There are cities that reveal
their charms on introduction, shamelessly, and there are others that give you
more time to get to know them, cities which are not voluptuous but viable, easy
to get around, good humored, self-effacing without being apologetic.
Manchester, 200 miles to the
northwest of London, and just a half-hour drive from its noisier neighbor
Liverpool, is one of the latter. It would be incorrect to say it lacks beauty,
for the great mills and warehouses built in the days when cotton was king, and
Manchester was its Versailles, are on the scale of Italian Renaissance palazzi
and can indeed look like Italian Renaissance palazzi on sunny days and when,
standing on a bridge over, say, the Rochdale Canal, you are in the mood to see
the best in things. Hotels, clubs, apartment blocks now, the old mills and
warehouses have made the change well from temples of ceaseless industriousness
to palaces of ceaseless pleasure. Victorian neogothic architecture enjoyed a
flowering in Manchester too, most notably in the great spired almost fairy-tale
Town Hall, a sort of cathedral to commerce that exudes confidence and
prosperity yet is not without delight in magniloquence for its own sake.
Moonlight on wet streets, the
distant prospect of chimneys made phosphorescent by their own smoke, industrial
valleys looking nostalgic in these nonproductive times, and on Saturday nights,
whatever the weather, girls with mottled thighs and boys in short-sleeved
shirts drinking mojitos en plein-air—such are the city’s sights. But it’s
substance rather than poetry that Manchester has always sought to convey, a
no-nonsense stolidity reflected in all the public buildings, squares, and
statuary, commemorating men of affairs, free traders, and reformers rather than
artists or adventurers.
If Manchester wears its cultural
achievements lightly, that is because it finds showiness, like its
geography—the city is positioned in the very path of wet clouds coming in low
off the Pennine Hills—absurd. A hundred years ago Manchester rivaled Berlin and
Vienna as a city of music. The Hallé, founded by a German immigrant 50 years
before, had become one of the world’s great orchestras. It tells you something
about Manchester at that time that a young Westphalian musical prodigy such as
Charles Hallé should have chosen to make Manchester his home. A small but
active population of German expatriates—some in flight from religious
intolerance, others simply doing business—was already established in
Manchester, making music, meeting to discuss ideas, encouraging an interest in
literature and in art. If the native Mancunian needed this spur to his own
hesitant creativity, it is to his credit that he welcomed it wholeheartedly.
Though the Jewish population was
small when I was growing up, Manchester seemed a Jewish city to me, so at home
did we feel in it and so in tune with its energetic comic pessimism. Foremost
among the pleasures of the city today is the Rusholme Curry Mile, a stretch of
Asian restaurants a short walk from the university, which, if you were dropped
there at night, you might take for a street in Bangladesh or Pakistan. A great
city knows it is never more itself than when it can make room for what is
different to itself, the corollary of which has been, in Manchester’s case, the
adoption by other cultures of Mancunian modesty and sense of the ridiculous.
You will hear better Jewish jokes in Manchester, as a consequence, than you
will ever hear in London. And I suspect the same holds true of Bangladeshi
jokes.
The presiding genius of the place
remains, though he died in 1976, the painter L.S. Lowry, famous for his
industrial landscapes, canvasses that simultaneously teem with life and express
the desolation of the northerner over whom the clouds too rarely lift. It took
a while for Lowry’s greatness to be recognized, so determinedly plain about his
art was he, so bent on downplaying his gifts. Outside of football—which is a
fiefdom of its own—it’s not done to blow your own trumpet in Manchester. People
will laugh with you on buses or in shops because they take the human comedy, of
which they are no less the butts than anybody else, to be universal. This is
not a population of a once fabulously rich cottonopolis making the best of its
decline; Manchester’s laconic mirth was always its strength. And you breathe it
in on the streets still like a tonic. |