by Paul Morley
After leaving behind the cemetery and golf courses, the river skirts the Stretford and Urmston in the borough of Trafford, then squeezes between the Flixton and Carrington areas of Greater Manchester. When Flixton was a remote rural area, up to the early nineteenth century, the river would isolate it from its neighbours. The origin of the name Stretford is ‘street on a ford’ – across the River Mersey. The principal route through Stretford, the A56 Chester Road, follows the line of the old Roman road from Deva Victrix (Chester) to Mamucium (Manchester), crossing the Mersey into Stretford at Crossford Bridge on the border with Sale, built, as its name suggests, at the location of the ancient ford. Ian Curtis, the Joy Division singer, was born at the Memorial Hospital in Stretford on 15 July 1956.
The Mersey is joined at Flixton by the Irwell, which means winding stream, from Olde English irre for angry or wandering, and wella, for stream, once named ‘the hardest-working stream in the world’, which rises on Deerplay Moor near Deerplay Hill, in the township of Cliviger, perched above the village of Bacup, east Lancashire. The stream proceeds south through Rawtenstall and Ramsbottom to Bury, where a little to the south near Radcliffe it joins the Roch, which rises near Todmorden and even though pronounced ‘roach’ gives Rochdale its name. Edwin Waugh:
The quiet Roch comes dancing down
From breezy moorland hills;
It wanders through my native town,
With its bonny tribute rills.
Oh, gentle Roch, my native stream!
Oft, when a careless boy,
I’ve prattled to thee, in a dream,
As thou went singing by.
Deviating to the west, the waters of the Irwell are joined by a rivulet from Bolton at Farnworth; it then changes to a south-easterly direction, meandering around Lower Broughton – separating Salford and Manchester – where it receives the Irk and the Medlock at the foot of the 387-foot, 25-storey Co-operative Insurance Tower. When completed in 1962, the largest office block built in Manchester since the war, a necessarily bold symbol of a post-cotton fightback, with the confident intention of equalling anything in London, the CIS tower was the third tallest building in Europe, and the UK’s tallest building outside London for 43 years. The CIS Tower was the first building in Manchester to surpass the ornate town hall’s 80-year-old 285-foot spire. Nothing in Manchester was higher until 2006.
It was heavily influenced by the innovative 1958 Inland Steel Building in Chicago, the first Chicago high-rise built since the Great Depression, which was among the buildings inspected by the design team on its fact-finding trip to America. It might be that the building of the CIS Tower was a late sign of Manchester allowing itself to be truly daring, an echo of nineteenth-century enterprise, a monument to local modernism and idealism, although the design derives from the US Midwest and East Coast and 1930s Germany. Built to enhance the prestige of both the Co-operative Society and the city of Manchester, the tower is a cathedral to egalitarianism and northern pioneering spirit, with every aspect of its design an exercise in elegance and perfection. Its sleek grey mass rising above the ageing city supplied a solo sixties slice of high-rise New York flair and was an expressive representation of the integrity of the Co-op itself.
Another striking Manchester building embodying optimism and aesthetic purpose, completed a few years earlier, in the late 1950s, and somehow communicating with a gutsy local accent, is a building commissioned by Manchester Metropolitan University as a home for the Hollings Domestic and Trades College. If Manchester’s position as a major city held during its shaky period of industrial decline, it was because of its solid reputation for higher education – the colleges, universities and schools distributed along the route south towards Didsbury, including Hollings College and its special building.
It was positioned three miles south, ten minutes on the bus, out of the city centre, along Oxford Road, through the Curry Mile, down Wilmslow Road opposite Platt Fields Park – which contains signs of the Nico Ditch, here more like a pathway – not far from Manchester City’s Maine Road ground, midway between Manchester Grammar School and the High School for Girls, where Rusholme bleeds imperceptibly into Fallowfield. Travelling three miles further south, keeping straight, through Withington, you reach the Palatine Road. This is where twenty-year-old engineering student Ludwig Wittgenstein lodged between 1908 and 1911 – drawn to the city by the prominent part Jews played in the cultural life of Manchester, the city’s tradition of self-educated genius and by the work of Ernest Rutherford, which encouraged his interest in the philosophy of mathematics and then ‘pure’ philosophy – and the Factory Records label was based. This leads to Didsbury, on the north bank of the River Mersey, surrounded by Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Burnage, Northenden, Cheadle, Gatley and Heaton Mersey. It is here that the Mersey passes under the Palatine Road, and the Palatine Road was named because it linked the two palatine counties of Lancashire and Cheshire separated by the river – a ‘county palatine’ was an area ruled by a hereditary nobleman holding royal privileges and exclusive rights of jurisdiction, and was permitted to form its own armies.
Hollings College had begun humbly enough in a single building in 1901 teaching the basics of cookery and domestic science to the working class. The new campus was planned by Scottish-born Manchester Council City architect L. C. (Leonard) Howitt, who had designed the sombre if imposing Crown Courts, the monolithic Sharston Baths in Wythenshawe (sweeping into view like an east European dictator’s fantasy) and also deftly reconstructed the Free Trade Hall from very little original material following extensive war damage. His 1955 Heaton Park Reservoir Pumping Station in Bury harmoniously matched architecture and sculpture to salute the immense late-nineteenth-century achievement of bringing water from the Thirlmere Reservoir in the Lake District through the longest tunnel in the world, ninety-six miles, to rapidly expanding Manchester, taking about a day to get there. He was also a member of the powerful Herbert J. Rowse team, which designed with classical late-British-empire verve the tunnel entrances, toll booths and ingenious streamlined ventilation towers for the Queensway Road Tunnel under the Mersey between Liverpool and Birkenhead.
Howitt’s building for MMU combined five separate college departments under one spectacular roof, and was fervently post-empire and defiantly post-war but in ways that didn’t contradict the utilitarian industrial traditions of the city. It ended up looking like the missing link between exotic but highly functional space-age Jodrell Bank and the self-consciously modern glazed spaciousness of the CIS Tower. The structure was instantly and affectionately nicknamed the Toast Rack for the way its concrete-framed glass-curtained seven storeys elegantly tapered towards a narrow rounded top capped with twenty-three free-standing open concrete arches. Rooms were smaller at the top than at the bottom, the practical reason for the innovative shape being the need for different-sized teaching spaces for a variety of technical purposes.
The post-war intention among architects turning their backs on failed imperial grandeur was to conquer and colonise the future, and some got it right. The Toast Rack demonstrated how post-war concrete could be used to create something witty, tough and accessibly unusual rather than at best the merely blankly solid and at worst a poorly executed configuration of ugliness, an ideological retreat from decoration and elegance. Howitt believed that his job was to produce beautiful buildings which at their best could help put the world to rights, and the architect should have soul, and morals, and a sense of humour.
Nestling against the Toast Rack is a low round building containing the library and cafés, which became known as the Fried Egg. Usually fussy, renowned architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner proclaimed the campus ‘a perfect piece of pop architecture’, beyond high praise from him. It’s just around the corner from the Dickinson Road Studios, the BBC’s first regional television studios, opened in 1954 in a converted church previously owned by cheap and cheeky Mancunian Films, hearty makers of full-blooded ‘northern films for northern people’, who gave George Formby his first
chance in films and opened their own studios in 1947. It was as though the Toast Rack was itself a part of pop-culture history, constantly in performance, rooted in the local and the universal, surely an influence on the coming sound of Joy Division, which combined space, concrete, art, technology and reflections of the internal and external environment.
Joy Division’s music producer, Martin Hannett, went to school at the nearby Xaverian College in Rusholme’s Victoria Park, solemnly blessed and opened by the fourth Bishop of Salford, Louis Casartelli, in 1907, having moved its premises from a four-storey building on Oxford Road. The salubrious and then gated Victoria Park was where in 1871 Manchester Town Hall and Strangeways Prison architect Alfred Waterhouse had impressed his intricate Gothic imagination on to a domestic building called Firwood, which was purchased in 1905 and set at the centre of the new campus. As extra buildings joined Waterhouse’s gently sinister centrepiece, the college exuded stately otherness in the middle of entwined residential streets and tree-sheltered cul-de-sacs. Eventually the college would be just a few steps from what became the packed, animated Curry Mile, and the mind would spin as you moved from Waterhouse’s vaulted heavy-doored generosity to the crush of restaurants and a different spread of imported glamour, both locations embedded in Manchester but set on the outside. Hannett’s Gothic and hooded but serenely ultramodern, synthetic and yet deeply human work for Joy Division was constructed between these two extremes of the exotic, ones he would have known well, the futuristic Toast Rack and the ornately austere Xaverian estate. (Back in the 1930s Anthony Burgess would suffer a crisis of faith while at Xaverian, leaving him a lapsed Catholic, intellectually resisting but emotionally stained, his fervent self-aggrandising teenage mind no doubt blown apart by the Waterhouse staircase covered with harrowing and/or inspiring Catholic iconography at the centre of the monastic Xaverian campus.)
I couldn’t take my eyes off the Toast Rack whenever I passed it on the bus in the late sixties and early seventies, or saw it from the train trundling through Levenshulme on the six-minute journey to Stockport from Manchester Piccadilly, slyly materialising in the distance across the shops, trees and rooftops, an abstract sculptural shape as much as an educational facility teaching students, including my Aunt Sally – travelling in from Handforth, loving its proximity to the Top of the Pops studios, where the likes of the Kinks lurked – how to cut hair, cook and fix cars. It veered up amid the strewn nothing special like a station on a monorail that took you across a landscape usually found in your dreams. It was so Manchester too, because it looked even better when it was wet, when it had a general demeanour of Mustn’t grumble.
To me, the Toast Rack showed how all buildings should look in the future, but most of those buildings would go unbuilt, or even unimagined. I also think it was the first building that made me realise you could fall in love with buildings – when they were so fantastically one of a kind, descriptions of experience as much as mere objects – because of the way they changed the world around them and showed up the banal.
The Irk, derived from irwke, meaning swift, rises in Royton, north of Oldham, and was once famous for the bloated eels that swam there, fattened by the grease and oil emitted by the woollen mills into the water. Once, it was clear and full of fish, running through woodlands of wild hyacinths and meadows of daffodils and primroses. The valley of the Irk has a long history in textile development. In medieval times cloth making was a cottage industry with the pieces of fabric bleached on the banks of the Irk using sunlight, rain, sour milk and a daily collection of urine from Blackley (dark wood) village. Queen Victoria’s white wedding dress was made, in accordance with designs ‘drawn and painted in the Queen’s own hand’, at the Ashenhurst Works in Blackley by the firm of Messrs James Houldsworth and Co. White was not then a popular option but was picked to complement the locally made lace, chosen to support the dyeing industry. Victoria’s dress had a huge influence on the style of weddings, white soon becoming the traditional choice for the bride’s gown.
The small Medlock (meadow stream) rises at Saddleworth on the Pennine fringes, then flows through the steep-sided wooded gorge that separates Oldham from Ashton under Lyne, before heading south-west towards Manchester, where it serves as a feeder for the Bridgewater Canal at Knott Mill near Deansgate. Friedrich Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England described an area around the highly polluted Medlock in central Manchester as ‘the most horrible spot . . . lies on the Manchester side, immediately south-west of Oxford Road, and is known as Little Ireland. In a rather deep hole, in a curve of the Medlock and surrounded on all four 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 4,000 human beings mostly Irish. The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets are uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; 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 tall factory chimneys.’ In 1832, describing Little Ireland, a local doctor, J. P. Kay, wrote, ‘this unhealthy district lies so low that the chimneys of its houses, some of them three storeys high, are little above the level of the ground’.
L. S. Lowry and the Stockport Viaduct by the River Mersey
At flat, bleak Irlam (settlement on the Irwell), south-west of Salford, the River Mersey, now full of Irwell, which has itself taken in the Irk and Medlock and all their associations, flows young and hearty and eager for adventure into the astonishingly man-made Manchester Ship Canal, the city’s audacious late-nineteenth-century retort to coastal Liverpool’s natural but irritating maritime superiority. Here, abruptly canalised, the Mersey once had a real grown-up job to do, supporting the cargo-laden weight of ocean steamers, its course obliterated past Hollins Green to Rixton, although the old riverbed can be seen at Warburton. At Rixton near Lymm (Celtic, ‘running water’) the River Bollin (of uncertain origin and meaning) enters the canal from the south.
The main source of the River Bollin is on Toot Hill in the hamlet of Forest Chapel on the edge of Macclesfield Forest at the western end of the Peak District. It passes through Macclesfield and Wilmslow, and in 1784 the Quarry Bank Mill was built right next to it, a waterwheel powered by the fast-flowing river driving all the machinery. Close to Styal Prison, a couple of miles south-west of Ringway Airport, the Bollin is joined by the River Dean.
The Mersey closes in on Cheshire, reliving its original function as the historic border between Lancashire and Cheshire, and leaves the canal to the north-west about four miles later around Warrington, where it is deep enough to hold ships of sixty tons. The administrative changes in 1974 meant that Warrington – possibly Viking, meaning a place to moor the boats – was one of those places that shifted from one county to another, the traditional Lancashire town now coming under control of the Cheshire County Council. The great Roman road that ran from Chester to Lancaster went through Warrington, bypassing what was then the swampy, inhospitable Merseyside area. For centuries, Warrington was the one place west of Stretford where a bridge was built over the river, and was the natural point of entry into Lancashire from the south.
Stuck between Manchester and Liverpool, neither one nor the other, the local accent seems uncertain about which way to turn. It comes down from old, no-nonsense Lancashire, up from the subtly milder Cheshire, and is also stained by the loud, lurking cities, reflecting its place on the Mersey, which mile by mile from east to west passes through changes in accent that appear almost imperceptible, and then are suddenly quite distinct. The mixing up of sounds and dialects suits a town that is always in transition that never really changes, at the mercy of town planners never quite making their minds up how things should look and work.
Becoming tidal from Howley and Woolston Weirs, the Mersey is now very much a strong and determined adult, possibly with vague, horrible memories of how it was trapped in the g
rotty dark underneath Mersey Square. It leaves Cheshire at Hale, in the district of Halton, not far from the birthplace of Lewis Carroll, and loops into Merseyside three miles from Widnes.
At the Runcorn Gap between Widnes, which grew out of the chemical industry, and Runcorn rail and road bridges span the river and the ship canal, which runs alongside the widening estuary to Eastham Locks, where canal and river unite, turning north, widening into a majestic estuary between Liverpool and Birkenhead on the Wirral, swelling and chopping, the volume and vigour of the city massed on either side, with Aigburth and Toxteth on the Liverpool side, Rock Ferry and Tranmere on the Wirral. It passes the Albert Dock before emptying into the sea between the faded resort of New Brighton at the head of the Wirral Peninsula and Bootle, as though that’s the reward for all the captivity and service and forced marriages with other rivers and waterways. Seventy miles of river, flowing like a guided dream, inspiring life, invention and activity, myths, industry and leisure all along its shores, ending up three-quarters of a mile wide, far from being an ideal harbour but perfect as a highway to the industrial areas of Lancashire that formed and flourished in the nineteenth century.
Somewhere along here, in 1917, convalescing in a military garrison, the poet Siegfried Sassoon angrily threw into the river the ribbon from the Military Cross he had won on the Western Front for bringing wounded men to safety while under fire. Moved by patriotism to join the army, he had become disillusioned and then disgusted with the war and the callousness of generals making battle plans thinking in numbers not individual souls. He particularly disliked the propaganda aimed at gaining recruits to replace the many thousands of men already slaughtered, which depicted the war as a worthwhile cause, a duty to fulfil – a call, it implied, which only cowards would refuse. He felt the war had become about conquest, and the authorities could stop it at any moment if they wished. The medal itself was not thrown away – Sassoon clenching his fists and shaking them at the sky – he chucked only the ribbon, a shred of purple and white cloth.