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live, work, study and have raised my family. As an author I have written about the lives of immigrants: my novel Revolt (2013), for example, captures the feeling of displacement immigrants often feel – of being lost between two worlds. In my latest book, The Concubine & The Slave-Catcher (2017), I focused on my father’s generation in a story called ‘Escape’, exploring what it was like for these men who arrived in England in the 1960s. Men who, like my father, were invited to come to the UK through the voucher system, as Britain was in need of workers after the Second
1960s), the burning of coal powered not only the growth of Manchester but an entire global empire of cotton. If these chimneys have now, in the main, disappeared from Manchester, replaced by a new verticality of skyscrapers, then the legacy of these technologies is profound and long-lasting. Climate change was in effect kick-started by these brick structures bellowing carbon into the atmosphere. What was considered a localised problem of smog, pollution and air quality in Manchester has now become planetary in scope, even as the chimneys stopped smoking and the soot
No struggle for social justice that lacks a grounded understanding of how wealth is accumulated within society, and by whom, is ever likely to make more than a marginal dent in the status quo. Much work has been done over the years by academics and activists to illuminate the broad processes of wealth extraction. But a constantly watchful eye is essential if new forms of financial extraction are to be blocked, short-circuited, deflected or unsettled. So when the World Bank and other well-known enablers of wealth extraction start to organise to promote greater private-sector involvement in ‘infrastructure’, for example through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), alarm bells should start to ring. How are roads, bridges, hospitals, ports and railways being eyed up by finance? What bevels and polishes the lens through which they are viewed? How is infrastructure being transformed into an ‘asset class’ that will yield the returns now demanded by investors? Why now? What does the reconfiguration of infrastructure tell us about the vulnerabilities of capital? The challenge is not only to understand the mechanisms through which infrastructure is being reconfigured to extract wealth: equally important is to think through how activists might best respond. What oppositional strategies genuinely unsettle elite power instead of making it stronger?
Destruction Atom – Steve Hanson This late 1960s image of Hulme is so powerful. The Victorian houses in the image are long gone, but so are the Hulme Crescents which replaced them in the early 1970s. The overstated story that Manchester is a co-operative city full of socialist radicals has a flipside: that Manchester’s real revolution was industrial, not political. Friedrich Engels, in the 1840s, in his father’s factories, saw men referring to other men as ‘hands’, and doing so to their faces. When he saw this he noted the conditions that forced socialism, co
. In the 1960s, Brady and Hindley tortured and murdered five children, burying four of them under Saddleworth Moor. One of those four – Keith Bennett – has yet to be found. It is unlikely he ever will be now that Hindley and Brady themselves have also died. But Saddleworth’s misfortune did not begin or end there. On a misty day in 1949, a British European Airlines plane crashed into one of Saddleworth’s hills, killing twenty-four of its twentynine passengers. And in 2015, the body of a man with no obvious cause of death was found in the same location. For over a year
Manchester: Something rich and strange Loop – Natalie Bradbury In the 1960s, Dr Beeching paved the way for the reduction of the British railway network, closing small village stations and branch lines across the country and catalysing the ascendancy of the motorcar as the dominant mode of transport in Britain. Some of these long-closed lines are now reopening, after decades lying dormant. Others have had their tracks removed permanently. In some cases, station buildings have now been converted into shops and supermarket cafes, as is the case with the former
display of certain goods.2 The global textile trade continued to evolve and, in fits and starts through the first half of the twentieth century, Manchester experienced a slow and painful decline of the cotton industry, with the last significant manufacturing mills closing down in the 1960s. The fading Cottonopolis was, in some respects, a foreshadowing of the de-industrialisation that would see dramatic changes to Lancashire and the industrial North through the 1970s and 1980s. 115 Manchester: Something rich and strange Much material evidence of cotton was swept away
Redfern buildings are Streamline Moderne in style, with decorative brick detailing that places them unmistakably in the 1930s. In the 1960s, when the city was moving away from its provincial Victorian heritage to look outwards and upwards, the CWS embraced international-style modernism and followed the trend of incorporating large-scale public artworks, such as murals, into its premises. When it opened, in 1962, the CIS Tower was one of the tallest buildings in Europe, and remained the tallest building in Manchester until the Beetham Tower was completed in 2006. These
1821, in response to the Peterloo massacre of 1819. It dropped ‘Manchester’ from its name in 1959, before moving to London in 1964. Manchester’s own daily newspaper, the Manchester Evening News, marked its centenary in 1968 by commissioning a short film, Here is the News. The film goes behind the scenes at the paper and places it at the heart of the city. The tone is optimistic, admiring Manchester’s new, modernist architecture of the 1960s. Another documentary, The Voice of a Region, made in the early 1970s, visits the Manchester Evening News’ premises, purpose
) by Hayley & Son; and St Mary, Hillkirk Street (1878) by Paley and Austin – the latter depicted by the artist L. S. Lowry in 1929. Other recreational needs were met by Ardwick Lads’ Club, Palmerston Street (1898) by W. & G. Higginbottom. Bradford continued to prosper into the twentieth century but, as with many inner-city and suburban areas of Manchester, post1945 planning brought about radical change. Slum clearance programmes saw back-to-back housing in Bradford and Beswick demolished in the late 1960s, and the resident populations relocated to new developments