- guardian.co.uk, Sunday July 28 2002 09.15 BST
- The Observer, Sunday July 28 2002
Despite our best efforts, very occasionally, those of us who live in London are obliged to abandon for a moment our fabulously busy schedules, glance up from our outrageously stylish metropolitan lives - stuck in traffic jams, shelling out for the world's most expensive child care - and recall the fact there are other cities out there in Britain, too. The former Hacienda DJ Dave Haslam, in his definitive history of the 'pop cult city' Manchester, England, has a term for these sudden startled northerly gazes: he calls them 'eruptions of interest'.
I'm talking to Haslam in a café dedicated to his city's musical heritage, and outside, one of those 'eruptions' is in full swing: the world's media, and even some of capital's, has arrived for the seventeenth Commonwealth Games, and the city has decked itself out with bunting and logos, and is full of volunteers in ironic flat caps and earnest purple cagoules, wielding Day-Glo batons, determined to remember to smile.
'You are just grateful that at the moment it's good news,' Haslam says of the attention. 'In the past, up here, it's generally either been the gangster thing, or the Strangeways riots, say. And because there is not consistent reporting on the city in the national media, and no one really knows what is going on, what you get are weird distortions.'
Some of these caricatures are hard to correct. The last time a journalist came up from London to see him, Haslam says, she insisted that he met her at Piccadilly station, went with her to the nearest bar, and then accompanied her back on to the train when the interview was over. 'She was convinced she was going to get mugged or embroiled in some huge drug deal or something,' he says. 'It's like the new version of cobbled streets and George Formby. It seemed impossible to me that this intelligent woman who worked for a national newspaper could still be thinking that way: but she really seemed to believe that the dark satanic mills were coming to get her.'
Sir Bob Scott, who organised Manchester's Olympic bids, and who is currently launching Liverpool's attempt to be named European Caital of Culture in 2008, is a professional challenger of these kinds of North and South prejudices. He holds to a generous theory that London's general disregard of the rest of the nation comes down to stress. 'Anyone who works in Liverpool is at maximum half an hour from home,' he suggests. 'Anyone who works in London is an hour and a half or two hours away. The whole process of urban survival in London compared to life in Liverpool or Manchester or Birmingham is horrendous, and what gets lost is that Londoners literally get caught up in their wonderful city, and all of its distractions and attractions, and can't really think beyond it.'
Norman Mailer once ran for the governorship of New York on the platform that it should seek independence from the rest of the United States. For whatever reason, living in the capital, it sometimes feels that London has achieved that status by default.
I can see both sides of this. I'm a lapsed Brummie, and grew up through the Seventies in a city whose civic pride had been diminished both by the collapse of its integral industries, and by a succession of disastrous planning decisions that had made the ring-roaded centre soulless and derelict. When I returned to Birmingham nearly a decade ago, however, to report on the ways in which the council was transforming that centre - the world-class convention centre and concert hall, the new public spaces and broad pedestrianised boulevards - I was astonished both by the pace of change and by the fact that the civic leaders, once a byword for stubborn gesture politics, were now talking in terms of 'returning the city to the people' and of 'long consultative processes with developers' and 'citizen friendliness'.
The odd thing is, that 10 years on, those messages still are only just breaching the M25: it is apparently even now a cause for gentle South-Eastern mirth, on a par with Harvey Nicks' pilgrimages north, or the proposition that Gateshead has cutting edge art galleries, that property developers are thinking of investing in the centre of the second city. 'It may sound ridiculous,' said one businessman recently of his office's move to Birmingham, feeling the need to apologise to his fashionable audience 'but we feel that the second city is seriously undervalued.'
As Bob Scott suggests to me, it has always been easier to sell the idea of Manchester, the world's first great industrial city, to the world, than it has been to generate much interest about its projects in London. Billy Connolly used to have a theory about Manchester's various bids for major sporting occasions: eventually, by a long process of attrition, he suggested, by keeping on putting their name on shortlists with some of the world's sunnier cities, they would wear the organising committees down, and they'd be granted one just to shut them up. Now that has happened, at least for the coming week or so, Manchester is home to the greatest show on earth. Unpalatable fact that it might be, watching these Games, London might even learn something.
One of the most vivid engineers of a decade of change in Manchester is Tom Bloxham, head of the development company Urban Splash, wearer of a goatee beard, and recipient of an MBE aged 38. I met Bloxham last week in his sweeping glass offices in Castlefield on the bank of the Irwell in the centre of the city. Before we talked, he showed me a picture of what this office site used to look like three years ago: an area of apparently unreclaimable industrial no-man's land, less brownfield site than set for Mad Max. In the time that it might take the London Authority to enter a consultative process about a cycle lane, Bloxham has transformed this waste land into a Conranesque paradise: intelligently designed homes and sympathetic offices within walking distance of the city.
Bloxham came to Manchester from London as a student and was amazed at the wealth of buildings that were lying empty. A lot of his friends were artists and musicians and writers and wanted spaces in the then virtually uninhabited centre where they could 'work and play' (as Bloxham is fond of saying). He worked out a way of buying some of the more interesting post-industrial buildings around Castlefield relatively cheaply and converting them first into retail space and then into living space. The area has been transformed, and others have followed suit.
'Oddly,' Bloxham recalls, 'the great model for this kind of living was in the Halifax ad with the guy in the loft, "Easy Like Sunday Morning". When we first started we went to the Halifax to borrow money and they turned us down...'
Bloxham grew up in London, and what he found surprising when he moved up here, was the degree of co-operation and partnership that was possible between the public and private sectors: 'While, in Liverpool for instance, the council was still trying to score political points off central Government, the council here wore suits and would dance with anybody,' he says. 'Even with the devil, or Mr Heseltine disguised as the devil... if it was good for the city.'
I wonder if he thinks London should be looking to Manchester as a model of development? 'Just look at Wembley,' he says. 'The great scandal is the contrast between the Commonwealth Games stadium and Wembley. More money has already been spent on the National stadium - £120 million compared to £110m - and work has not even started. It's an absolute outrage. That level of waste would never be allowed to happen here. We would have been crucified by now.'
From a fairly early stage, he suggests, Manchester City Council were very supportive of the idea of Urban Splash. One of the turning points for everybody proved to be the bidding for the Olympic Games. 'I remember it being a laughing stock in the London papers,' Bloxham says, 'lines about the shooting competition taking place in Moss Side and so on, but even when it was announced that we didn't get it there was a tremendous sense of celebration in Castlefield. The people of Manchester suddenly realised that they were not locked into competing with Sheffield or Birmingham or Liverpool, but could take on world cities like Sydney and Los Angeles. And there was a great surge of confidence in that realisation.'
Bob Scott, who started his career as a theatre manager in Manchester, believes this kind of status has, in reality, yet to be earned. 'Our national problem,' he suggests, and part of the reason that there remains a divide between North and South, 'is that we have a world-class city in London and then we have got second-class cities. We haven't got any first-class cities at all. That won't go down very well in Manchester and Birmingham. But they have to face up to the fact that they are not yet on a par with Barcelona or Rotterdam or Milan. They are a step down from that because they are not state capitals. Milan can look Rome square in the eye. To make the North West into Lombardy or Catalonia or Bavaria will require a sea change in thinking. What Manchester must not do is to take a 10-year holiday after the Games. it must say: What next?'
Howard Bernstein, Manchester's chief executive, who when I see him has dressed up in his best crumpled jacket for the arrival of the Queen, agrees, up to a point, with Scott. 'This is what I call maybe stage two of about 10 years' hard work,' he says, 'the aim of which was to make us a very successful regional capital. Once the Games have finished we can then really strike out.'
He points, as he must, to the new business opportunities: the Spinning Fields site near the centre of town which will add two or three million square feet of new office space; the need to build on the key strength of the universities - the consolidation of UMIST and Manchester into one world-class institution; the drive to persuade companies to have their headquarters here, to begin to halt the drift of North Western brain power down to the South East. 'If we can get those things right then all the infrastructure will come too,' he says, keeping the faith. 'If you looked at Barcelona in the early 1980s, and forgot the weather, it would not look too dissimilar from Manchester. I think we are the best two examples of how sport and culture can regenerate an area.'
He could go on, but he has an opening ceremony to think about. But still he follows me out of the Town Hall, sucks on a fat cigar on the council steps. 'We are not preoccupied with London,' he says. 'We never have been. We need a strong capital, we also need very strong core cities. We are not competing with London, we are competing with our peer cities, Frankfurt, Lyon, Milan. And we have never been better placed to do so.'
From the perspective of all-powerful London it might just perhaps be easy to be cynical about some of the ways in which cities like Manchester - or Leeds or Bristol or Newcastle - have begun the process of post-industrial regeneration by using capital projects, museums and heritage centres, retail outlets and art galleries (the line forever blurring between the two); the way they have put their faith in a leisure and pleasure economy, and hoped the rest will follow.
But while sometimes it can seem that marketing is being mistaken for culture - as in Hoxton or Borough - the development of the core cities has a feel of realistic strategy and ambition. There are new landmark buildings on Salford Quay: the Bilbao-esque Lowry, and Daniel Libeskind's wonderful new Imperial War Museum (designed in glorious Mancunian fashion: 'I wrapped a ceramic teapot in a plastic bag and dropped it from my window,' Libeskind said, 'and I saw that I could select three pieces that would be enough to represent the entire curvature of the universe...') are well-used buildings of impressive quality. The stadiums for the Commonwealth Games are magnificent and, unlike those in Sydney, on which they are loosely modelled, they will have full use by the city once the Games are over.
What this kind of investment generates, Scott suggests, in contrast to the Dome - built as a monument to sponsors not to people - 'is a tangible sense of civic pride. When I came to Liverpool two years ago there was open warfare between the local authority and the local newspaper. It was horrendous. But I think if you produce something like the Commonwealth Games or the Capital of Culture bid, and so play it that it is unthinkable that the city does not get behind it, then suddenly you get a kind of unity of purpose.'
Even five years ago, it would have seemed laughable that Liverpool, which for so long had seemed on a course of posturing self-destruction, would have been party to such schemes. Now immensely likable Liberal Democrat council leader Mike Storey, a teacher, talks of an inevitable 'joined-up approach'.
Sitting eagerly forward on his sofa in the City Hall, he talks of how 'great European cities have a certain quality and feel about them - the streets are clean and safe, there are vibrant public spaces, there are events and festivals, the city feels civilised and alive - and that was what we wanted to achieve here. One of the first ways to begin to achieve that is to get the retail environment right, and then encourage people to move back in and live in the heart of the city. And we've got to hold our nerve on that.
'There is a lot of poverty here, and inevitably those people are going to look at the money we are spending on things like Capital of Culture and think: why is that not going on sorting my problems out? But we believe that it is going on that. The city has to attract investment. A decade ago there were maybe 1,000 people living in the streets around here. Now there are 10,000, and soon there will be 20,000. For far too long no businessmen have been allowed through the door here; they were the sworn enemy.'
Under Storey, Liverpool has been forging close links with New York - because of its historical relationship there is talk of twinning - and it is already twinned with Dublin and Shanghai, cities that have revolutionised themselves in recent years.
'I was lucky enough to be in New York talking to some of the city leaders there who had turned that city around, and I said, you know, how did you start that process, and they told me: "You talk the city up to everyone you can, you sell it and sell it and sell it, and then you look around for the big cranes on the skyline." And we've been doing that and lo and behold the cranes have started coming.'
As well as projects such as the conversion of the old Bryant & May factory with Urban Splash, Liverpool is about to finalise a deal with the Duke of Westminster, and Grosvenor Estates which will see a £700 million development of the semi-derelict Paradise Street area of the centre of the town, not with malls, 'but with proper city architecture, shops and housing, and some landmark buildings'. In addition they are engaged in association with Jarvis plc, which has a £72m project to build 15 new schools in the city. Storey is a pragmatist: the bottom line of the Capital of Culture idea is that it 'will bring in £200m and create several thousand permanent jobs.'
And a lot of the indicators are going in the right direction: emigration out of the city, which was nearly 10 per cent, is now less than 1 per cent; house prices are going up, even, for the first time in years, in Toxteth. You can see the effect of the City of Culture bid already, Storey likes to think: 'People are no longer looking down at the ground, their heads are held high.'
For all of this, though, Liverpool still has nine of the poorest 20 postcodes in Britain, and their problems will not be talked away. The most visible sign of the new Liverpool are still the obvious ones. On the surface the place looks like every other city centre in Britain: with its Hogsheads and its Yates's Wine Bars and its Wetherspoons, its mobile phone shops and its retail experiences. Manchester is further ahead in this process but, admits Bernstein, 'one of the criticisms that can perhaps still be levelled at us is that perhaps the hype does not measure up to the product. And,' he adds, 'I think it should be that way. That there should be a little gap between those two things. And I think it should be our job to close that gap.'
Dave Haslam, who has seen first hand how the outburst of youthful creative energy of the late Eighties, centred on 'Madchester', and which happened in spite of everything, became corpora tised, remains sceptical of the promises. 'It was interesting,' he says, 'watching the creative spirit become official, how everything becomes part of the glossy brochure mentality. When you wear your cynical hat you look at these galleries and lofts and what you see is brochure fodder. The marketing people like their vistas .'
He makes a powerful argument against the leisure culture as a panacea. 'The Games and everything are great, but only if they mean that prosaic everyday Manchester gets regeneration too. The education system. The transport system.'
He holds the suspicion, that as in London we have been bought off with café culture and sold short on public services. 'You have to look at school exclusion rates, male suicide rates, teenage abortion rates, all of which are way above average here. It's that rather than the bricks and mortar that will define the change. In that sense it is much bigger than Manchester. It is not a North-South divide any longer. It's a divide between the suits and the unsuitable if you like. In Britain we seem increasingly happy to live with that, to accept that is how things are. That you can travel a mile one way or a mile another and you are in a different world entirely. There are a lot of questions asked: Whose city is it? Is it the developers' city? They are so powerful here now. Is it the people waiting at the bus stop? Or is it the city of people who might be excluded from even that?'
Tom Bloxham argues that given the will and the design-led vision, Manchester can conceivably be all those things to all those people. He is not in it out of the kindness of his heart, of course - Urban Splash is a very profitable company - but, he argues, 'we never build a bad building. Every scheme we do wins regeneration awards and architecture awards and we also win awards for our entrepreneurship and for me the three go hand-in-hand. What we have done so far is a win-win thing, places that were blights become attractive, we bring wealth into the city centre and also people that will complain about things. Most of the people who buy our apartments are bright and articulate: they won't put up with bad roads or bad schools or whatever and they shout about it, they get involved in the city, so you get a virtuous circle.'
Bloxham is trying to apply his stripped-wood philosophy to social problems. He has a number of new ventures with housing associations and is working on the Manchester East project, which after the Games will bring 12,000 new affordable homes to the stadium area. 'We know how to bring city centres back to life,' Bloxham says. 'The real challenge now is to regenerate the edges of the centre, the very deprived, very impoverished communities there.'
He talks of a couple of schemes, one with low-rise Seventies housing, one with very dense back-to-back terraced housing, which he thinks will be very successful in turning some of these places around. 'A lot of it,' he says, with some zeal, 'is about self-fulfiling prophecies. Three years ago, where we are sitting was one of the bleakest sites in Manchester. Now it is one of the most desirable. You have to believe that can happen all over.'
The way toward this, in Bloxham's view, is to build the kind of partnerships that London, at a strategic level, seems to find it incredibly difficult to form. In this sense, the problems of London are the problems of Manchester and Liverpool and Newcastle magnified exponentially. When I ask Bob Scott about the challenges of marketing cities compared to the chaos of running theatre companies he suggests that the difficulties are much the same: 'You have to make sure you have the critical meetings and honestly thrash out the problems early on. It sounds simple but too often, and particularly in the capital where there is often more of a range of bodies involved, those things still just don't happen.'
Scott lived in Manchester for 26 years before he moved to London - to Greenwich in fact, where he is also chairing the committee, or perhaps one of the committees, looking into the future of the Dome. 'I sort of expected London to be like Manchester but bigger,' he said. 'But really it is nothing like that. It's another country. I mean really big players in London don't know each other at all. No two big players in Manchester or Newcastle don't know each other. It's unthinkable. And that's where the great possibilities for those cities lie.'
The solution Scott believes lies in part in government not only learning from some of the examples of 'best practice' in places like Manchester - letting its strategic authority govern, not getting lost in hubris or mired in politicking - and moreover encouraging London to think more about the possibilities beyond the M25.
'One of my great complaints is that if you talk to Ken Livingstone or to London businessmen, or media people even, they just don't think about the rest of Britain enough, don't realise that strengthening Yorkshire and Lancashire and the Midlands would immensely strengthen London. It would take some of that pressure away... the fact you have got to build four million houses in the south of England when cities like Liverpool and Manchester are actually markedly underpopulated is a pretty vivid description of national policies not working.'
Sooner or later, Mike Storey believes, some of that thinking will be done for them. 'People in Manchester or Liverpool or Leeds or Birmingham, are going to start saying "hold on matey, our restaurants are as good as yours, our theatres are as good". The media is lagging behind what is happening up here. And when that perception changes people will eventually rebel against the problems and the expense of living in London, will realise that they can have a comparable life and a far better lifestyle in other cities in Britain.'
The opening ceremony to the Commonwealth Games contained the usual coded musical messages. It began with 'One Nation Under a Groove' and ended with 'Ain't No Stopping us Now'. Up here, they half-believe this week that for once, the whole of the rest of the country is listening.
The great divide
HOMELESS Average number of people sleeping rough per night London: 264 Manchester: 14
PROPERTY Average house price London: £171,692 North West: £76,465
CHILDCARE Cost of a full-time live-out nanny per week London: £300-£450 Manchester: £200-£240
PINT OF STELLA Porter's Bar, Covent Garden: £2.90 Hogshead, Oxford Road, Manchester: £2.35
NIGHTCLUBS Cost of admission on Saturday night Ministry of Sound, London: £12-£15 The Atrium, Leeds: £7
TRANSPORT Cost of a weekly travelcard London: £36.90 Newcastle: £12
CAPPUCCINO Nicole's Restaurant, London £2.88 Moderno Café, Leeds £1.60
