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Dr Alice Roberts, Manchester’s politics and genetic myths of the British Isles

29/9/2020

There was a radioactive sunset burning Manchester into a ruddy glow on Sunday 20 September but that meant it had been a beautiful blue sky day.

TV production companies like blue skies, extra clarity and all that, although a late sun makes you have to pick your angles carefully.

I was filming with Dr Alice Roberts for Channel 4’s Britain’s Most Historic Cities. Dr A is well-known from so many TV shows, Digging for Britain, Time Team and Coast etc...but she is no ordinary presenter since she’s also a biological anthropologist, author and academic. Hardly Ant & Dec.

Walking around and chatting between the actual filming put me in mind of Michael Portillo, ex-Tory minister, political commentator and presenter of Great Railway Journeys. I am pretty sure Dr Alice Roberts has never been compared to Michael Portillo but what I mean was he was also more than just a TV personality when I'd taken him around several years ago. Aside from being a former Conservative Cabinet Minister, Portillo is an author and historian so he had a deeper knowledge which made the whole process of filming quicker, slicker and more enjoyable. Same with Dr Alice Roberts.

There have been a few Britain’s Most Historic Cities broadcast including those featuring Norwich, Chester, Cheltenham and York.

Manchester’s complex history meant the focus was on politics and radical thought in this city. My role with Dr Alice Roberts was to set the scene of the early industrial city and then cover Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx’s time in the city, and underline how Manchester helped shape the thought of these fathers of modern communism.

Getting ready to film on Kennedy Street

Getting to the filming day was an interesting process. First being contacted by Sonja Nicholls, the researcher, then by Lucy Hershon, the producer, then taking part in a preliminary visit by Tony McKee, the director. The production company working with Channel 4 was IWC Media and the whole process was smooth and professional.

Tony was fine company on that earlier visit and it would have been good to share a pint. But not with the Covid-19 alienation guillotine factored in. The measures to keep us all free of the virus were stringent. For instance, on the day of filming, nobody was allowed to arrive by public transport, easy for me as I cycled. Lunch had to be taken separately so while I could be in the same restaurant I had to be seated away from the crew. I also had to sign a health declaration some days before filming and then one on the day (I think) and I also had to have a temperature test. All this and remember there was no filming indoors – hence the weather was a blessing.

We talked Engels and Marx at Chetham’s under the guiding eye of Tony and the rigorous control of Lucy. Somebody said how small communists were in Manchester during the nineteenth century, meaning communism not communists, and the whole conversation spun off into laughter about how those titchy communists never had a chance. Someone deadpanned about Marx and Engels being so tiny it was hard for them to get their point over as nobody could see them. Or hear them. Another person said, it was a miniscule movement. Give them a yard they’d take an inch.

As usual, Fergus Wilde, the Chetham’s host and librarian was on hand offering wisdom and wit. As usual the old 1421 buildings were on hand offering ineffable charm and beauty.

Tony McKee snaps Fergus Wilde and Alice Roberts

The interior of the building because of horrid Covid had to filmed with just Alice. Somebody took a great picture of her at the table where Marx and Engels had studied in 1845.

I always remember a pair of guests once getting very excited about seeing that bay with the table and gushing about it on Tripadvisor. Unfortunately they'd put how much they had enjoyed seeing the table where Marks met Spencer. Retailers of the world unite.

Inside Chetham's Library at the famous table

Lunch was at Salvi’s Mozzarella Bar in the Corn Exchange. The group had been booked into Wagamama but I persuaded them to go for a local indie instead. Better food, spread the local love.

As we walked between the next filming locations, from The Vine pub with its weavers' windows, the canyon of textile warehouses along Princess Street and the Rochdale Canal, finishing at the old Birley and Mackintosh Mills, we talked about British DNA. As you do.

Alice said biological anthropology was showing that prior to the more recent immigrations in the second half of the twentieth century, the gene pool is remarkably similar across the British islands.

The main influence on our DNA came in the Bronze Age, the Romans, Normans and others scarcely affected it, nor did the Norse. We’ve long known that there is no such thing as a Celtic race by blood (read this by Stuart McHardy) despite a cultural attachment to the idea which is an entirely different thing. Nor it seems is there evidence to support the long held belief in major Anglo-Saxon invasions after the Romans left, despite a cultural attachment to the idea, which is again an entirely different thing.

It seems there may have been Germanic speaking tribes in the east of England before the Romans arrived. There would have been trade and mutual comprehension across the North Sea between what are now the Low Countries, Northern Germany, southern Denmark and England. In other words a form of English was spoken in England before England was ever a thing.

Large invasions never probably happened

Life, for many people, continued into the ‘Dark Ages’ in the way it had before the Romans arrived and during their almost 400 year occupation.

If this is true the English Language became the dominant one through interaction and adoption as the, so to speak, lingua franca. As this excellent article from Chris Catling says ‘Increasingly, linguists are characterising English as a contact language – emerging from the interaction of different languages – rather than the imposed language of a dominant class.’

It's fascinating stuff. So, fundamentally, the white Britons whether in England, Scotland, Wales or the island of Ireland are closely related. Separate cultural identities may exist but there are few biological differences traceable in our DNA.

By the way, the Britains Most Historic Towns' episode about Manchester will be released late spring, early summer 2021.

By this time the UK will be definitely and sadly for many, out of the European Union, but what isn’t so definite is whether we’ll be out from under Coronavirus.

A radioactive sunset at Mackintosh Mills

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Manchester's huge Old Trafford art show

23/5/2020

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Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition 1857
Date: 1856-7
Architect: Edward Salomons
Demolished or lost: 1857/8

I had an email this week about an event in Old Trafford that is largely forgotten. This was the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857. The remains the largest temporary exhibition of artworks ever gathered.

The location is now crossed by Talbot Road in Old Trafford, and was bordered by the Botanical Gardens to the north. White City Retail park occupies the area of the Botanical Gardens. Manchester cricket club, now Lancashire had to move a couple of hundred metres or so down the road to accommodate the Art Treasures Exhibition.

The Art Treasures Palace covered an area of two football fields and had its own railway sidings, landscaping and catering arms. The building had the appearance of three large decorated arches. The central and largest arch allowed access to the Grand Central Hall, which was over 700ft long terminating in a stage for a 60 piece orchestra. Behind the orchestra sat a concert hall organ.

As prominent art historian and visitor, the German, Gustav Friedrich Waagen, wrote: ‘I have never seen a building containing such collected works of art so advantageously lighted as this, while the rooms are airy, and of felicitous proportions.’

Oddly, while visitors weren’t allowed to make notes or sketches, they were allowed to touch the paintings. Modern curators would curl up in a ball at the latter these days. Mills closed and people were brought by train to the exhibition from all across the country, some commentators sourly noting how some of the workers scarcely left the refreshment tents.

'THERE IS AN OLD TRAFFORD ZOOM TOUR ON THURSDAY 11 JUNE. You can book here. The session will be recorded so can be viewed at the guest's convenience.'

To add to the attraction of the occasion the Manchester Royal Botanical Gardens got involved too. As the official advertisement announced: ‘A communication is opened from the Palace to the Gardens, thus adding to the interest and variety of the Promenade’.

The delivery of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition from conception, through construction, to demolition was jaw-dropping. This was Victorian energy condensed and delivered in its purest form.

Following on from the success of the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, and subsequent exhibitions in Dublin and Paris, all focusing largely on industry and science, Mancunians proposed an Art Treasures Exhibition. The idea was dreamt up in February 1856, money raised in March, royal approval granted in May, building at Old Trafford began in late summer and by February 1857 the building was completed. 16,000 artworks were in place by May 1857 and the exhibition opened.

During the next 142 days 1.3m people visited, including Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the King of Belgium, the Queen of the Netherlands, Louis Napoleon, Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, Lord Palmerston, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Gaskell, John Ruskin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Works by artists such as Titian, Raphael, Velasquez, Holbein, Rubens, van Dyck, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Reynolds, Turner, Constable were on show, as were works from the recent Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Indeed the exhibition did much to cement their reputation. Other ‘treasures’ included sculpture, china, furniture, even suits of armour.

An unfinished Michelangelo painting (shown above) was christened The Manchester Madonna after its first public display during the exhibition. It now resides at the National Gallery and depicts Madonna, Jesus, St John and angels.

For the first time photography was given prominence including a controversial tableaux piece by Oscar Gustav Rejlander called The Two Ways of Life (shown below). This depicted a pair of young men being offered advice from a patriarchal figure. On one side lie sinful pleasures including lots of topless women and on the other side are virtuous pleasures including reading a good book. It was scandalous at the time but when Queen Victoria bought a copy for Prince Albert the indecency tag faded.

By September the show was over. Within months nothing was left, the vast building had been demolished and dismantled, its 650 tons of cast iron, 600 tons of wrought iron, 65,000 square feet of glass and 1.5 million bricks recycled. The organisers and sponsors of the exhibition, all from Manchester postal addresses, made a small profit of £304 which was used for charitable purposes.

There are some permanent reminders of the event. German musician Charles Hallé had assembled a group of musicians to entertain the guests. The response encouraged him to set up the Hallé Orchestra in the city.

The London-based Art Journal praised the exhibition but couldn’t help a snobby dig at the city which had delivered the huge event. It wrote: ‘That Manchester should propose such an exhibition was surprising enough; but how much greater was the marvel that such an exhibition as was actually formed, should have established itself at Manchester!’

Fortunately another metropolitan magazine the Athenaeum was more accurate. ‘Before we can become creators we must educate a race of appreciators who will admire and buy. Nineteenth-century Art has broken from the patron’s drawing room, and appeals to the crowd. The Manchester Exhibition is a vast epitome of Art, ancient and modern – the best of its kind ever attempted.’

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The Crow, The Fish, Chronological Confusion and James Bond

18/12/2018

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I WAS followed by a crow today because I had a fish in my hand.

The fish was a fried fish from the chippy called the Hut on Liverpool Road into which my good friend, a Scot, by the name of Steven Lindsay, has in a spirit of civilising progressiveness encouraged the sale of the battered sausage. It’s ‘a belter, a Glasgow delicacy,’ as he describes.

The crow was noble in its devilish darkness, its head swivelling from side to side each time laying a black eye upon me and my haddock. It looked healthy as hell too, with a sheen on its feathers as rich as a polished jackboot. As Mark Garner of Manchester Confidential says, when birds look at you like that, they remind you of nothing less than their ancient relatives, dinosaurs, in this case a big predatory T-Rex.

The crow hopped from wall to wall on Longworth Street never taking its dead vision from me as though Hitchcock were directing it. A woman in her mid-thirties was walking the other way. “It’s following you,” she said with a strange smile, “is it your familiar?” She was dressed completely in black, like the crow. The only difference was she had platinum dyed hair and very black mascara.

The city was looking interesting in the late afternoon winter. It was half three, the light was failing and in the cold air every building seemed outlined in ink against the tarnished silver sky. Yet it was getting a bit scary down on Longworth Street. I swear that as soon as the woman spoke the crow gave her look, bobbed its head, and flapped away arrogantly. I was left alone with my fish and a slight chill down my spine.

Hey, stop staring at my haddock

Writing the time as half three, reminds me of something. I had a typical Northern European misunderstanding on the weekend. I was conducting tours of Chetham’s Library at 1.30pm and 3pm. There were a couple of Norwegians on the first tour who’d arrived a little early. They’d arrived at 12.30pm. This was because they’d rung me in the morning and asked me when the tour was starting. Half one I’d said. In many Northern European countries people think half one is half twelve, an hour earlier, in other words half the hour. In our island logic it clearly can only mean a half hour after the hour.

The Nordic guests were still delighted to come on the tour of these almost 600-year-old buildings: as were an American woman and her daughter who were looking up universities in the UK. The daughter wants to do a Masters in building conservation over here. When Michael Powell, the librarian, revealed letters from the Heywood collection signed by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, they shook their heads in astonishment.

The 3pm group loved the buildings too. As Michael, with his trademark sardonic delivery, was entertaining the guests while showing them remarkable materials such as a medieval bible in manuscript from the 1300s and the utterly lovely first edition of Saxtons’ Atlas of England and Wales from 1579, one woman noticed something about her friend. She thought he looked like the founder of Chetham’s School and Library, Humphrey Chetham, so she got him to pose behind Michael’s back and took the picture. “It’s the nose and the eyes,” she said later. David, as her friend was called, seemed happy to go along with the description. He was Humphrey for a day.

All David needs is a the right hat and he'd be a perfect seventeenth century benefactor

This reminded me of the time when I was taking a large group around Manchester Art Gallery and we stopped in the Pre-Raphaelite gallery. As I was talking I saw four people detach themselves and walk to a Holman Hunt picture. This was The Shadow of Death and features Christ with his arms raised in a Y-shape. It depicts him in his pre-Messiah days when he had a proper job and he’s stretching after sawing wood in his carpenter’s shop, ominously in the Hunt painting, his shadow on the wall behind is reminiscent of the crucifixion.

The wandering four from my group split. One took a picture, while, with Christ’s Y as the first letter, the other three made the MCA of the Village People’s disco blast. It was hilarious - if irreverent.

'Young man, there's no need to feel down/ I said, young man, pick yourself off the ground'

On that second Chetham’s tour were a father and daughter from Perth, Australia. They have relatives in Hartlepool and had seen Chetham’s Library on an Australian travel programme. Robert had called me in the morning to see if there were any spare tickets. There weren’t, but he seemed desperate to come along and when he said he wanted to drive from Hartlepool to Manchester and back for the tour in a day, I had to say yes.

The English (rather than perhaps the Scots’) sense of distance isn’t long. Two hours in each direction is perhaps the upper limit for most. When I grew up in Rochdale I never went out in Bury, all of six miles distant. Then again there wasn’t much there that Rochdale didn’t have aside from a better fish market and no teenager goes six miles for fish. Even when the crows leave you alone.

Robert’s daughter is studying at a Sydney university. Previously she’d stayed with friends on that side of the country but way outside Sydney and she said: “We’d drive six hours each way to get some city life.” I guided a journalist from Colorado once and he lived two hours from the nearest shop. I like to live two minutes from the nearest shop. And bar. With a national park and the Pennines within ten to fifteen miles. Convenience is so convenient.

Traffic grinds to a halt again in Manchester

Mind you, thinking of the Aussies, given the state of congestion on Manchester roads at present, it takes six hours to get two miles to The Quays, at rush hour. Something like that. Suffice to say that instead of the projected Sat-Nav time of two hours and forty minutes to get to Manchester from Hartlepool it had taken Robert and his daughter an hour longer.

The Chetham’s tours were the last of the year and so Sue McLoughlin, the heritage manager, and her granddaughter Imogen, provided mince pies and mulled wine. It was all very jolly.

By the way the best question of the week I couldn’t answer came in the Audit Room of Chetham’s. I was talking about John Dee, the enchanter, mathematician and the Warden of Manchester from 1595 to 1605, at the end of his long and slightly preposterous life. Dee was probably the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest. Before Manchester he had been in what is now Germany attempting alchemy, in other words making gold from base metals, the impossible dream of so many dreamers through the ages. He was spying for England too and, by sheer coincidence, through his obsession with symbols, gave himself the code number of 007.

I said something like this to the group, “Ian Fleming who created the James Bond’s MI6 character didn’t know Dee had done this. The inspiration for Fleming’s 007 seems to have come from the number assigned to a code breakthrough for naval intelligence in World War II.”

The a voice came from across the room. “There’s MI5 and MI6, but what happened to MI1/2/3 and 4?”

I had no idea. I have no idea. Next time I see that crow I’ll ask it.

John Dee, 007, as he would have looked in Manchester. Give that man the Best Dressed Magician Award, 1595, right now.

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Wabbits, Scweamers And Bwutes

9/4/2018

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Haunted Underworld guests posing with me. Tina, the screamer, is on the right

THE DUCK, a female mallard, chased the male mistle thrush, stopped and then the thrush walked towards the duck. It looked very much like cross-species bird flirting. It also looked ridiculous given how much bigger the duck was than the thrush, three times bigger at least.

That this avian courtship was taking in place in front of group on an April Fool’s Day tour made it all the more delicious. The whole event was mad, with me delivering twenty five crazy Manchester stories and guests having to guess up to five false ones. We finished in the Town Hall Tavern where the group were tasked with singing Oasis’ Don’t Look Back in Anger to the tune of George Formby’s When I’m Cleaning Windows.

The false story, I only did one I included in the end, concerned a carving of rabbits in the Cathedral, called Rabbits Cooking The Hunter.

This is was the fib and what I said: ‘Elmer Fudd was right in his unceasing quest to kill Bigs Bunny. Rabbit should be pronounced 'wabbit'. We've just been talking about Samuel Johnson's 1750’s dictionary in Chetham’s Library. Well another of the books reveals something else. And it seems that for certain 'r' animal words the original pronunciation was 'w', this comes from a twist in the sounds handed down from the Germanic into Anglo-Saxon and which was continued in use by peasants. Thus in the 1300s it might not have been unusual for a peasant to have said: 'The wabbit and the wobin are worried by the wat.' This only applied to animal words. So, Elmer Fudd was right. Rabbit should be said 'wabbit'. Easter bunnies, Easter wabbits.’

I’m pleased only two of the teams on the tour guessed this was the false story.

The wabbits cooking the hunter

The group on the Salford tour

The day before the above tour I’d taken a full house of guests along Chapel Street in Salford,on a tour jointly organised with Salford City Council. This route is remarkably rich in colourful detail and national significance. In less than a mile it captures the essence of these central areas of the conurbation. We went inside Sacred Trinity church and St Philip’s church, both of whom supplied a splendid welcome, as is the way in these modern, progressive places of worship. A big, big thanks to Kolyn and Alice respectively in Sacred Trinity and St Philip's. (And for that matter, a big thanks to Shelagh McNerney, Head of Development, Salford City Council, and her team for facilitating the tour.)

In St Philip’s we went into the atmospheric crypt and saw the walled up grave of one of the most important military figures of the first half of the nineteenth century, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Thomas Arbuthnot, fought in the Napoleanic Wars from Spain to the West Indies. He was the North and Midlands of England military commander during the tumultuous 1840s, a time of great distress and Chartist unrest. He, apparently, carried out his role with great sensitivity.

His house was on the Crescent close to St Philips. He died without children, his wife having died many years before. Arbuthnot’s funeral in 1849 was a huge affair packed with military pomp and attracting thousands of bystanders. His simple wooden coffin can be glimpsed through ventilation holes in the crypt. We finished the tour by singing Ewan MacColl’s hymn to the gritty reality of Salford seventy year’s ago, Dirty Old Town. It was sung with relish by the guests.

The crypt under St Philip's church

Speaking of gritty, on one of the Mayfield tours recently a gentleman told me how his teacher during the 1960s had referred to Manchester’s three rivers, the Irwell, Irk and Medlock as the Inkwell, Mirk and Mudlark due to their extreme pollution at the time. Now there are brown trout back – as this video shows which I filmed with the Environmental Agency a few years back.

I loved another story on a recent Mayfield tour. Up on the platform level there’s a rusting piece of kit. Its official title is British Rail Universal Trolley Equipment. The acronym used by rail workers and managers was BRUTE. One guest on a snowy tour recalled how his mother was once taken aback in Victoria Station by a warning sign which used the acronym but failed to define what it meant. The sign read, ‘Please be careful of BRUTES on the platforms.’ Wise words.

An upended Brute

I mentioned an old department store on Stretford Road, called Paulden’s’, on a Principal Hotel tour recently. One lady remembered working at the Refuge Assurance, as the Principal Hotel was formerly, when a dramatic fire in 1957 destroyed the department store. Everybody was upset about the loss of this Manchester landmark apart from, “lots of people in Hulme, as all the records of their hire purchase payments had gone up in smoke with the fire.”

The Haunted Underworld tour on Sunday was great fun. Thanks must be extended to Tina Miller for her screams at the climax of a couple of stories in the dark. Screamers on ghost tours spread a fabulous mood of tension amongst guests, which is a fine quality in a spooky, dark, underground location. In fact, I might hire Tina to seed fear in the dark.

All the Haunted Underworld group line-up at the end of the tour

Finally, it was a great pleasure to chat with James Naughtie of BBC Radio 4 about Manchester at the time of the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester. We were in Chetham's Library looking at the Manchester Mercury newspaper from 17 August 1819, the day after Peterloo. The shows highlighting particular days in British history through the filter of front pages of newspapers will be broadcast in May and June. It seems from the picture below that Mr Naughtie was offering me lessons in how to play the invisible piano. Probably the best piano for me to play as long as its inaudible as well as invisible.

James Naughtie, the invisible piano and the Manchester Mercury

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Mayfield Masterplan Delivers A Green And Exciting Solution - Plus Consultation Dates

1/3/2018

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THE Mayfield Partnership masterplan delivers a dynamic and exciting vision for the city.

Of course I might say this given I am presently conducting tours (click here) across the site, but as a city centre commentator I believe I am justified - objectively - in making the claim.

The masterplan designers are Studio Egret West, they should be congratulated for the coherence of the plan given its vast 24 acre extent. If you are familiar with Manchester then 24 acres is an area slightly larger than that bordered by John Dalton Street, Cross Street, Exchange Square and Deansgate.

The plan integrates progressive design with heritage assets to spectacular effect and includes a 6.5 acre linear park along the River Medlock plus the opening out of the huge Mayfield Depot from 1910 in a sensible and attractive manner.

It’s the imagination here that captivates. There’s almost a childlike exuberance. I remember as a kid being asked to create a fantasy city. The Mayfield plans look like the place I drew, aside from the lack of a rocket ship docking area. Look at the pictures and you might catch a flavour of what I mean.

The masterplan sweeps from very tall landmark buildings on the west and north of up to 50 storeys to more tall buildings on the east, but in the form of an inverted bow. This dips in the centre over the park. The southern side will be occupied by low rise buildings. This inverted bow ensures the sun will easily illuminate the new park unlike many recent schemes with central garden or park areas.

At Mayfield it’s proposed the tall buildings on the west and north, will be more suitable for office and commercial space while those on the south and east will be residential. This is a general principle only as it might be appropriate for the landmark building over the former ticket office of Mayfield Station to become a hotel or flats or a combination of both.

Mayfield Park will offer a range of amenities and a variety of landscaped spaces to encourage different uses and different users, from infants to pensioners, from residents to visitors. There will be formal garden areas and wilder parts with the River Irk the focus as it meanders across the site freed from its fierce nineteenth century walls. The higher level of the old depot building will require terraces down to the river which should introduce pleasing height differences in the park

The key ‘heritage asset’ is the old Mayfield Station and this will provide the foundation for tall buildings on the north while also leaving room at the platform level for a garden embedded in one of the old track bays.

The huge interior of depot, almost the size of two football pitches, will be opened out and provide a range of opportunities. In this masterplan it’s suggested the interior might be used as exhibition or gig space, bars, restaurants and maybe some retail. There will be public route through the interior from the former ticket office area opening out into a broad gantry walkway over the steps and terraces down to the lower area of the park on the south side of the river.

It’s envisaged to deliver the plan in phases with the first phase being Mayfield Park and the residential units on the east of the site. Then it will be the depot’s turn, with other elements across the large site following on.

It all looks wonderful.

Let’s hope the ambition contained within the masterplan can be retained and delivered as time marches one. The only problem is that this is a ten year plan and given the quality and flair shown in these proposals it’s natural to feel impatient. What will happen though is that the charming name of Mayfield, which harks back to the days when there was a large house here in beautiful gardens, will once more become relevant as the park blossoms.

TO VIEW THE FULL STRATEGIC REGENERATION PLAN CLICK HERE.

'The Mayfield Partnership has set out a proposed vision for #MayfieldMCR, which will evolve over the coming months, with your input. Come along to one of the public consultation events around the city and give your feedback: www.mayfieldmanchester.co.uk/consultation #MayfieldConsultation'

CONSULTATION DATES:

Mayfield public consultation at Piccadilly Gardens - March 3, 9am-5pm.

Mayfield public consultation at Archway 9, Temperance Street, M12 6HR - March 8, 2018 / - March 11, 2018.

'Take the opportunity to learn more about the proposed 6.5 acre park, and participate in family-friendly activities, from building cardboard box worlds and sandpit landscapes, to mapping out ideas on sensory tables.'

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Hotel Shenanigans, Segways, Massacres

2/2/2018

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TWO crazy and fruity stories from a Manchester hotel manager the other day.

My friend had been called by the PA of a company that uses the hotel frequently and asked if a visiting company director could be ‘looked after’. This means an upgraded bedroom, a free bottle of bubbly or wine and maybe some chocolates. A couple of days after the visit, the manager was called back by the PA and said, “What did you think I meant by ‘looked after’? I didn’t mean send an escort to his room.”

Apparently the director had gone for a jog in the morning and returned to the room. Just as he was about to shower there was a knock on the door, so still in his jogging shorts he answered. There was a beautiful young woman outside who pushed her way in, kissed him passionately on the lips and moved towards the bedroom. “No, no, please no,” stuttered the man and ushered the surprised woman out.

After calming the PA of the company down, assuring her that the hotel would never send a prostitute to a guest’s room, the manager checked the CCTV. He saw the escort enter the room and quickly leave whereupon, clearly confused, she checked her phone, shook her head and walked round a couple of corners, knocked on another door and this time didn’t come out for a while. What had happened was she’d originally gone to room 412 when she should have gone to 421. Not good with figures in this sense of the word.

He had an even more disturbing story. A maid one day came down from one of the rooms and said, “There’s a body in room 238.” The manager took a concierge to investigate and there in the darkened bedroom there was a prone figure. “You open the curtains and I’ll call the emergency services,” said the manager. When the curtains were opened the body turned out to be a sex doll. This was removed to the office where a short time later a call was received. A male voice said, “I left something in room 238.” “We know you did,” said the manager, “lots of people leave things like gloves and hats but not what you left.” “I wouldn’t have left her but we’d had an argument,” said the man about an inanimate plastic doll. “May I come and get her?” “Of course,” said the, by now, bewildered and bemused manager, “but I advise you don’t leave the doll in bedrooms for maids to find and think they are dead bodies.” “Right you are,” said the man as though he’d just had a conversation about buying teabags.
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On a more savoury note had some fabulous fun with Belgian guests recently in Tatton Park as the snow fell. The picture below show several incentive tour buyers hosted by Visit Britain about to scoot through the deer park on all-terrain Segways. Ha, this was fun including a tremendous and dramatic fall I suffered when being too cocky on the way back to the start point. Proper head over heels as I tried to take a bank too sharply. The good news was that it was in full view of everyone. My how they laughed at me.

The Belgians took several pictures of the red deer sheltering in the park. With the snow falling it was pretty as picture. The day before we had gathered in Cloud 23 for a champagne reception, 23 floors up in the Hilton Hotel even though the guests and me were staying over the Midland Hotel. Good job we hadn't had the champagne before the Segwaying otherwise I might have tried to do a wheelie somersault on my machine.

On Friday last week I took artists and festival organisers on a Peterloo Massacre tour for a project for Manchester International Festival (MIF) next year, which will also be the 200th anniversary of Peterloo. Fabulous people seen in the top picture below. This is the best thing about a specialist tour. People are on the tour because they want to learn things and they want to talk about them. An energised audience is always the best.

Of course, it is the performer’s job (guides are performers and entertainers not academics although they need a bit of that too) to get the most from an audience, but there’s only so far one can go. Faced with a group of teenagers who have been told to come on a tour after maybe a four hour drive from Oxford where they had already been subjected to a morning tour simply isn’t easy. Similarly with a Malaysian group recently who didn’t really want a full coach tour, they just wanted to get to the Manchester United bit so they could take pictures and tick the visit-to-Britain box for stadia.

With the MIF group it was blast, loads of fun, lots of questions, lots of to-ing and fro-ing, despite the topic.

This Wednesday I conducted a tour for the Alliance Business School. It involved post-grads from China, the USA, the Czech Republic, Spain and Australia. I said, “It’s a shame you aren’t studying the weather because on this tour it’s going to throw itself at you in five different ways: rain, hail, snow, wind and sunshine.” Actually I was wrong we got sleet too.

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Ghosts and diesel pumps - Saturday and Sunday 27/28 January

29/1/2018

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A PSYCHIC medium called Lee came on my Chetham’s tour on Saturday. He’s a pleasant man, very gentle and gracious and had previously come on my Mayfield tour. I am naturally of a sceptical cast of mind but it’s always interesting listening to those who consider themselves in touch with ‘the other side’. Turns out he had three ‘experiences’ or ‘visions’ or ‘manifestations’ at Chetham’s – not sure of the right word.

By the main gate he saw a group of young boys seemingly at play. The costumes he described could have been those of the ‘poor boys’ admitted in the late 1600s. He thought these spirits were happy in themselves. Then in the Baronial Dining Room he saw a group of gentlemen from the early 1700s having a serious meeting but again nothing threatening.

However, in the Audit Room, which already has a hell mouth carving of a demon eating a sinner (see picture below) and a burn mark supposedly from Satan, he found himself standing next to a beautiful young woman from the nineteenth century in a striking red dress to which something terrible had happened. Oh dear.

This echoed Lee’s Mayfield tour experience. He’d ‘seen’ a dead man from 1968 walking up and down one of the platforms his soul stuck in time and lost up there. There was nothing troubling about him though. Meanwhile in one of the old parcel offices in the depot he sensed 'a very dark presence’ and that something awful had occurred which was hidden from him.

Now like I say I am of a sceptical mind but when you are alone in these ancient, on the one hand, and abandoned, on the other hand, places, you can’t help things playing on your mind. Why can’t all ghosts be happy ghosts, just hanging around because they so enjoyed it down here and can’t let go.

By the way the diesel pump in Mayfield is becoming a celebrity on the tours. It’s a seventies entity in vivid yellow with a Total tag for Total Oil. It’s a handsome devil too and in the quiet of the vast Mayfield depot, in my mind’s eye, I imagine it comes alive and hops around the depot when nobody is there. Matt Wilkinson, a photographer, came on the Sunday tour and took some marvellous images, including one of the diesel pump, below. I particularly like the picture at the top of this page too of the rows of iron pillars receding into the distance, like something from the Lord of the Rings..

It was my birthday on Saturday - 27 January. And that of Alice in Wonderland’s Lewis Carroll. Or Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, as he was called when he was born in Daresbury, 21 miles from Manchester in 1832. There’s some sort of connection in that. There’s something very ‘down the rabbit hole’ and ‘through the looking glass’ about my occupation of writing on lots of different things from food to architecture to politics, taking people into places they’ve never been and into places that may have been closed for decades, while writing on imagined or illusionary buildings and projects.

27 January is also a very sombre day as it marks the liberation of Auschwitz and is thus International Holocaust Day. I took the family to Auschwitz several years ago, everybody should visit. It never leaves you and nor should it. Alice and death camps. 27 January, it seems, is absurdity and horror. I suppose one way or another every day is, somewhere in this imperfect world. Not the most cheerful of thoughts but pertinent given what Holocaust Day represents.

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The North

28/1/2018

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I initially wrote this in 2013 for Manchester Confidential when Paul Morley's book The North was released. The passages below (slightly amended) preceded an interview with Morley.

MAYBE we should all write down what our North is.

For me it’s a complex of positives and negatives which adds up to the only place I ever want to live. It fits me like a glove. Like an old sock. I know its ways, its bad habits and its peculiar joys.

At its best it’s the spirit of independence melded with cleverness and humour, at my end of the North that means Anthony Burgess, Robert Peel, John Bright, Lydia Becker, Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth Raffald, Joseph Brotherton, Sam Bamford, Joan Bakewell, Anthony Wilson, Lemn Sissay, hotpot, Lancashire cheese, steak and cow heel pie, curry, and pint after pint of golden ale.

It's family.

It’s the Smiths, Doves and Mark E Smith. It’s Caroline Aherne and Steve Coogan and Les Dawson. It’s Chetham's Library, United, Liverpool, City, my home town of Rochdale, LCCC and the National Cycling Centre. MIF. It’s the 25 Nobel prize winners from Manchester University. It’s liberating. It's the Miners Community Arts & Music Centre and Small Cinema in Moston, creating something out of nothing with their bare hands. It's innovation, entrepreneurship and radicalism. It’s the Fifth Pan-African National Congress. It’s multi-cultural, yet it’s about a sense of identity.

But I know it’s also Bernard Manning and 8% of a low-turnout voting Nick Griffin as a Euro MP in 2008. It’s Shameless and people being somehow proud of that show, it’s the strange adulation of Bez, it’s a chip on the shoulder, a vehicle for condescension and it’s about understanding the anger that comes from that. It’s about the disaffection that led so many of our towns to vote Brexit. It’s the segregation within those towns between groups of different ethnicity as highlighted in the Panorama programme of 22 January about Blackburn. It can be reductive.

It’s moorland and wooded cloughs, disused mills, grand Town Halls, church spires and council estates, weavers cottages and millstone grit, it’s brick, it’s brash, it’s high meadows and crazy sunsets at the end of dull days.

It can be breath-takingly more beautiful than anywhere else in these British islands and fifteen miles away it can be irredeemably uglier than anywhere in these British islands.

It’s a mass extinction, revealed in massive masonry by the side of rivers, peeping from under greenery. A place where you guess a factory once reared high above, where hundreds of humans worked long hours in clog and shawl at a time when through the Royal Exchange in Manchester 6.6bn linear yards of cloth flowed with nearest rival Japan producing a paltry 56m linear yards.

It’s the spark that’s left the furnace.

It’s a sense that maybe the really important times are over. That every dog has its day and that we’ve had ours. It’s the hope that if we once had all that, then the North can rise again - and is rising led by the transformation of Liverpool and Manchester. It’s the doubt contained within this transformation that much of this new money wasn’t generated anywhere in the North.

It’s the almost hand-moulded hills of the Trough of Bowland, the sandstone and views of Alderley Edge, the sheer effortless beauty of the Lune Valley, the can-this-be-real drama and gentleness of the Lake District, the ludicrous sand dunes at Formby.

It’s the empty urban areas of east and north Manchester, the shattered districts of inner Liverpool, demoralised small towns such as Radcliffe and Widnes. It’s boarded up pubs and shops and worse, the hundreds of cut off, isolated, estates such as Langley or Hattersley or Kirkby that make me seethe with rage about the inhuman planning disaster of post World War II Britain – that internal diaspora played out with more brutal potency in the heavily populated North than just about anywhere.

It’s the endless transition between well-to-do and poor, between haves and have nots, between wilderness and towns.

It’s the place where you see the skull beneath the British skin more obviously than anywhere else. The North is the rough with the smooth. It’s where, as Jim McClellan wrote, ‘the social processes are more visible’.

Yet the North is all about the people who’ve achieved, not through privilege and inheritance, but through ‘nous’ - although I know I may be kidding myself.

And losing steam.

And repeating myself.

Because of course when I talk about the North I’m only really ever talking about the North West, my bit.

And I’m only ever really talking about me.

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The Best Dressed Indian Italian Scouser, Lubbock, Tragedy, Comedy

3/1/2018

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2017 ended and 2018 began with public tours on the Discover Manchester programme. This is where a group of guides under the heading Manchester Guided Tours have teamed up to provide tours everyday at 11am: that’s every day including Christmas Day. They’re excellent value, under £10, and the tours provide a general introduction to Manchester rather than being themed on a specific subject.

For the guide it’s a voyage of discovery too, as you have no idea who might turn up and where they might come from. The two small groups I picked up from the 11am rendezvous location outside Central Library before and after New Year, included people from Germany, Canada, Belgium, USA, China, as well as closer to home in Preston, Prestwich, Stockport and Manchester.

For these tours my usual route is St Peter’s Square, Central Library, Town Hall Extension, Albert Square, St Ann’s Church, Royal Exchange with a finish at the Cathedral, or at the rear of the latter, at the National Football Museum. This route hits several prominent city centre buildings while also covering a richness of history that no other provincial city can compete with in the UK. Yeah, I know, that’s a bold statement, but I stand by it. Come on the tour and you’ll understand why. It’s also a route that takes guests inside a lot of buildings, which as well as providing occasionally welcome shelter, provides a more comprehensive tour than simply keeping on the streets.

On 2 January there were two guests from Lubbock, Texas. One of this pair lives in Cologne for the time being and was showing his friend some other parts of Europe with a non-traditional itinerary of Dublin, Manchester, Antwerp and then back to Cologne. “What’s Lubbock, Texas, like?” I asked. “It’s got the Buddy Holly museum, is in a cotton growing area, is very flat, has a quarter of a million inhabitants but it’s four hours from the nearest major city,” said one of the friends. “You could describe it as the most disappointing city in the USA,” said his pal with a grin. “Wow,” I said, “they should market it that way, people flock to places with a point of exception. The city authorities could have a campaign called ‘Lubbock, it always disappoints.’”

Strangely enough this observation from citizens of the city made me want to go to Lubbock. Places that seem dour to the natives often have something worthwhile to experience for visitors. Part of the paradox of tourism is that residents feel contempt for qualities visitors find fascinating. Not that I'm a big Buddy Holly fan.

My last tour of 2017 had included an extremely dapper gentleman with a bow tie. When I'd asked the guests where they hailed from, our dandy self-described as an Indian Italian Scouser working at Manchester Royal Infirmary. I said not only are you the first Indian Italian Scouser I’ve ever met but you’re the best dressed Indian Italian Scouser I’ve ever met. The two Canadians on the group were visiting because the male half of the couple was a football fanatic who supports Everton Football Club passionately through a family connection. He was here to visit the National Football Museum and the two Manchester clubs before attending a game at Goodison Park in Liverpool.

Couple of final points.

The best thing I overheard in a Manchester pub over the New Year was while waiting at a bar, and a man said to his lady, “I look on life as a comedy which is my tragedy, you look on life as a tragedy which is your tragedy.” It sounded Wildean and profound, although I’m not sure it is profound at all. I'm still trying to sort out its meaning but it had fine ring to it.

Meanwhile there was a pleasant tweet from Allied London about the long derelict London Road Fire Station. This was posted on New Year’s Eve. It read '2017: Planning Permission obtained, a year of historic tours with @JonathSchofield and a special collaboration with @wallpapermag #WallpaperComposed - featuring a enchanting performance from @JescaHoop here's to an historic 2018 #HouseOfLondonRoad.'

Truly, taking those tours around that venerable space incorporating the living memories of people who had lived and worked, there were some of my favourite moments of the past two years.

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SOLD OUT and screwed up eyes and ears

28/6/2015

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So in a few days I will have completed my first of sixteen walks for Manchester International Festival. These sold out second quickest after Bjork apparently. That's 480 people I'll be taking around.

It just shows that publicity is everything. The brochure and website of this incredibly well-regarded festival has worked its magic on my tours. I can't wait to start. There will be a few surprises for people but then on a tour called Rabbit holes, Radicals and Pioneers, there'd have to be.

A curious incident happened on a Haunted Underworld tour. There was one young woman who from beginning to end had her fingers in her ears and her eyes tight shut and was being guided round by her friend.

When the terrors of the underground had been negotiated and the screams had faded I asked the woman whether she'd enjoyed it.

"Yes," she said in the fresh air above ground, "tremendously."

"But you didn't see any of it or hear any of it?" I said.

"I know I was too frightened to look but I still thought it was brilliant," she said.

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