Book review: Rebuilding Manchester

You could have bought the two-up, two-down terrace in Moss Side I lived in with three student friends between 1998-99 for £20,000, give or take. The sky blue hulk of Maine Road, home of Manchester City FC – then managed by Joe Royle and soon to suffer the ignominy of being relegated to the third tier of English football – loomed two streets away. I paid £40 a week in rent, and always on time, too – rumour had it that our landlord “Pete” went to bed with a handgun under his pillow.

These days, Man City are back in the Premier League, and owned by men so rich that last month they didn’t blink at signing an Ivory Coast international for £24 million on a reported weekly wage of £220,000 a week. The club has moved on geographically too, to the east of the city centre, in a new stadium originally planned for Manchester’s (failed) 2000 bid to host the Olympic Games.

That Manchester had the gall to the bid for the Games just four years after an IRA bomb tore the heart out of the city centre says much about the ingenuity and spirit of its people, and only two years on the city was hosting the Commonwealth Games. It’s that spirit that town planner Euan Kellie – also a student in the city in the late nineties – pays tribute to in “Rebuilding Manchester.”

Kellie’s book is the story of the regeneration of a post-industrial city economy. The IRA strike on 15 June 1996 that injured 120 people was not the first attack on the city, of course – more than five decades earlier the Luftwaffe had also wrought havoc. As Kellie notes, the terrorist attack gave the city the opportunity to “rectify the hasty mistakes of postwar development.” Michael Heseltine visited and declared the situation as “an opportunity, perhaps unique, to rebuild and recreate the centre of one of England’s great cities.”

More specifically, it provided the chance to recreate the Hulme regeneration model on a wider, city-centre scale. In Hulme, Manchester City Council had set up an independent company with a blend of private and public experience to transform an area of concrete desk access council flats into mixed-use, mixed-use tenure neighbourhoods under the Government’s City Challenge programme. A total of £250 million was spent between 1992-97. Then deputy chief executive of Manchester City Council Howard Bernstein said: “Over the past ten years, we’ve seen housing-led strategies, employment-led strategies and transport-led strategies. We’ve tried to produce regeneration-based strategies that incorporate all of those.”

Kellie writes that Manchester built on this holistic approach to expand the city-core in the wake of the IRA bomb. A taskforce was promptly set up comprised of public and private partners and, after a masterplan was chosen, the council bravely committed to determining all planning applications within a period of eight (EIGHT!) weeks.

Kellie divides the post-bomb masterplan process into five sections – commercial, residential, historic, retail, leisure and space and connectivity. The emphasis is on physical schemes – don’t expect to read anything here on the implications of Mancunians rejecting the congestion charge, or how the combined authority clout that city-region status brings could impact on regeneration. Throughout, it is the partnership approach that allows the city to reinvent itself. As Kellie notes, the rebuilding is more about bricks and mortar; it is about people. If “Rebuilding Manchester” has a weakness, it is that there are few insights into the characters – the Leeses and the Bernsteins, the Tony Wilsons and Tom Bloxhams - that made the rebuilding possible. Readers looking for observations on what it is that defines the Mancunian spirit will be disappointed. Kellie is a town planner, not a social anthropologist, after all.

Nonetheless, “Rebuilding Manchester” is required reading for anyone with an interest in place-making in post-industrial cities. The exciting thing is that the end of the story remains unwritten. As Manchester City Council chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein writes in the forward. “It is a great … and never-ending story."

A snapshot of social exclusion in Manchester

Those who have watched the career of regeneration photographer Len Grant, whose book Reclaiming East Manchester we reviewed last month, will be pleased to hear he's just published another work, this time a more personal exploration of social exclusion.

Billy and Rolonde sees Grant capture on camera the lives of a heroin addict, a homeless alcoholic and a Zimbabwean asylum seeker who have benefited little from the large-scale regeneration that has sought to improve homes and communities in and around Manchester.

In the book's epilogue, Grant writes: "Like many British cities Manchester has undergone something of a renaissance in the past decade or so. City-centre living, new shopping centres, huge inward investment: the good times have been rolling. Even many of the inner-city neighbourhoods, previously neglected, have enjoyed significant renewal.

"However, there are many who remain untouched by the regeneration efforts .. .who have been excluded - or have excluded themselves - from the rest of society, busying themselves with a daily routine of survival. It is these stories that I wanted to tell."

A couple of the stories have a positive conclusion, Grant says. The first part of the book documents the life of Billy - which was the street name he used when he became a heroin addict and before he participated on a rehabilitation programme and reverted to his former name, Rolonde.

Billy is a cheerful, polite young man in his 30s who admits that he offered himself as a subject for the book because he thought it would be an incentive to get clean. He did so successfully, while also rekindling relationships with a family he had neglected for years. He gave up smoking, too. Grant's record of the two years he spent talking to and photographing Rolonde is illustrated with unromanticised images and extracts from Rolonde's letters to Grant and the diaries - moving and funny in equal measure - that he kept while in rehab.

As Grant writes in his epilogue: "Stories like this have no ending. There will always be more Billys and more photographers trying to make sense of it all."

Well worth a read.

Book review: Reclaiming East Manchester

A new book has been published to mark the end of the New Deal for Communities programme in east Manchester.

Reclaiming East Manchester: Ten years of resident-led regeneration is by photographer and writer Len Grant, who was commissioned back in 2008 to produce a book to chart the development of the area during the decade-long NDC programme. I initially assumed the book would be heavily PR-y, but I was pleasantly surprised. Through a fairly impressive portfolio of photographs as well as interviews with regeneration professionals who were involved in the work and dozens of residents, Grant documents what east Manchester was like to live in before the NDC programme began, key events in the history of the scheme, problems that were encountered and how residents feel about the area now.

However, I thought the most interesting bit was the front section, which includes prefaces by John Prescott, Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City Council and, most importantly, Sean McGonigle, who was NDC co-ordinator for the area between 1999 and 2009.

McGonigle previously led the council's housing programme in the then run-down city-centre districts of Hulme and Moss Side - for that reason you would assume he'd have been used to seeing areas of extremely entrenched deprivation. But, he writes, when he visited Lower Beswick in east Manchester for the first time in 1997, he was shocked. "I'd worked in housing for many years but I'd never seen anything like it," he says. "It was scary as hell. There was row upon row of boarded-up properties, with brown metal shuttering over all the doors and windows. Rubbish and burnt-out cars were everywhere. The place was just awful and it left a deep impression on me."

McGonigle tells how he was tasked with putting together a bid for east Manchester to the Estates Renewal Challenge Fund (ERCF) - a programme left over from the previous Conservative administration - only to have it rejected by the Government. The book includes an extract from the response letter by Hilary Armstrong, then minister for local government and housing, which said: "My concern about the ERCF bid which Manchester submitted is that I am not convinced that...spending money solely on social housing would deal with the overall problems facing east Manchester."

A few months later Armstrong visited east Manchester and announced that the Government was developing a new approach to sustainable regeneration - "something more appropriate for this area", as McGonigle writes - which would later become the NDC programme.

McGonigle writes candidly about the challenges of getting the NDC projects started. "We were faced with some angry and dissatisfied residents...who had a very low opinion of the city council. They felt let down and abandoned and we had an uphill struggle convincing them things would get better," he says, and mentions three particularly vocal female residents who he dubbed 'the Witches of Eastwick'. He also suggests how things could have been done differently, saying the way residents were elected to sit on NDC boards was not always fair, as particularly opinioned individuals often dominated discussions and made it difficult for other residents to be heard.

All in all, this first section in particular is well-worth a read. Visit http://www.thisiseast.com/ for more information about regeneration projects in east Manchester. Len Grant, meanwhile, has another book coming out later this month about social exclusion, which we will no doubt be reporting on...

A rat’s eye view of regeneration

Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, first published in the UK last year, is the debut novel of US author Sam Savage. It tells the story of a rat who lives in a ramshackle bookstore on Boston’s Scollay Square in the 1960s. Firmin, the runt of his litter, nibbles on the books around him in order to survive, later developing the ability to read and as a consequence a very human - and not at all rat-like - sense of the world around him. A voracious reader, he reads books including Oliver Twist, Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby, Middlemarch, Alice in Wonderland and many more. Savage’s book chronicles Firmin’s musings as he attempts to make friends, firstly with the bookshop’s human owner Norman Shine, and then later on with the struggling and eccentric science fiction author Jerry Magoon.

Firmin’s exploits take place against the backdrop of a huge urban regeneration project. As the story moves on, so too does the city council’s plans to redevelop the neighbourhood in which Scollay Square is located. Early on, we learn that the city council and mayor plan “to replace Scollay Square with a large flat piece of concrete, and on top of that, to frighten people, they were going to put government buildings, like forts”. Pictures were published in Boston’s Globe newspaper, showing how Boston would “gleam like Miami” when the project was finished. But for Firmin, and local traders, “a sense of doom began to gather around us like a poison mist”. As the regeneration project gathers pace, eviction notices are served on traders and residents, windows are boarded up and buildings burn. Whole blocks are cleared. Local storekeepers are resigned to their fate and Firmin is sad: “At night the stars wept.”

The regeneration project described by the rodent is loosely based on a real scheme, an author's note at the end of the book reveals. Scollay Square (pictured left in the 1880s) did really exist in downtown Boston until 1962, by which time the area had become an ageing and seedy district. More than 1,000 buildings were demolished in the area as part of the redevelopment project and 20,000 residents were displaced. An entirely new district was built on top of the square, featuring government, state and federal buildings, such as Boston City Hall.

I enjoyed the book. Not so much for its apocalyptic view of regeneration, but more because it has many funny and moving moments. Worth a read.