The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (37 page)

Remember Queenie? We were sat on the grass outside the Zion one hot sunny day, about 15–20 of us all drinking and smoking when Queenie came along swearing and shouting and offering to sit on anyone’s face! Poor Shaun (not with us now I’m afraid) was pinned to the grass whilst she did it . . . Yes, I remember Rizzla too at the precinct but also remember vividly the day he jumped off the top walkway between Robert Adam and William Kent . . . We all ran out of the pub expecting him to be splatted on the road when he suddenly got up, started swearing and went off to do it again! Crazy guy.

By the mid-eighties, the Hulmans were a scurvy bunch that is still recalled with wistful nostalgia. Someone has even set up a MySpace page for the Crescents, a mock personal profile in which the buildings describe whom they “would like to meet.”

Punks, goths, ratios, scum, dickheads, junkies, bums, bummer, animal, wasters, prats, knobheads, alkies, speedfreaks, perry boys, crusties, salts, pissheads, muggers, mugs, moonies, rastas, weirdos, wannabees, the grants, mohawks, psycho billies, spikey’s mum, cockroaches, methadone queuers, arsebandits, violent bastards, depressed hippies, pidgeons, barbed up scallies wankers, acid heads, pigs, robbers, crusties, the psv, indie kids, e-heads, dopeheads, trustafarians, the scream team, stringies . . .

They weren’t in the Athens Charter, were they?

I
N
1976,
A
young music journalist called Tony Wilson went to a concert at the Free Trade Hall in the center of Manchester. It was a thinly attended event, with just forty people in the audience. They had come to see an unknown new band called the Sex Pistols.

An hour or so later, Wilson left the hall burning with a messianic fervor for punk rock. He hadn’t experienced anything so exciting since reading Engels and hearing about Tristan Tzara at the Cabaret Voltaire. He found an old working men’s club on the edge of the Crescents and opened it as the Russell Club, a place for the new music that was beginning to pour out of the housing estates. It might not have looked like much, but Wilson’s factory of art—made very much in the mold of Andy Warhol’s cooperative and the Bauhaus—proved to be a greenhouse that germinated a new avant-garde, self-consciously reminiscent of the great age of modernist prophecy in the 1920s. The Fall, Joy Division, and all the rest of them played in the club in their early days. Wilson went on to found Factory Records, a record label that put Manchester on the international map. He employed the graphic designer Peter Saville to do the club posters and the album covers, and Saville did exactly what László Moholy-Nagy and Marcel
Duchamp and Georges Braque had done in the 1920s: he ripped things off, collaged them together, and passed them on, a stream of achingly hip images of a shattered past and an incomplete future.

Time and time again, the residents of the Crescents remember the music. James writes:

My fondest memory might be the solitary one of placing the needle on
Power Corruption and
Lies for the first time after buying the album the day it came out. To me, barely in my 20s, that record summed up the existential dread of Hulme, along with the freedom and creative possibilities it incited in anyone who could cope with the quotidian smell of piss in the stairwells and lifts and the dog shit everywhere, like a magic carpet of despair.

James shared his flat with a drummer, and together they blacked out the front room and lined it with egg cartons to form a makeshift recording studio. They weren’t the only ones: Lloyd ran two pirate radio stations out of the third floor in the Charles Barry Crescent, moving his gear to empty and inaccessible flats every time he got wind of a visit from the police. Joy Division came to pose for grainy, gray photographs on the concrete decks; bIG*fLAME, “Britain’s premier jazz fuck trio,” was born in the Crescents in 1982. A Certain Ratio, A Guy Called Gerald, Finlaye Quaye, the Inspiral Carpets, and many other bands jammed in the Crescents, recording and performing in the makeshift studios and clubs that riddled the buildings with endless thrashing, thumping, pulsating noise.

Around the middle of the eighties the music of Hulme started to change. The new bands weren’t beautiful, and their lyrics weren’t deep. An album from the Happy Mondays was titled
Pills ’n’ Thrills and Bellyaches
, and that’s more or less what it was about: it was a drug thing. Punk rock had been a beer thing—at least you threw your pint across the room when you were listening (if that is the word) to it. Tony Wilson’s brand of postpunk was a weed thing: you reverently placed the needle on the record and lay back on your bed, waiting for that sense of existential dread to surge through you. But the new rave music of the late eighties was all about the pills: speed, acid, and,
above all, ecstasy—chemicals that kept you dancing and grinning all night, all the next day, and all the way through the night after that. It didn’t matter how stupid the music was.

And that’s when the Crescents started to eat themselves. It began at a party in 1989. It was just an after-party at first, a few folk getting together in a kitchen after the clubs had closed to dance off the last of their drugs; but before long, things got out of hand. Everyone had brought their mates, and soon the kitchen was so crowded that no one could breathe, let alone dance. Bruce can just about remember what happened: “I recall Jamie taking a jackhammer to the wall of his flat to start a club? . . . But that resulted in him getting all his studio gear nicked?” They had knocked a hole through the wall to the flat next door, you see. And when more people showed up, they did it again. And when still more people turned up, they did it a third time. By the time Jamie put his jackhammer away, they had knocked through several walls and floors, so that the former kitchen was now an infernal cavern rammed with sweaty bodies and thumping bass.

There was a massive sound system in the front room—the downstairs kitchen had been turned into a bar selling Red Stripe, and the whole block seemed to ooze spliff. Not that it matters because every one is E’d up—gonzoid-eyed and scrunched-up faces leering into the dark haze. Careful as you wander around that staircase that sort of goes to the second floor.

Soon enough the parties started taking over the whole place, making it more or less uninhabitable for anyone who wasn’t dancing. Gonnie recalls

the memorable Hulme Demolition Sound System, not so much because of their music selection, but more because they set up in the little shopping precinct to play techno from Wednesday into Thursday morning, after the clubs had closed until the shops had opened, with just one police patrol car popping by to check the proceedings. Desert Storm Danny on the decks and his mate Joe running around
to motivate people. While elderly people shuffled past to get their breakfast milk on a grey Thursday morning, there would still be a few people dancing on the precinct roofs and others sitting around on sofas and easy chairs that had been abandoned in flats ready for demolition.

The city fathers who had destroyed the slums of Hulme in 1934 could not have, in their worst nightmares, imagined the brave new world that had taken their place.

A
S EARLY AS
1986, the Manchester city council had hosted a conference in which they tried to work out what to do with the Crescents. They clearly didn’t hold out much hope for a happy ending: the meeting was titled “Deck Access Disaster.” They’d tried everything. They had established a Housing Action Trust to deal with the renovation of the complex, but the residents ransacked the offices of the team that had been detailed to help them. They paid for a study to examine the social, economic, environmental, and housing situation of the area, but they soon gave up on the effort. Hulme didn’t look like a problem that could be solved, they said.

It couldn’t be solved by Manchester on its own, anyway, and eventually the city turned to the central government for help. In 1991, Manchester was given a grant to address its biggest problem—not quite enough money to sort everything out, but at least enough to get the city council out of the landlord business. The official goal of the project, stated in bland bureaucratese, was the creation of a “safe, clean, and attractive” physical environment where people could have “accommodation which meets both their housing needs and their aspirations.” Ultimately, the planners hoped, “the local population . . . will have a long-term commitment to the area.”

It was not not much to ask, one might think, compared to the demands of
The Communist Manifesto
or the Athens Charter. But for a place like the Hulme Crescents it was a marvelous vision, a future that for years had seemed possible only in the realms of fantasy.

There was a price to pay, of course: this was a future in which the Crescents themselves could play no part. The city council approached
the Dogs of Heaven, a local theater group, and asked them to concoct a crowning send-off, a fitting finale for the hell that the Crescents had become. On a clear night in March 1993, they pushed a car off the roof of the John Nash Crescent and lit the funeral pyre of a utopia that hadn’t turned out as anyone had planned. It was televised on the BBC’s
Late Show
.

There is another film, a home movie, that records the events of the day after. It is blustery, but the music is still pulsing away. A ragged crowd is pulling bastard wagons cobbled together from doors and windows, car parts and kitchen units. They pile these fragments at the foot of a gigantic phoenix made from fragments of the concrete building behind them, and they dance as the firebird consumes the offered remnants of their homes.

The Hulmans said good-bye to their Crescents in time-honored fashion. Graffiti on a concrete wall parodied the pronouncements of a council notice.

Madchester City Council, cutting jobs, destroying services, selling your home . . .

We have democratically decided that your homes are not important. Big business and yuppies have offered us large sums of money to have offices, posh shops, car parks, wine bars etc. in Hulme. One or two of you paid the poll tax. We have a few flats to offer you in Wythenshawe. You will not be able to come to the city and spoil our chances of attracting big business and the Olympics. For you scum who pay no poll tax, squat, or are too young or too old to be bothered with, we have a wide selection of park benches and cardboard boxes to offer you as accommodation. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Go to Hulme today, and you won’t find a trace of the Crescents. Instead you’ll see a neat suburb of brick terraces and tidy gardens which look remarkably like the back-to-back cottages that Engels described, give or take a filthy urchin or two. The future of Hulme resembles nothing else so much as its past.