Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (40 page)

We were the only passengers. Anna tried to explain the reason for our ride to the driver. Why we would
choose
to stay, for a Manchester holiday, out by the airport? Did we know about the Trafford Centre? Deciding that we must be plane-spotters, the driver let us off at the airport pub, where we drank from plastic tumblers and watched a succession of planes coming in to land. Then we walked a greenway track, under surveillance cameras and along security fences, to the terminal. Where the only disembarking passengers were a group of Chinese tourists wearing surgical masks against the threat of swine flu.

After an hour, the coach picked us up again. The driver insisted on delivering us right to the door of the Bella Roma, a Pizzeria Ristorante on Palatine Road. Where, as usual, we were solitary diners, sitting under a panorama of the Coliseum, watching smart hoodies cluster around the chippie. The large man in the Man U T-shirt, from the bar at the Britannia, the one who kept his back to the cricket, had a good reason for his behaviour. We saw him being helped into the airport coach. He was twice blind: drunk and visually impaired.

We got back to the hotel to suffer the match. After the second goal went in, I switched off and wrote up my notes.

A couple of months later, I find myself driving back to Manchester. It is still there and still wet. A report I had barely finished transcribing, on my earlier expedition, was snatched away, and turned into a script to be voiced by a German actor. There were people on the move – children – marching across town, clamped to their headphones, following my unreliable directions to invented places.

I was booked into a Premier Inn and slated to give a talk in the belly of the beast, in Urbis, that giant amputee octopus. Nothing revives a city like a terrorist outrage, a rogue car bomb clears the ground and stimulates development. Contractors put in their bids before the dust settles. Designer T-shirts in the covered malls of the post-IRA Arndale Centre proclaimed:
KETAMINE JUST SAY NEIGH
.

Urban Splash, the architectural imagineers, are not buying into this big-bang thesis. They reckon that nothing works, as an engine for regeneration, like a failed Olympic bid. The hard graft has been done, the nexus of connections is already in place. The schmoozers are still on salary. All that deflated rhetoric has to find an outlet. Manchester was up for change. And Urbis was part of the fallout, the collateral damage, a museum of the city dedicated to cultural amnesia. Vaughan Allen, the former style journalist appointed as chief executive, made it his first task to unpick his own mission statement. ‘We banned the word “museum”,’ he said. ‘The word “museum” means things in cabinets, and we didn’t have any.’ Urbis was about freeing up space, while avoiding the drag of classification. You channel-hop: fashion, music, manga, gardening. Constantly changing shows. Sampling. Snacking. Hit boredom with homoeopathic doses of the same. Vaughan’s buzzword was ‘zeitgeisty’. ‘We realized what we had created was a Sunday supplement.’

Addressing an Urbis audience, wriggling on hard plastic chairs, I felt like Willie Walsh after the opening of Heathrow’s Terminal 5: when 500 flights had been cancelled and 23,000 passengers were about to depart without luggage. There was ‘insufficient familiarization’, Willie said, failing to understand that the nature of these non-places is that they are all too familiar, but factored to be nothing more than that. You never achieve intimacy. Tactile exploration without penetration. Photos from our earlier Manchester walk flickered behind me, in case the audience ran out of puff. The room was like a corridor furnished to cope with the traumatized survivors of a natural disaster. I summoned a submerged cabal of luminaries: De Quincey, Canetti, Wittgenstein, Sebald. All of whom got out of town at the first opportunity.

As I negotiated my own escape, two local bad boys, cans raised in salute, waved me over. ‘I’m John and so’s he. That stuff you were banging on about, making it glamorous: bollocks, man. Manchester’s crap. We’ve been stuck in this shithole thirty years, we should know.’ They had the scars to prove it, prison pallor dusted with carcinogenic freckles, indelible midnight stubble. Sniffing out the complimentary booze, the low-intensity fuss of a doomed opening, a new magazine too big to steal (or sell), they were the real spirits of place; foot-soldiers of the legendary Savoy Books, a subversive operation that somehow combined the peddling of pornography with patronage of valuable lost writers like Jack Trevor Story and Maurice Richardson. And the conceptual brilliance of getting old rocker P. J. Proby to record
The Waste Land.
And Fenella Fielding to trill her way, in outraged innocence, through J. G. Ballard’s
Crash
.

A younger man attached himself to our little group, a walker, newly returned from Berlin. He said that he had set out one day, on a whim, from Alexanderplatz to Poland. He followed the railway line. He took no photographs, made no notes, carried out no research. There were drawings, sketches. He would turn the journey into a graphic novel.

The cold water in the Premier Inn is off. The hot tap is scalding, volcanic. You run your morning bath before you turn in for the night. Give it time to stop steaming. The electricity, so they tell us, will be cut off at 11.30 p.m.: don’t get caught in the lift. Our window doesn’t shut, but the bed is big and comfortable. The breakfast bar is occupied by genial bouncers and roadies, who are exchanging tales of mayhem, life on the motorway.

Back from the Urbis gig, Anna declines to eat in the empty restaurant, which is a low-ceilinged rabbit hutch, jaunty with muzak. You are safe, she reckons, with an Indian. They tell her, at the desk, that there is a recommended place ‘just around the back’. Blinded by the rain, twenty minutes in, we abandon this quest. It’s one of my conceits that canalside development packages come with bars and bistros and that the inner-city marinas of Manchester are now sufficiently established to have at least one of these, which has not yet been found out, declared bankrupt, rebranded, boarded over.

Steepling warehouses, black water. Out of the gloom, a fuzzy halo of neon around an Italian restaurant. It’s one of those nights when five customers is five too many. The chef is drinking at the bar, resisting overtures from a pompous greeter in a slippery suit. When my fishcake arrives, after fifty minutes, it’s more like refrigerated cattle cake. You graze your tongue licking it, you can’t bite. ‘Everything good, signore, signora?’ And for once, sodden, starving and provoked, they get a true answer. ‘Awful.’

There will be no charge. Snatching up her coat, Anna lets her linen napkin fall across the decorative candle, which smoulders noxiously, then bursts into flame. I throw some iced water over the conflagration and we rush for the door, leaving a charred and smoking mess. The lowlife revellers from Urbis are pissing into one of the ornamental trenches, but the rain will wash it away by morning.

There was one more walk for the following day. Stephen Bayley, the original design commissar for the Millennium Dome, had been talking up an intervention in a revamped industrial quarter of Manchester known as New Islington. Other metropolitan commentators followed his example, enduring or enjoying the ride out of town, the cab, the lunch, a congenial interview with the Stirling Prize-winning architect: Will Alsop.

‘I like sitting at tables,’ Alsop said. ‘They are the horizontal planes of social discourse. Most proper conversations happen across a table, particularly if wine is involved.’

The structure was called Chips (as in ‘cheap as’) and it looked, in magazine illustrations, like an off-cut from the container stack on the A13, downwind of the landfill mountain in Rainham. This cheery intruder on post-industrial blight consisted of a block of 142 apartments, fewer than half of which would be made available under the government’s ‘Rent to Homebuy’ scheme. The usual consultation process had been offered to locals (i.e., an opportunity to agree with what was already in place) and they were said to regard the jazzy invader with conditional affection.

‘I’d like to say the name Chips was my idea,’ Alsop said, ‘but in fact it was the locals who came up with it.’ Fat, golden-yellow, metal chips, oven-ready and heaped on the plate, beside a dollop of brown-sauce canal. Mouth-watering colour in enhanced digital representation. The big block lettering of containers in transit from the forgotten dirt-yard of Chobham Farm, Stratford. And I thought of another set of chips too: the last throw of a desperate gambler.

New Islington didn’t show up on any of our giveaway maps, which meant that we were free to ramble, to follow our instincts. We had been in this unknown city just long enough to know where to avoid, how to navigate by river, canal, culture quarter. And how to rely on postcards collected from the splendid Manchester City Gallery. Last night’s Italian restaurant, I now realized, was a recapitulation of the claustrophobic gloom of Pierre Adolphe Valette’s blue-tinged painting
India House
(1912). Snaky reflections in the water, warehouses looming out of the murk. After the intense and unsettling experience of a tramp around the halls, stairs, chambers, of a new (new to me) museum, with the urge to see everything and still find time to
concentrate
on highlights, discoveries, coming away with a few postcards is a necessary ritual, a ticket of release. The correspondence I received from Ballard always came on postcards, from which you could track his movements across Europe: Rome, Madrid, Paris. His unexpected interests: Caravaggio, Raphael, Titian, Breughel, Henri Rousseau. With a reserve stock, from the Tate and the Museum of Modern Art in New York: Dali and Max Ernst. Spread Ballard’s cards across one of Will Alsop’s tables and you possess the catalogue of the Shepperton writer’s psychopathology: Sigmund Freud, Henry Ford, and the dust cloud from ‘the world’s first atomic bomb’. Crucifixions, velvet nudes. Hotel lobbies, magnum cities. Cannibalism on a Spanish beach.

Off-map, beyond anywhere you are advised to shop, it gets more interesting, more Chinese. Supermarkets. Factory-size restaurants catering to out-of-town wedding parties. Bilingual signs for the HSBC bank (which is already Chinese-owned). Heading in an uncommitted north-westerly direction, we achieve an orient of the heart. Green tiles and orange, wide-skirted pagoda roofs:
WING YIP, CHINESE
&
ORIENTAL GROCERIES. GLAMOROUS CHINESE RESTAURANT
. A proper street, used and occupied, evolved into a nice mix of pushy incomers and doomed survivors. In the newspaper shop they are friendly, but they don’t do much in the way of news. In the kiosk-bank, the Anglo-Chinese manager sets us right for New Islington. It is more than a rumour, he lives there. And he loves it, this separation from the street, with the screening devices of contemporary design, the electronic security systems. He is delighted that we, strangers, tourists, should want to locate his building. It confirms the decision he made, his faith in a provisional, CGI future. He flips a hand-phone, taps images on a screen, a silver wafer like a device for taking your own fingerprints. He relishes this sense of entitlement, of being a pioneer, an investor in a private island: beyond Manchester, beyond anywhere. Shanghai. Hong Kong. Canary Wharf. Dubai. New Islington.

The selling point of the enterprise zone is its refusal to connect with the street, the through-traffic heading out of town, the dignified abdication of the warehouses along the cobbled canal. Everything here aspires to Berlin’s death-strip, the shadowland of the Wall as it comes back to life, as scavenging film-poets exploit it: wastelots, rubble gardens, exposed cellars, immigrant kiosks, metal-shuttered booze boxes. A headlong collision between cocky architecture, tolerated public art and brazen hucksterism: new plaques on old mills, twisted avenues of girders mimicking dead forests, towpaths with panoramic hoardings making a movie of the future:
HELPING TO REGENERATE NEW ISLINGTON
. You could define the area, its distance from the commercial centre, as territory in which they can’t, at present, afford to build another prison. Strangeways, the ugly penal colony housing most of the cast of the
Coronation Street
soap opera, is across the river, on the west side of Bury New Road.

Stephen Bayley speaks of Will Alsop’s ‘tipsy bravura’. The Chips stack is a prime example of the electively unfinished look, perilously balanced blocks in fuck-you colours, suitable for students, artists, city-rim campers. Copywriting for the project makes reference to vanished industries, containers, scrapyards. The effect is throwaway but not disposable. And, although it has been extensively written up, Alsop’s cluster is resolutely open-ended, a work in progress. That is its charm: it feels squatted, builders stroll through at a recreational saunter, their tools have been arranged on concrete slabs, like conceptual art waiting for a sponsor. Alsop says that what he is trying to promote is ‘space’, unmediated, empty as a scooped skull. ‘Everyone goes through the same door. You can’t tell who isrelatively wealthy and who’s not.’ Neither can you tell who works here, who lives here, and who is trying to cobble together enough material for fifteen hundred words in the broadsheets. Everybody we see through the window is carrying furniture. Natural greenery (weeds) have been set in concrete tubs in a field of stone chippings. Curls of barbed wire dress green-mesh fencing.

ISLINGTON WHARF: BUY TO LIVE. TRY BEFORE YOU BUY. LIVE FOR 1 YEAR WHILE BUILDING YOUR DEPOSIT
(
LIMITED AVAILABILITY AND SUBJECT TO STATUS. ONLY VALID WHEN PROSPERITY IS PURCHASED
.)

The rain gives Alsop’s containers a glaze of authenticity. Nobody is around to make the pitch. The offices for the neighbouring development, the tower block, are shut. This is as close as we have come to SuperCity: parked units, mobile homes that do not move, a vertical trailer camp heaped in a dangerous arrangement that isn’t going to crash. The building predicts a community that may or may not arrive. It exists only because funding has been achieved, at a certain level; but not quite enough, so it appears, to get the thing done.