Manchester, UK, June 2015 - An Equivocal View

Given that the city is only 35 miles from my home in Sheffield, it is perhaps inevitable that I visit Manchester quite a lot. Almost always my purpose takes me to the city centre, and I really don't know the suburbs at all well. So what follows is about the centre and the Oxford Road corridor past the universities.  And there is something of the provisional about this - but to tell the truth I really don't feel I 'get' Manchester or have (yet) managed to experience and display a sense of affection for it. And it's not just the fact that it was in the Granada studios in Manchester where my ambitions to be on a winning University Challenge team came to naught. (We won both our rehearsal matches but then lost the real match once the audience arrived and the cameras whirred.)

There are many individual elements to central Manchester that I greatly like - some of the restaurants in Chinatown, the Bridgwater Hall, the Manchester City Art Gallery. I have enjoyed visiting Castlefields, and Salford Quays (although I know they are in a different place administratively). I (perhaps surprisingly) appreciate the bustle and organisation of Piccadilly Station. And I am looking forward to visiting the recently reopened Whitworth Gallery.

But I still find the city centre difficult to 'read'. Streets lined with imposing buildings end in wasteland car parks.  Parts of the street grid around Portland Street are repetitious and anonymous. And despite having what I believe to be a very good innate sense of direction, I am too often surprised when I find where I actually am.  I don't feel 'at home' or at ease in Manchester in the way that I do in, say, Newcastle where the line of Pilgrim Street (the old A1) and the curve of Grey Street define whole related areas of the inner city.

There are certainly many fine Victorian buildings in central Manchester, vying with Glasgow in that respect. The western side of Princess Street provides a wonderful example of the variety of such architecture. But that is in a location where all the buildings are fully occupied and maintained.  Elsewhere what must surely be listed buildings have trees growing on the roofs and grass in their gutters; upper windows appear to have empty rooms behind them; and there is a generally scruffy appearance at ground level.  In the city centre only the Gay Village seems to display care and attention devoted to the built environment. Yet Manchester is undoubtedly one of the wealthier provincial cities of England - I assume that is the reason why there seem to be more street beggars and signs of homelessness here than elsewhere. But it's not those elements that give what I feel to be more of an 'edge' to the city after dark - perhaps there's more hard drinking here than elsewhere (although I feel the same sense of risk in Leeds late at night).

One Mancunian street, however, must be among the most learned in the world. I am talking about Oxford Road running out past two universities (Manchester Met and the University of Manchester) as well as the Royal Northern College of Music and also being the location of the Manchester Museum and the Whitworth Art Gallery. Yet Oxford Road is a broad and busy thoroughfare with very little of note for the public realm, and at its northern end, near the station, it betrays the low-level retailing and untidy appearance I experience elsewhere in the inner city. 

But today, at a meeting in Manchester, I've learned two related things about future plans for Oxford Road.  Firstly they are planning to narrow it, landscape it and create a greater sense of place and belonging for it.  That should reduce its anonymity and give it some character.  And secondly all the educational and cultural establishments along the road are going to produce a joint map and location boards instead of, as today, providing information only for their own institutions and ignoring the existence of others.  The Oxford Road corridor could take on a real identity.

Perhaps then my opinion of central Msnchester will become more definitely positive and less equivocal.