, who’s
footing the bills? If it is coming out of the public
purse the sooner a protest meeting is held the
better.136 Civic celebrations nevertheless attrac-
ted large crowds and were evidently popular
in both cities; around a million people were
said to have attended Manchester Civic Week
in 1926 and 50,000 people a day visited Liver-
pool’s first Civic Week in 1924.137 Municipal
leaders were certainly confident about their
impact: Manchester’s lord mayor claimed that
‘Civic Week has justified itself from every pos-
sible point of view, and has realised the highest
expectations.’138 Similarly, the success of Liver-
pool’s first Civic Week caused the Post and Mer-
cury to claim, ‘the high peak of civic patriotism
was reached today’.139 Although it is harder to
ascertain how far the crowds accepted the new
images they saw, the attempts of municipal lea-
ders in Liverpool and Manchester to engage
with the citizens lends weight to the suggestion
that there was a greater interest in ‘the people’
and that community was the ‘buzz word’ of the
interwar period.’140
Faced with a turbulent economic and political
climate, municipal leaders turned to the city.
Liverpool’s and Manchester’s unemployment
figures told one story, but the cities themselves
were portrayed to say something different to the
local citizen. Nor were they the only northern
industrial cities to invest in the urban environ-
ment: other examples of ambitious civic buil-
dings include Sheffield City Hall (1929-32) and
Leeds Civic Hall (1931-3). Civic Weeks were also
hosted by Salford, Cardiff, Hull, Bristol, and Der-
by, and Lesley Whitworth’s research on Coventry
suggests such ambition was not limited to cities
in crisis.141 Further research is needed on inte-
rwar urban transformation to understand the
motivations and ambitions of local politicians
and planners in more detail. Nevertheless, the
136 MEN, 1 Sept. 1926, MCL LSC cuttings: Civic Week 1926. Northern Voice, a
self-styled working-class periodical went further and complained about the
selective nature of the celebrations: ‘amongst the junketing and chronicling of
Civic Week ... I have seen no reference to one little island near the heart of the
city’, referring to Ancoats, Northern Voice, 8 Oct. 1926, p. 2.
137 Daily Dispatch, 4 Oct. 1926, MCL LSC cuttings: Civic Week 1926; IPM, 23 Sept.
1924, LCL LSC cuttings: Liverpool Civic Week, Wembley, 1924.
138 ‘Civic Week trail of triumph ‘, Evening Chronicle, 8 Oct. 1926, LSC cuttings:
Civil Week 1926.
139 LPM, 23 Sept. 1924, LCL LSC cuttings: Liverpool Civic Week, Wembley 1924.
140 Francis Mulhem, Culture/metaculture (London, 2000), p. 13; Matthew
Grimley, Citizenship, community and the Church of England: liberal Anglican theo-
ries of the state between the wars (Oxford, 2004), p. 1.
141 Lesley Whitworth, ‘Men, women, shops and «little shiny homes»: the consu-
ming of Coventry, 1930-1939’ (Ph .D. thesis, Warwick, 1997).
56 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
connections explored here between town plan-
ning and an inclusive approach to citizenship in
the age of mass suffrage should not be ignored.
The role of Liverpool Un iversity and the pio-
neering influence of Charles Reilly, especially
in encouraging the local press to promote new
buildings and in cultivating close links with East
Coast America, must also be emphasized. The
article has highlighted the innovative work of
local politicians, architects, planners, and engi-
neers in both cities, but suggests that Liverpool
was at the forefront in developing strategies of
civic design and urban redevelopment.
Finally, this article also supports Michael Saler’s
research on visual modernism, which suggests
that northern England attempted to maintain
its independence and autonomy against the
increasing power of London between the two
world wars.142 The ambition demonstrated by
municipal leaders in interwar Britain, however,
signalled the final period of independence for
local government Nationalization of gas, electri-
city, transport, and health, alongside the advent
of the Second World War and the Labour victory
of 1945, all contributed to the growth of central
government.143 For Liverpool and Manchester,
the shift in power was to prove disastrous and
the following decades were characterized by
significant population loss and dramatic econo-
mic decline.144 Their post-1945 experience has
overshadowed the relative strength and ambi-
tion of municipal power in Liverpool and Man-
chester between the two world wars, when, des-
pite higher levels of unemployment and pover
ty than in southern England, both cities were
indeed ‘soaring skyward’.145
142 Michael Saler, ‘Making it new: visual modernism and the «myth of the
north» in inter-war England’, Journal of British Studies, 37 (1998), pp. 419-40.
143 Barry M. Doyle, ‘The changing functions of urban government: councillors,
officials and pressure groups’, in Daunton, ed. Cambridge, p. 295.
144 Manchester’s population had fallen to 404,861 in 1991, barely half the 1931
peak, and unemployment rates reached 58 per cent in some parts of the city
during the 1980s. Kidd, Manchester, pp. 215 and 224. By the 1970s and 19800,
Liverpool assumed the status of a postindustrial pariah’. Jon Murden, ‘»City of
change and challenge»: Liverpool since 1945’, in Belchem, ed., Liverpool p. 394.
145 Liverpool promotional map, 1924, LCL LSC.
57
joint master of architecture
Jesko Frezer, Martin Schmitz (Eds.), Lucius Burkhardt Writings / Rethinking man-made environ-
ments, pp. 133-141 © Springer Wien Verlag, 2012
WHY IS LANDSCAPE BEAUTIFUL?
LUCIUS BURKHARDT
(1925-2003)
This paper begins and closes with a discussion
of what exactly «landscape» is. Which parts
of our visible environment are included in
that which we call landscape, and which other,
equally visible phenomena are excluded? For
we agree unanimously on this much at least: the
cow pats in Vrin belong to the landscape while
tin cans tossed aside by a tourist do not. So the
basic idea here is that «landscape is a construct.»
And what this terrible phrase conveys is nothing
other than that the landscape is to be found,
not in environmental phenomena but in the
mind’s eye of those doing the looking. To espy a
landscape in our environ-ment is a creative act
brought forth by excluding and filtering cer-tain
elements and, equally, by rhyming together or
integrating all we see in a single image, and in
a manner influenced largely by our edu-cational
background. Was our trip to Vrin therefore only
the begin-ning of a journey through our minds?
Naturally we had given this matter some thought
during previous discussions. Consequently, we
arrived in Vrin with two scenarios in mind. The
first went some-thing like this: when we picture
a landscape, our mind’s eye draws on the full
range of phenomena found in our environment-
colors, structures, identifiable natural contexts
and signs of human inter-vention. The environ-
ment here resembles the artist’s palette. Yet this
comparison, like all good comparisons, is not al-
together steady on its feet. The phenomena that
make up this palette are too differ-ent from one
another to be juxtaposed easily, in a single plane.
In a sense, it is truer to say that the landscape
consists of many differ-ent layers: the merely
visual layer of colors; a more complex layer com-
prising the first hints of natural or technological
production infrastructures; and a layer in which
58 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
social aspects and hence, also a temporal dimen-
sion can be identified: an abandoned farmhouse,
an annoyingly modern building, or-evidence of
an era when farmers were still self-sufficient-a
field full of a certain variety of grass.
And then our second scenario: the landscape
constructed thus on the palette, from various
phenomena, is oriented to the icfeal qf the «lo-
cus amoenus»1, the «charming place» upheld
by painting and literature since the time of Ho-
mer and Horace, through that of Claude Le Lor-
rain and the Romantics and, lastly, by our tou-
rism brochures and cigarette advertisements.
To identify a landscape as charming is insofar
synonymous with the endeavor to «filter out»
whatever we actually do see in the place visited,
so as to be able to integrate the outcome in our
preconceived, idealized image of the charming
place. The more the walker sees that matches
his expectations- the fountain at the city gates,
the quiet shore of a lake, Conrad Ferdinand
Meyer’s white peaks2 - the greater his degree of
satisfaction.
Do these two hypotheses -the «palette» and the
«charming place» - stand up? They do and they
don’t. What follows is an attempt to cover the
key points in a debate the class held on the final
day of its trip to Vrin.
Does everyone have the same «charming place»
in mind? If it is indeed the case that each per-
son viewing a landscape picks out certain ele-
ments and filters out others in order to paint his
1 comfort, which incorporates trees, grass and water, lies usually beyond the city
limits, and is suggestive hence of a natural paradise untrammelled by the dictates
of urban civilization.
2 Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825-98) was a Swiss poet and historical novelist.
own picture of a charming place, the outcome
is doubtless highly individual: every person
applies different criteria. To identify a charming
place is to rediscover one’s past youth, to redis-
cover impressions garnered from the parental
home, from books, from older people’s recollec-
tions, from pictures on the walls of one’s child-
hood bedroom or classroom, or those inspired
by favorite books. None of us is able to look at
the landscape through another person’s eyes.
Yet common ground does exist: the virile thing
to do at holiday time is to take to the mountains,
the lakes, the high seas; individual variations in
taste are therefore subordinate to that collective
entity we describe as «culture.» And culture in
this regard might best be described as the col-
lective memory of anything we perceive as a
charming place.
But places that in no way correspond to the
conventional image of a charming place are
also beautiful. Some tourists find the desert
appealing, or the northern tundra, while we, for
our part, take pleasure in the scree slopes in the
high mountains of the V order Rhine Valley. Opi-
nions in our class were divided, so this pheno-
menon could not be explained unanimously. One
group said that the unusual landscape, the de-
sert or scree slope are a source of pleasure to us
also because we «rediscover» them; through the
books we read as children-tales of Red Indians
and other adventure stories, as well as romantic
travelogues penned in bygone times by explo-
rers-they have become for us quasi charming
places.
Utility and beauty
Other members of the class took a different
view, namely that the impression of beauty one
has when looking at a desert, factory sites, or
scree slopes ensues precisely from the contrast
between those places and the conventional,
idealized charming place. Any pleasure the
viewer takes in such a panorama derives from
the great sense of accomplishment he feels after
having integrated it in this concept of «char-
ming.» Or, in other words: in a truly charming
place the viewer need accomplish very little.
Aesthetic pleasure is assured him, no doubt, but
he learns nothing new. The further removed the
place in question is from his ideal - so long as it
matches the ideal to some extent - the greater
the amount of information he can garner from
the situation. And this gives rise to the question
we were able to explore experimentally, also
through drawing or painting: at which point
does an experience of the beauty of a landscape
cease? When is a landscape so alien or strange
that it is no longer perceived to be a landscape
and hence something charming?
One point that preoccupied us for a long while
was this: what role do natural objects such as
plants, animals and stones play in constructing
a landscape for the person who never bothers
to acquaint himself with them; to look up their
names in a reference work, for example, or find
out something or other about them? In other
words: who sees the landscape as landscape-he
who breaks it down into identifiable compo-
nents, or he who simply enjoys its appearance?
At this point, we came to discuss the signal effect
of certain combinations of natural phenomena.
We noted the way we ourselves subconsciously
looked to vegetation for orientation. Where
might one park a car in the village? Clumps of
nettles are the clearest sign of all that nobody
has an interest in a field. Where can our group
take a seat in the open air without robbing the
farmers of something? Where can we make a
small fire? The meadows of the Allmende-the
commons-clipped short by cattle, the loosely de-
marcated edges of the forest (which also serve
at times as pasture), and the squat hedges of
alpine roses all signal the absence of a private
land lease and hence, of a potentially aggrie-
ved leaseholder. A subconscious knowledge of
plant societies steers even the urban dweller to
an appropriate site for a picnic. Are such places
lovely primarily, and accessible only incidental-
ly? Or has our own sense of beauty latched onto
places unsuited to production because we are
driven off the others? Plant societies also aler-
ted us to changes in the village. It seemed to us
that weeds and nettles covered unusually large
areas between the houses in these highland
communities. Trampled grass indicated paths
still taken in the daily round of outdoor labor.
Yet many outdoor activities associated with
the traditional, multifaceted, collective mode of
agricultural production are no longer pursued
59
joint master of architecture

The Landscape
Trap (1986), a
limited edi-
tion by Lucius
Burckhardt.
for the Galerie
Eisenbahns-
trasse in Berlin.
At the opening,
he spoke on a
nearby bomb-
site on the
theme «Lands-
cape exists in
the mind’s eye.»
We fall into a
trap when we
confuse
landscape with
nature.

today. Paths and squares between houses in
Vrin are considered private property. A right of
passage is assured their use demands; and the
weeds encroach upon those areas that have fal-
len into disuse. So, vegetation here informs the
viewer not only about the richness of the soil but
also about the shifting modes of production and
social circumstance.
This led us to the question of the relationship
between utility and beauty. Is the abandoned
landscape lovely, or the one currently in use?
It was clear to all of us that only city residents
would ever debate such a matter; only city resi-
dents see agricultural land as landscape. Only
someone removed from nature and from agri-
cultural production can look upon agricultural
production and natural growth, and label them
landscape. In Vrin, terraced slopes and certain
types of plant society on the alpine pastures
attest still to tillage, the former mode of produc-
tion. For it is only in the last twenty years that
our highland economy has shifted from self-suf-
ficiency to a dairy monoculture.
Monoculture was another problem we failed to
get to the bottom of in the course of our discus-
sions. Initially we assumed that diversity and
hence also self-sufficiency look «more char-
ming». Then images of extensive monocultures
cropped up: fields of grain in aerial photographs
from the Swissair calendar. Does their beauty
lie in the spatial remove? Or in their geometry,·
revealed most clearly to the pilot? Dairy produc-
tion in Vrin implies blossoming pastures-so far.
Yet pastureland in some areas of Switzerland is
no longer allowed to bloom at all, but is mowed
incessantly. The result is an impoverished but
still green landscape that cannot yet be said
to be ugly. Those monocultures developed in
countries where the agricultural economy faces
stiffer competition on the global market than
ours does are quite definitely ugly however.
Wherever cows and pigs are housed in huge
industrial stalls, and fed on hay and grain grown
elsewhere, wherever surplus dung is dumped on
land formerly used to raise cattle, the marriage
of beauty and utility is well and truly over.
Does that mean however, that our sense of beau-
ty yearns for an old-fashioned style of cultiva-
tion, for those production modes recently aban-
doned and no longer viable? By the time Horace
wrote his Arcadian pastoral poetry, Arcadia no
longer existed but, rather, a Sicily where masses
of slaves produced cereals to feed metropolitan
Rome. Is our quest for a beautiful landscape
therefore also a quest for recently abandoned

60 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool

production modes-a quest for fruit trees on a
pasture near Basel, for example, a pasture of the
type made increasingly rare by the rise of the
electric lawnmower?
The role of ruins
This led to questions about human input in
general, about technological intervention and
«disruption’’ of the landscape. Of course, poten-
tial mischief has the artist just itching to turn the
church tower into a cooling tower, to sketch a
nuclear power station alongside the sanatorium,
and to draw a highway leading to the heart of
Vrin. Nobody will ever find this type of disrupted
landscape beautiful. And yet such interventions
are relative; today we so readily accept older in-
terventions of a violent nature as to enjoy them
even, as indispensable landscape features. Or
were the military fortresses of Grisons Canton
not once perhaps a terrifYing sight? Is the wind-
mill on a landscape painted by a Dutch Master
not a modern form of energy production, analo-
gous to our power stations? And did not the nu-
merous viaducts built for the Rhaetian Railway
aesthetically enhance entire valley formations?
At this point we discussed the passage of time
and the role of the ruin. Technological accom-
plishment in its derelict form has not only
become an integral component of the char-
ming landscape but virtually its emblem: whe-
rever a ruin signals past history, the walker’s
anticipated and actual images are reconciled.
Eighteenthcentury English gardeners who
placed artificial ruins in their artificial lands-
capes did not do so in vain: ruins symbolized
the past and hence, reality. The ruin as a sym-
bol can be read therefore also as dissatisfaction
with our contemporary and in a quite other
way, ruinous world.
By way of contrast, the actual ruin of the lands-
cape-erosion, in a word-did give us pause for
thought. The ruin attests to past usage and,
even had no ruined castles existed in the region
we were studying, traces enough of earlier
husbandry were evident in the abandoned ter-
raced slopes, and enhanced the beauty of the
landscape. Admittedly, «wounds» is the word
that springs to mind for the region’s deserted
farmhouses, often razed to their stone foun-
dations. Naturally we gave some thought also
to the laborious pursuit of agriculture on high
mountain slopes, and in particular to wild hay-
making there. Agricultural production and the
preservation of alpine flora are closely inter-
twined here, and the problem of the farmer as
«landscape gardener» is one we of course real-
ly ought to discuss at length yet will not touch
upon here, for the moment. Erosion speaks
of the disuse or misuse of nature in a most
extreme form, yet one that is not wholly wit-
hout appeal for tourists, especially in the Vor-
der Rhine region. Actually, it was at the eroded
spots that we-admittedly with a paintbrush
and palette, not with words-were best able to
pursue the focus of our research: the question
as to how far one might distance oneself from
the ideal image of the landscape without des-
troying the message, «This is a landscape».
We painted landscapes, and noted how the very
composition and structure of a painting help
convey the message «landscape.» If we painted
a valley in the foreground, and allowed a moun-
tain range to rise against the sky in the back-
ground, it was practically impossible to not pro-
duce a landscape. No color, no drawing is so far
removed from reality as to destroy the impres-
sion of a landscape. «Non-landscapes» could be
produced in any case, only by departing from
conventional ways of composing or framing the
image. Landscape in artistic terms appears the-
refore to be a construct comprised of conventio-
nal visual structures. To our astonishment, our
experiments failed in one respect: we did not
manage to produce a single ugly landscape. That
annoyed us very much, for we had undertaken
initially to publish the sort of tourism brochure
that would discourage other groups from fol-
lowing in our footsteps to Vrin.
61
joint master of architecture
NECE, Cities and urban spaces : chances for cultural and citizenship education, 29 sept. – 1 oct. 2010,
Trieste, Italy © Katie Milestone, 2010
POPULAR CULTURE AND INCLUSION/
EXCLUSION IN URBAN PUBLIC SPACES
KATIE MILESTONE
Manchester Metropolitan University
In my paper I seek to discuss a case where popu-
lar culture has changed the face and profile of
the UK city of Manchester. I will highlight the
conditions that allowed for popular culture to
flourish but I will also highlight the problems
and difficulties that have emerged along the way.
I want to consider whether popular culture had
an impact in creating new, or different, public
spaces.
Manchester is the third largest city in the UK. It
was the birthplace of industrial revolution – a
city mainly built on the textile industry. A city
where the ‘conditions of the English working
class’ were so terrible they were a much used
case study in order to examine the exploitation
of the urban poor. Like many other western
industrial cities, during the 1970s Manchester
experienced severe deindustrialisation, econo-
mic and urban crisis. The city (and wider region)
suffered from high levels of unemployment.
There was a dearth of cultural facilities and lack
of use of the city – especially in the evenings. In
addition to the ravages of deindustrialisation
Manchester experienced a great deal of moder-
nist planning which also saw the destruction of
sites of urban engagement (Mole, 1996).
The period, in which these negative effects were
at their most severe, the mid to late 1970s coin-
cided with the emergence of punk. Although
punk was not ‘invented’ in Manchester it cer-
tainly caught the imagination of a number of
disaffected young people in this city and the
surrounding area. Manchester’s punk inspired
pub and club scene has been extensively docu-
mented (see Savage (2005), Middles (2009),
Haslam (1999), Milestone (1996)) and celebra-
62 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
ted in Celluloid (such as in the feature films 24
Hour Party People (2002) and Control (2007).
The impact of punk in Manchester mobilized
groups of young people to become engaged in
new forms of cultural production. The ethos of
punk was that you could do it yourself. There
was no need for professional training or high
levels of cultural capital. People were empowe-
red by punk to create their own fashions, make
music, to set up fanzines and club nights. Bands
such as Joy Division and The Buzzcocks came
first. A few years later they were followed by the
Smiths, then the Happy Mondays, Stone Roses
and Oasis. Significantly many of these bands
stayed in the area. The impact of this was that a
supporting infrastructure for cultural industries
began to develop in the city. A significant facet
of this infrastructure was directly connected
with Factory Records. Tony Wilson was an inno-
vative leader who, as a journalist and presenter
at Granada TV, was able to use his positions and
contacts to promote the cultural scene. In neigh-
bouring Liverpool 15 years earlier, bands such
as the Beatles had no choice but to leave the city.
In the 1960s most regional British cities had no
media and cultural industries apart from local
newspapers, radio and TV. The popular music
industry was squarely clustered in London. That
record labels were established in Manchester
was to have an important role to play in the de-
nouement of the Manchester story.
Concurrent to punk and post punk another les-
ser-known but equally significant underground
culture was in flow. This was the northern soul
scene. Although not restricted to the north of En-
gland the scene was very active in the Manches-
ter area. This, like punk, involved and number of
pop cultural entrepreneurial activities including
DJing, buying and selling records and organising
club nights (see Hollows and Milestone, 1998).
What was happening by the early 1980s was
that a distinct regional cultural infrastructure
was emerging. This happened in other UK regio-
nal cities too (such as Sheffield and Bristol). This
was significant because it presented a hegemo-
nic challenge to London’s control of the nation’s
cultural production infrastructure. However
it should be noted that under Labour’s Ken Li-
vingstone’s leadership of the Greater London
Council radical new approaches to community
based cultural production and investment in
seedbed cultural industries was taking place.
There were new approaches to cultural deve-
lopment, which were increasingly focused on
working class culture, Black and minority eth-
nic groups, women and other groups who had
hitherto been excluded from cultural produc-
tion. The GLC approach was significant because
as well as trying to make the arts and cultural
more inclusive they also saw the economic
potential of culture and supported the deve-
lopment of new cultural industries. In depri-
ved northern UK cities some Local Authorities
tried to invest actively invest in new cultural
production infrastructure as a way of trying to
combat the loss of jobs in the area. The northern
English city of Sheffield for example set up the
world’s first municipally funded recording stu-
dio and Audio Visual Enterprise centre. It also
developed a cultural industries quarter. This had
mixed success. Manchester was very successful
in establishing itself as a pop city. Compared to
Sheffield Manchester had the advantage of an
international airport, northern headquarters of
national media organizations and a hug higher
education sector. A lot of Manchester’s success
was due to luck and happenstance. By the late
1980s pop tourists were flocking to the city, the
city’s universities experienced improved univer-
sity applications and the cultural industries sec-
tor grew (see O’Connor 2001).
A specific area of Manchester became very
strong in terms of its pop cultural offering. This
area became known as the Northern Quarter.
This was an area of the city, which although very
central, was outside of the official regenera-
tion zones. Because the area was run down and
showing signs of decay, rents were affordable
and there was plenty of available space. Because
of its central location and affordability the area
experienced a flourishing of sites of cultural
production, retail and leisure facilities. There
were many attractive commercial and industrial
buildings, the site of the old market and many
traditional pubs. The area had an intimacy and
atmosphere that was not available in the other
parts of the city that had undergone ill thought
out modernisation in the 1960s and 1970s. In
contrast to the concrete monstrosities nearby,
the rescuing of the northern quarter was bottom
up, small scale and ad hoc. The area developed
as a site of pop cultural retail and pop cultural
production. In terms of retail the market based
in a Victorian department store, Affleck’s Pa-
lace, was crucial. Market stalls could be cheaply
rented and this provided new opportunities for
small-scale cultural production and entrepre-
neurialism. Fashion designers, record collectors,
pop artists had an avenue to sell their work and
make a living. As some of these business grew
they relocated to larger premises in the nor-
thern quarter. Cultural producers were drawn to
the area – fashion designers, graphic designers,
record labels, and recording studios. Cafés, bars
and restaurants also opened in the area. Here
then was a very solid and holistic chain of pop
cultural production, consumption and represen-
tation. An interesting new form of public space
began to emerge – albeit a space squarely aimed
at a particular group of young people with high
levels of cultural capital.
By the late 1980s early 1990s Manchester
was world renowned for its pop music and
club culture – much like swinging London in
the 1960s or New York in the 1970s. Although
they had emerged from the ground up, after a
while the City Council realised their significant
cultural asset and began to formally support
local cultural industries. The city council funded
Cultural Industries Development Service pro-
vided business support, networking activities
and promotion for local cultural businesses (see
O’Connor and Gu, 2010).
Increasingly the Manchester music story was
incorporated into official narratives about the
city and in particular it’s marketing material.
63
joint master of architecture
The Factory Records graphic designer, Peter Sa-
ville, was enlisted as the creative director of the
city brand. Manchester’s regeneration through
pop culture is seen as success story and the city
has experienced a good deal of what has been
described as ‘policy tourism’. It is indeed a char-
ming story. If not over romanticized. Where are
the women, where are the creative young people
from Manchester’s black and minority ethnic
populations in this narrative? A dominant ver-
sion of popular culture has been imposed on the
city.
But what of Manchester did longer term? What
impact has this had on the city? Did the city ma-
nagers learn from this experience and utilize its
home-grown cultural assets in its future regene-
ration? Of course it is hard, impossible, to talk
about the city as a whole. The city council has
some power but limited resources. There are
other powerful forces at stake in defining urban
space and community use. There is much cele-
bration of Manchester’s regeneration through
pop culture. Some of those involved in the un-
derground punk and post-punk scenes of the
1970s and 1980s are now involved in the mains-
tream development of the city. The boom (and
oversupply) of city centre living has been mar-
keted in terms of providing a hedonistic lifes-
tyle for the ‘creative class’. Indeed the late Tony
Wilson (founder of Factory Records) was a fan
of Richard Florida and Manchester appears to
have a high score in terms of Florida’s creativity
index. Whilst there have been many innovative
and positive examples of using Manchester’s
‘unique’ cultural assets (its pop music and gay
culture) for regeneration there is also a danger
that exclusionary, mono cultural public spaces
are being created that exclude large sectors of
Manchester’s citizens.
Manchester city centre was bombed by the IRA
during the Euro 96 Football championships.
There were no fatalities. The 70s retail monstro-
sity, the Andale centre was badly damaged. This
was used by the city as an opportunity to reconfi-
gure the city centre and to create a new space,
which came to be marketed as ‘the millennium
quarter’. As part of this that which had been a
hippy market in the old Corn exchange building
was replaced by ‘the Triangle – an up-market
64 EVE 2013 manchester - liverpool
retail space targeted at a small layer of rich
consumers. Here an important space for non-
corporate, nonmainstream retail was displaced
by corporate capitalism. The newly designed
public space of the Millenium quarter attracted
hordes of young people – mainly Goths, Mos-
hers, EMOs and skaters. However these groups
have not been welcomed and the work of Joanne
Massey clearly shows how these young people
are being ‘designed out’ of the area. For all its
claims to be a new city centre public space, its
focus as a retail space has brought with it huge
levels of regulation and surveillance.
In terms of the city centre there has been a focus
on property development – much of it problema-
tic in the light of the crash. There is an emphasis
on high-end retail, glass towers and sanitized en-
vironments. New public spaces are highly regu-
lated and the overall aesthetic is driven towards
conspicuous consumption. The relative success
of Manchester city centre renewal is perhaps
not matched by corresponding improvements
in the lives and life chances of groups who live
on the periphery of the city centre. Manchester
compares unfavourably across most social and
economic indicators.
What spaces are available to create new, alterna-
tive, spaces in a city where the old underground
has been incorporated into the mainstream?
Citizens are interpellated as consumers rather
than critical or active producers of ‘alternative’
forms of social space. The property market, the
drive to thematise and commodify everything
has created a city centre where there are only
consumption spaces, but not public spaces.
High levels of social exclusion are implied by
this. Only time will tell if the recession and the
crisis of greed induced capitalism will open up
new urban spaces. What can be learnt from the
Manchester example is that whilst alternative
culture was able to flourish in under-commodi-
fied spaces, that when other spaces were subse-
quently ‘regenerated’ the idea of the local, the
quirky and the raw was overlooked in favour of
the corporate mainstream. An opportunity to
create diverse and dynamic public spaces was
missed. There is an oversupply of ‘sameness’
and this approach is showing strong signs of fai-
lure.
Bianchini, F and Parkinson, M (eds), (1993): Culture and Urban Regeneration: The West European Experience, Manchester University Press.
Haslam, D (1999): Manchester the pop cult city Fourth Estate
Hollows and Milestone (1998): Welcome to Dreamsville: a history and geography of northern soul in The Place of Music Leyshon et al (eds) Guilford Press
Landry, C (2000): The Creative City, Earthscan
Massey, J (2005): The Gentrification of Consumption: A View from Manchester in Sociological Research Online, Vol. 10, Issue 2
Middles, M (2009) Factory: The Story of the Record Label, Virgin Books
Milestone, K (1996): Northerness and New Urban Economies of Hedonsimin. From the Margins to the Centre Wynne and O’Connor (eds) Ashgate
Mole, P (1996): Fordism, post-Fordism and the contemporary city in From the Margins to the Centre Wynne and O’Connor (eds) Ashgate
O’Connor, J (2001): The Cultural Production Sector in Manchester, research & strategy, summary, Manchester City Council Economic Initiatives Group,
O’Connor, Justin and Gu, Xin (2010): Developing a Creative Cluster in a Post-industrial city: CIDS and Manchester. The Information Society, 25(3). (In Press)
Savage, J (2005) England’s Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock Faber and Faber
65
Conception and realisation: Esquivié François, 2013.
EVE STUDY TRIP 2013

LIVERPOOL &