Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (41 page)

Drenched and weary, we complete our Manchester trajectory with a return, across town, to Trafford Park. That monster mall, the Trafford Centre, conceived in 1984, is more of an antique than the Victorian mills of New Islington. The Thatcherite optimism, the glitz, the Cinecittà bravado, is suicidal, insane. Fascinated by what the posthumous history of a redundant mall might be, here was my answer: a space–time singularity. White hole. The absence of gravity. This swollen epic of consumerism was waved through, in 1989, as a job-creation scheme. There were 35,000 unemployed people within a five-mile radius. No public investment was required. The centre would provide 6,500 jobs, as well as taking on 2,000 construction workers. It didn’t much matter what was being built: the same argument plays for all grand projects. Coshed by an excess of retail opportunities, fast-food outlets pastiching global cuisines, multiplexes showing eight kinds of Harry Potter and four kinds of dinosaur, we flop in a phantom New Orleans and prod at some inedible oil slick, Gulf of Mexico fish substitute. If you arrive on foot, pushing your way through a hedge into the supersize car park, you are an alien, a non-consuming wetback. Get yourself spotted on CCTV using a camera and Special Branch will kick down your door, at first light, for no extra charge.

The Trafford Centre has its own microclimate and it smells like dead television. Like the aftersweat of an Oscar ceremony: hope dashed, lust curtailed, fear tasted. That heavenly dome. The Gloria Swanson staircases. The muscle beach statuary. Our clapboard Basin Street has no bougainvillea, no heady scents: it stinks of recycled air, in-transit passengers, plastic headrests. Muzak is malfunctioning in another room, there are no street bands.

‘It is unlikely,’ John Parkinson-Bailey wrote, ‘that another out-of-town centre of such a size will ever be built.’ But the Trafford Centre isn’t out of town,
it is a town
, a suburb bent on making Manchester its feeder satellite. And in this aim it anticipates the ambition of Tesco: to become a primary developer, by setting their provide-everything hangars within a secure ring of blocks and towers; thrown up, with the connivance, and approval, of local and central government.

The Trafford Centre is a quantum explosion of statistics: three miles of shopfronts, twenty-seven restaurants, a food court seating 1,600 people (eventually), nineteen escalators, forty-three hydraulic lifts, banks, financial services, eighteen ‘food on the go’ outlets, travel agents and estate agents, lottery points, parking space for 10,000 cars. The centre is an oil vampire, a carbon-emission hotspot. A De Quincey hallucination of superimposed cultures, pub-quiz quotations: Aztec, Chinese,
Hercules Conquers Atlantis
,
The Fall of the Roman Empire
, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers ocean-liner modernism. Granite and marble from the quarries at Montignosa and Querleta in Italy, at £5.8 million: lottery-winner acquisitiveness on an heroic scale. Premier League Xanadu. And all of it fixed in another era, the 1980s: retro television,
Ashes to Ashes.
In the great gold rush of Old Tory/New Labour consumerism, the Trafford Centre became the epicentre: of traffic congestion, blocked roads with anti-pedestrian earthbanks, strategic plantings. A shopping city and football stadium in the same park. An extension to the Metrolink was turned down by John Prescott, the Environment and Transport Secretary, who overruled the local planning inspector, while reasserting, with a thump on the lectern, his commitment to reducing private motoring.

It wasn’t long before the news came through that Urbis was blown. The thing that was never grounded, that never managed to find a workable description for the money that leaked away into the gutters around its wind-blown square, was exposed as a metaphor of foolishness, not an engine of regeneration. The icy skin reflected the world, but it was not of the world: a solid void. Redundancy notices were delivered to two-thirds of the staff, the invisibles. Urbis came into being in 2002, on the tide of New Labour boosterism, post-millennial loose change. And like all the other vanity interventions across the north of England, it crashed: the berg melted. But a neat solution was found, relocating failure, in the expectation that, after so many lies and prevarications, nobody would notice. The collapsed National Museum of Football in Preston could be transferred to Manchester. Fail better, fail bigger. Urbis will reopen as the thing they were determined to spurn, a museum, a museum of football: in a city where there are already two major enterprises running on their club shops, their global-branding initiatives, their TV channels. Urbis, it seems, is retreating to a form I remember so well from my childhood, from Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach: waxworks of Stanley Matthews and Stan Mortensen, after the monochrome Cup Final triumph of 1953.

Staying away from Hackney, and out on the road, I took any assignments that were offered, an untenured motorway lecturer, hawker of threadbare polemics: a low-rent turn. I staggered into retail-park campuses from epic detours around overturned lorries, potatoes spread across the M11, red-cone avenues, to face ranks of urban geographers, conceptual architects, land artists – never literary folk. I was spared that. When I returned home, after a few months, it was to check on outstanding invoices (outstanding in tardiness), to placate the bank, to shuffle red postcards for undelivered packets and summonses. The more I worked the less I had. Expenses piled up, nobody rushed to reward a person operating at the outer limits of the system. Promised fees melted away in massive tax deductions. Invoices were mislaid, or returned so that the expense claims could be filed to another authority in another office. There were unfortunate epidemics of Chinese flu in the finance department. At one point, after three months of delivering talks composed in transit, finessing journalism that might be profitably recycled, slapping down introductions for over-optimistic reissues, I added up the figures: I was owed more than £12,000. And I had no time to chase it. Keep moving. Another suitcase, another Travelodge.

Unless you walk everywhere, the new England is unutterably strange, a carousel of disorientating jumpcuts; coming off-road is like random digital stutter. Another plate of congealed fish and chips. An invitation to join the Automobile Association. A health check by slot machine. Another lecture to deliver: a madman talking to himself in public. Sunk in apathetic reverie, like all those other ghosts in neon cafeterias, I began to wonder if grand projects had ever been successful. And if, having once failed, they couldbe revived. I remembered the earlier trip with Chris Petit to Morecambe. And the Midland Hotel. That memorial to streamlined Style Moderne. To the age of the railway poster.

The sweep of bay has more cloud than it can comfortably accommodate. The pleasure to be derived from sliding back a glass door against the force of the wind, after checking in to the revamped 1930s hotel, and remarking the narrowness of the balcony, is tempered by wondering where exactly the nuclear power station locates itself, and where the Chinese cockle pickers were trapped by the tide and drowned.

While Anna rested, I made a tour with my camera, after deciding that it would be more interesting to investigate the network of small streets behind the showpiece esplanade. The pictures, when they come back from the chemist, are never right. You can’t capture it. The way Morecambe has worked so hard to reverse history, to bring back the era of lidos, pleasure gardens, well-kept municipal parks: the last resort. All Lancashire – industrialists, solicitors, showmen, Masons and Rotarians – flocked to dinner dances at the Midland. Buck Ruxton, the Lancaster GP, hanged in 1936 for the double murder of his wife and his maid, was a regular at social functions. On parallel avenues, running away from the windswept front, the town carried on its real business: failing tea rooms, Eric Morecambe heritage pubs, covered markets converted into budget malls, drinkers slumped on bus station benches, dope deals of spotty cyclists on wastelots behind abandoned petrol stations.

Oliver Hill’s Midland Hotel, from 1933, is a significant part of the unsunk fleet of English modernism: low, flat-roofed, rimmed with slender balconies. And always hungry for another coat of white paint. Deco curves arguing with starker German geometry. Hotel or hospital? Fresh air, exercise, sunbathing. The lull of the 1930s, the years when the middle classes felt good about themselves, when they experimented with Europe. Hill’s only experience of hotels and resorts was staying in them. He came from an established family. His connections with Sir Edward Lutyens (who designed an annexe for Manchester’s Midland Hotel in 1930) helped to secure the Morecambe commission. On a continental tour, Hill visited the Stockholm Exhibition, and took a fancy to the Scandinavian version of modernism. The space, the light. Like a vision of the coming Ikea philosophy.

The Midland was born out of confusion, set down on the site of a redundant harbour to act as a crash barrier at the end of a railway line. The convex side of the hotel, mirroring the sweep of the shore, faced the sea: a vision for every bedroom. A fashionable stopover for those who were part of the newsreel of the time. Rumour dresses the empty set with Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson, Winston Churchill, Noël Coward, Oswald Mosley, Coco Chanel. The rattle of cocktail shakers. Heels clicking on terrazzo floors and ankle-straps flashing over the seahorse mosaic by Marion Dorn. Hill was a promiscuous collector who invited the artists of the moment to chip in. He signed up the few he could afford: the two Erics, Gill and Ravilious, as well as the lovely Marion Dorn with her headscarf-turban, her Egyptian eyes.

Creosote-sleek London bandleaders from the Winter Gardens squabbled over bar bills with tight-lipped Lancashire funny men. Bud Abbott, of Abbott and Costello, was expelled at 4 a.m. for serious ‘misbehaviour’. He crawled from his taxi, two hours later, on his hands and knees, begging for readmittance. He’d seen what the rest of the town, beyond the blessed islet of this hotel, was actually like, the penitential bed-and-breakfast regimes who wouldn’t let him over their sandstoned doorsteps.

The intention of the Midland, from the first, was to keep the plebs out; working men invading the entrance hall, the show-stopping space with Gill’s relief panel, were instructed to remove their cloth caps. Arthur Towle, Manager of Hotels and Catering Services for the Midland Railway, insisted that trippers coming from the promenade be separated from bona fide guests. ‘We must not confuse them with the class of people who will be using the hotel.’ People like Trevor Howard, who was at Carnforth Station shooting
Brief Encounter
, or tooling around the Cumbrian backroads in his MG. And Laurence Olivier flashing a rictal grin at the punters, before giving them his turn, end of Empire as dying music hall, in the film version of
The Entertainer
.

The Winter Gardens Theatre, by this time (1960), was as posthumous as the Midland. But the hotel, under various management packages, struggled on. Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise checked in – two twin-bedded rooms – at £6 a night, in June 1969. The beached concrete liner rocked with the waves. The water table was so near the surface that at high tide, or after heavy rain, Hill’s flagship building would lift and sway, tugging at anchor, floating on the tide.

Pink paths. Grey scree of man-made jetty. Massing cloud curtain. The reality of Morecambe contradicts the Midland’s decorative art, Gill’s map of north-west England painted on the wall of the Children’s Room. His cavorting sea nymphs recall an era of luscious railway posters with rippling bathing belles, capped and toned, on diving boards above the Mediterranean glitter of a freshly installed lido.

Staying in this heritage terminal, once of the railway, now of the road, I felt like an unrequired extra in
Double Sin
, one of the Agatha Christie
Poirot
episodes they shot here. Television is our method of validating the past, through archive or costume drama. The Midland was somewhere to drive away from, the town of Morecambe was too scabby to pass the audition: they relocated the action to picturesque Kirby Lonsdale. But, weirdly, in the quest for warped authenticity, set designers recreated Eric Ravilious’s erased mural. The only accessible version of this obliterated artwork was banished to a mock-up of the hotel’s circular café (the space allocated for well-behaved proles) in the London Weekend studios at Twickenham. As an official war artist with the rank of Honorary Captain in the Royal Marines, and intending to sketch a rescue mission, Ravilious flew out from a base in Iceland on 2 September 1942. The plane never returned. Even before the hotel opened, Gill noticed how badly the Ravilious mural had cracked and how much it required patching. He wrote to his friend: ‘It seems a frightful shame to even talk of whitewashing it out, but can you possibly leave it as it is?’ Northern damp seeped through the wall, paint peeled, obscuring this prophetic vision of a deserted grand-project lido, a sky of miniature parachutes, angelic invaders floating from the clouds.

Urban Splash, the regeneration quango who backed Will Alsop’s Chips development in Manchester, promoted the restored Midland Hotel like a lost Ravilious. There are photographs in the local history archive of pedestrians gazing at CGI posters exhibited on the high fence protecting the site of the future hotel. White curves, blue sky: a Hockney postcard. Morecambe as Los Angeles. Palm tree, empty highway. And, by implication, naked people sharing showers in every room.

The new Midland uses design as a screening device: are you qualified to appreciate where you are?
Are you on set?
Or passing through, a one-night investor? ‘No woman had anything to do with this,’ Anna said of the en suite bathroom, which allowed no space for toiletries and featured a foldaway lavatory, inches from the bed. The cupboards were artworks with complicated pull-down racks. Narrow balconies offered the immensity of the bay as a challenge. Reminding us of how unreadable this shoreline is: sandbanks and rip tides, the argument between national park and dirty industry, recreation and paranoia. A fated landscape where storms wash away bridges, splitting communities, and where one bright summer day a taxi driver with a lethal armoury would go on the rampage, killing twelve people, including his twin brother, his solicitor, fellow cabbies, before taking his own life. The authorities ordered a lockdown at the nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield, where Derrick Bird had worked, before being dismissed for theft. Members of the plant’s private security force joined the unsuccessful pursuit of the man in the car, as he roamed the backroads, culling random pedestrians. Giving a darker stain to Eric Gill’s playful chart.