The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (34 page)

I
T WASN’T MEANT
to happen that way. No one could have predicted it back in 1971, when the Crescents were first opened and everybody
gathered at the Zion center for tea. Then it was as though some wonderful revelation had been delivered, on time, on budget, and looking fantastic.
The Manchester Evening
News ran an article titled “A Mini Town with All Mod Cons.” It hailed the “complex of overways, underways, and linkways . . . houses with central heating and double glazed windows” as a self-contained “quiet refuge,” complete with their own “walks, shops and a library.”

There were four crescents, each half a mile long, set amid a vast open park. Each crescent was seven stories tall, with hundreds of flats, all of them designed to the latest ergonomic space standards and all of them accessed by open decks that overlooked acres of greenery. The designers of the Crescents, Hugh Wilson and Lewis Womersley, had named each of the four buildings for a great British architect—William Kent, Robert Adam, John Nash, and Charles Barry—and Wilson and Womersley clearly hoped to join their august company. “It is our endeavour at Hulme,” they announced, “to achieve a solution to the problems of twentieth-century living which would be the equivalent in quality of that reached for the requirements of eighteenth-century living in Bloomsbury and Bath.” It was a bold claim: the smart Georgian terraces of Bloomsbury and Bath were a long way from working-class Hulme. But in 1971 anything seemed possible.

T
HE
C
RESCENTS HAD
been a long time in coming; but the future always is, isn’t it? It had been more than a hundred years since a young German businessman named Friedrich Engels first arrived in Manchester. His father had sent him to that white-hot crucible of the industrial revolution hoping that a good dose of work at the family mill would make the young man abandon his naive idealism; but Engels junior loathed his new job, and it did nothing to moderate his radical views. He took up with a certain Mary Burns, who brought him to all the parts of Manchester that weren’t on his father’s itinerary. Engels was so horrified that he published a book describing what he saw.
The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844
painted a vivid picture.

In a rather deep hole, in a curve of the Medlock and surrounded on all sides by tall factories and high embankments
covered with buildings, stand two groups of about two hundred cottages, built chiefly back to back, in which live about four thousand human beings . . . Masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and darkened by the smoke of a dozen factory chimneys . . . In this atmosphere penned in as if with a purpose, this race must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity.

Engels left the city and his father’s job soon afterward and ran away with Mary Burns to Paris, where he met Karl Marx. In 1848, as revolutions swept across Europe, they published The Communist Manifesto, in which they demanded, among other things:

Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.

By 1971 many of these demands had been met. If you required a monument to Marx and Engels, all you had to do was go to Hulme.
All property belonged to the City Corporation of Manchester, and everyone drew their state benefits from the state-owned post office. No one inherited anything; they had nothing to pass on, and even if they had it would have gone to taxes. People traveled into town on the state-run public transport system, the unions and corporations formed industrial armies, and comprehensive education was available to all children. The Hulme Crescents, gigantic concrete buildings in a sea of greenery, even completed the “gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country.”