by Paul Morley
The Industrial Revolution had built the streets where people lived, that they travelled between, created the systems, services, shops, parks and schools, but post-revolution developments were leading to new forms of community, new social and cultural patterns, technologically distributed forms of gossip imported from American pop culture existing in post-geographical spaces and places beyond these Victorian and Edwardian streets, which were now only one form of reality, a reality that was solid but fading, being replaced by a reality that was liquid, transient and mobile, but intensifying. People still loved gossip, found it the best way for the complexities of existence to be simplified and turned into addictive stories, but this gossip was a long way from a century before, when it was restricted to tiny, self-serving local communities. Gossip was now owned and marketed by corporate companies with their own reasons for controlling their customers, wherever they were.
Reddish was of the past, but a new ‘past’ was discreetly being produced, one that would not leave the sort of public traces and permanent monuments, the roads, railways, town halls, libraries and canals emphasising and commemorating borders, boundaries and anniversaries that the Victorian world left. The new past, the new public, were being led somewhere else. The new traces, monuments, transport systems and emerging borders – or lack of borders – were a result of the continuing refinement and development of technology, which both made people’s lives easier and more comfortable and trapped them inside the plans and strategies of those who claimed the power and control; they were computer chips and social networks and disembodied intelligences, and the systems and routes were now miniaturised and virtual, containing a different sort of communal memory, distributed information and administrative disposition, leading to a new potential for moral anarchy, freer exchange and/or imaginative transcendence.
Reddish was still, as though it was waiting for something, still, as though the gates into time opened up by the smoking Industrial Revolution had been sealed up, still, with the past, and, still, with the inevitable incredible future, which you could not see coming but couldn’t be missed.
(c) The last few miles, the last few minutes, the last few pages. The last mile, the last brick, the last drop of rain. The last place on this journey on the way south from the north – Woodford, at the southern tip of the Metropolitan Borough of Stockport, five miles outside the town centre, the most southerly point of Greater Manchester, eleven miles south-south-east of Manchester, on the River Dean border with Cheshire, or Congleton, twenty-one miles south of Manchester, seven miles east of the M6, overlooking the eastern edge of the Cheshire Plain, on the banks of the River Dane, at the foot of the southern reaches of the Pennines, the last train from Manchester Victoria to Blackpool, 23.23, calling at Salford Central, Salford Crescent, Bolton, Lostock, Horwich Parkway, Blackrod, Adlington, Chorley, Buckshaw Parkway, Leyland, Preston, Kirkham and Wesham, Poulton-le-Fylde, Layton, arriving in Blackpool North eighty-seven minutes later, the last cotton mill built in Lancashire, during the 1926 recession, Elk Mill, on the border of Chadderton and Royton, used until 1974, demolished in 1999, the last mill spinning cotton, in the Hurst area of Ashton under Lyne, Cedar Mill, active into the 1970s, the last issue of the Manchester Guardian published in 1959, before the paper moved completely to London in 1964, the last programme ABC broadcast from its studios in Didsbury, Opportunity Knocks, in July 1968, the last day of Belle Vue zoo 11 September 1977, the last member of the Morley family to live in the north, Dilys, my mother, tucked up in dull boarded-up Rusholme, in a barren, cramped two up two down my dad would have seen as a coffin, who followed her children through the exit in 1987, the last days of the Golden Garter Club in the 1980s, turned into a bingo hall, destroyed by fire in 1990, the last night of the Hacienda 28 June 1997, the last year that the CIS (Solar) Tower was the tallest building in Manchester, 2006, when it was replaced by the 164-feet-higher 551-foot Beetham Tower, a 47-storey skyscraper home to a Hilton hotel built with big money in what is now a city of swish new hotels, some built into the grand old warehouses, making use of Manchester’s boastful Victorian scale, Waterhouse’s monumental Refuge Assurance Building given late-twentieth-century life after decades in the wilderness, some built out-of-the-box new, out of hyped-up glass, steel and space, because the city and its people still want to get ahead, get into the fragmented centre of things and show people a good time (the Hilton jutting up towards a scudding sky emits a wind-induced spaceship hum you can hear in Hulme, and from up top out of the city’s clutches it has a view on a clear day of Jodrell Bank, still unbelievable, still close to the stars, Blackpool Tower, Snowdonia, Liverpool Cathedral, the Peak District, the Pennines, like they’re Manchester’s hanging gardens), the last episode of Coronation Street, which will never happen until long after we have died, so the last episode of Coronation Street that my mum watched, the last episode that I will watch, a few years before the last episodes that my sisters Carol and Jayne will watch, the last book borrowed from the library, the last words of Laurence Sterne: ‘Now it has come,’ the last lines of Wuthering Heights: ‘I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth,’ the controversial, final, twenty-first chapter, ‘Amen. And all that cal,’ of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, in which Alex, bored with violence, begins to mature and grasp adulthood, ‘Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and the turning young earth and the stars’, the last thoughts of Sir Bernard Lovell about the secrets of the universe, before he died, three weeks short of his ninety-ninth birthday, still in Cheshire, on the outskirts of Neptune, the last performer at the Manchester Free Trade Hall before it was turned into a hotel in 1996, the Dalai Lama, telling his audience, ‘Loving oneself is crucial. If we do not love ourselves, how can we love others?’ the same year as the premiere performance of Thomas Adès’ These Premises are Alarmed, when the Hallé Orchestra moved out of its old home to the Bridgewater Hall, ten years after local heroes the Smiths played at the Free Trade Hall, finishing with ‘Big Mouth Strikes Again’, the last request, the year that Morrissey admits that 50 per cent of his writing can be blamed on Shelagh Delaney, including the last line of the Smiths’ debut single ‘Hand in Glove’, plucked from Taste of Honey, twenty years after the all-mouth-and-rousing Lesser Free Trade Sex Pistols, thirty years after the electric Bob Dylan used the Free Trade Hall to tell nothing but the truth, forty years after Muddy Waters appeared with Chris Barber and his Jazz Band, the last smoke clearing from Manchester after the 1956 Clean Air Act so that you could see the Pennines from the city centre and see the city centre from the Pennines, a certain portion of all that visible darkness removed, eighty years after Charles Dickens’ final Manchester appearance reading from his books as part of what he called his farewell tour, the last match played at Manchester City’s Maine Road on 11 May 2003 after eighty years, a 0–1 defeat to Southampton, the last song recorded by the Smiths, ‘I Keep Mine Hidden’, third track on the ‘Girlfriend in a Coma’ twelve-inch single, where Morrissey feels the past, grumbles a bit, sighs a little, and you realise that he’s been preparing his last words all his life, on high alert, the last chance, the last quote, last orders, the last line of Howard Spring’s disclaimer to Shabby Tiger, ‘There is no such city as Manchester,’ the last two lines of Alan Garner’s Elidor, first read as an eleven-year-old, ‘The song faded. The children were alone with the broken windows of a slum,’ the last lines of ‘Another Day’ by Roy Harper, ‘And at the door/we can’t say more/than just another day/and without a sound/I turn around/and walk away,’ the last lines of the third stanza of W. H. Auden’s ‘A Lullaby’, from the penultimate year of his life, 1972, ‘In boyhood/ you were permitted to meet/ beautiful old contraptions/ soon to be banished from earth, saddle-tank locs, beam-engines/ and over-shot waterwheels./ Yes, love, you have been lucky,’ the last wanderings of the giant, yaw
ning City fan L. S. Lowry, a Maine Road man, in an overcoat of clay, occasionally brushed but never cleaned, longing for something, walking to clear his head, taking pleasure in his breathing, the tread of his feet on the pavement, with his own style, noticing the smallest things, with a frugal eye, making history, in his own solemn, familiar way, there’s nowhere particular he wants to go, before he comes to rest, on the right track, by a fence, on a brick wall, an umbrella propped against it, near the factory gates, under a slender, alert, smoking chimney, watching a man roll a threadlike cigarette on his doorstep from morning till night, opposite a crooked house leaning to the left due to unstable foundations, resting the baggage of hundreds of years of oppression, having the last laugh, a last scone, a last crumb of comfort, a last drag, a last trip to Huddersfield, a last visit to the local shop, a last look at the view, all that muck and brass, nursing a pint, the last hour, the last dab of paint, in the shape of a tear, smeared red with essence of ashy grey, last but not least, making his escape, released at last, the last resting place, the last trudge along the pier to the little red-topped lighthouse, the last sight of a setting sun, the last meander across deserted sands, the last exit to nowhere, the cancelled flesh, as heavy and as weightless as the Stockport Viaduct, as dead but as visible, a brown blur of buildings, the last money spent, poor once more, the quiet nonchalance, crossing the border, on top of the world, where the river meets the sea, in the cold mid-winter, near some ruins, under hills as lonely as God, at the edge of the horizon, at the foot of the stairs, pausing at the junction to eternity, the bliss of solitude, as silent as light, the last look at home, the last paragraph, the last laugh, the last wave, the last breath, the last thing on your mind, a last look behind you to check where you’ve been, for proof that you existed, and that things are as you left them, just as you remembered them, the last word, the last footstep, until the next time, heading north.
In a dressing room at Granada Television Studios in Quay Street, Manchester, with Marc Bolan, during the recording in August 1977 of his ‘Marc’ show, a month before he died. He was the first famous musician I interviewed for the New Musical Express – my favourite pop star ushering me into a new world and showing me the way forward. He gave me his telephone number and asked me to call him when I was next in London.
Acknowledgements
1.
This north was made up out of memory, conversation, a number of journeys that began or ended at Stockport station, or Manchester Piccadilly, and various facts, quotes and dates scattered around the Internet. The combination of recollection, impression, assembly and wandering is not intended to achieve conventional scholarly precision. If there was to be a series of bracketed academic numbers attached to these facts, dates, quotes and traces, the straightforward explanation of their source would be that they were found on the World Wide Web, and then framed, filtered and spun until they fitted into my story of the north. I do not claim objectivity, viewing any such certainty, all things considered, as impossible, so there seems no need to produce any proof, evidence or verification, other than – it’s all out there.
This north is a hallucination as much as it is a history, a non-fiction dream of what might have been rather than a documented expression of the definite. None of the facts, deeds and claims were included unless they were repeated so many times almost word for word on various sites that they had turned into fixed, neutral objects. These objects became walls, gates, trees, steps, lanes, faces, valleys, roofs, showers, locks, flagstones, patterns, fixtures and fittings, and, at the other extreme, a series of illusions, a miscellany of emotions, owned by no one, something in the air, available to anyone thinking of producing their own map, model or manifesto, their very own version of events.
2.
Thank you to David Godwin, my agent, who sat me down one day, gave me a cup of tea, and told me in so many words, perhaps to get me out of his office, to take a train to Stockport, wander down the hill into the town centre, look around, and write down whatever occurred to me. When I returned many years later, with bags of material, he sat me down, gave me a cup of tea, and like the gentleman he is ignored the fact I was dressed in rags and mumbling deliriously about bus stops, bridges and Reddish Baths. The Venerable Bede, as well, although eventually the great mind-changing monk of Northumbria and the father of English history never quite made it into the book. Thank you also to Caitlin, Anna and Heather at David Godwin Associates.
3.
Thank you to Mike Jones, who commissioned the book in the days before the phrase ‘back in the day’ was in common use. Before I had even got to the stage of constructing the canals, roads and railways, while I was still stumbling through the woods, digging a few holes, sniffing the air, he moved elsewhere. I hope this north shows him that when I told him at our first meeting what I was going to do, there really was a plan.
4.
Thank you to Michael Fishwick at Bloomsbury, who took over the book, and firmly but gently ushered me into the era of motorways and colour television. Even though I ended up following a number of paths, and a few waterways, and got carried away counting bricks, he made sure I never lost sight of the original path, and that there was enough of a connection between my feet and the ground.
5.
There is a soundtrack to this book that contains, perhaps, for me, the more obvious and expected northern sounds – Joy Division, Magazine, Roy Harper, the Hollies, the Watersons, Cabaret Voltaire, Vini Reilly, ABC, Frankie Vaughan, Ewan MacColl, Autechre, Billy Fury, the Smiths, the Fall, Buzzcocks, the Stone Roses, the Animals, the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band, A Certain Ratio, Echo and the Bunnymen, Neil Tennant, Jilted John, Harrison, Lennon, Starr, the Mekons, the Spinners, the Passage, Pulp, Van der Graaf Generator, Robert Smith, Ladytron, Mick Ronson, Frederick Delius, Elvis Costello, New Order, John Barry, Bryan Ferry, the Blue Orchids, Joe Cocker, Everything But The Girl, Paul Rodgers, the Human League, Godley and Creme, Julian Cope, Be Bop Deluxe, the Undertakers, 808 State, the New Music Manchester group, the Searchers, British Electric Foundation, Deaf School, the Distractions, Badly Drawn Boy, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Arctic Monkeys, William Walton, the Scaffold, Electronic, Gang of Four, John Cooper Clarke – and then there is another (even) ghostlier soundtrack, also useful for creating the correct atmospheric weight, and weightlessness, inside, and outside, of the thoughtful, and brawling, north, which includes Derek Bailey, Gavin Bryars, Tony Oxley (and therefore the Joseph Holbrooke trio of Sheffield), Harold Riley of Leeds, Trevor Watts of York, John McLaughlin of Doncaster, Georgie Fame of Leigh, Big in Japan of Liverpool, Fila Brazillia of Hull, Elkie Brooks of Broughton and Vinegar Joe, Robert Palmer of Scarborough and Vinegar Joe, John Taylor of Manchester, Azimuth and the University of York, Ian Anderson of Dunfermline and Blackpool, Clock DVA of Sheffield, Section 25 of Blackpool, Prelude of Gateshead, Graham Collier of Tynemouth, Penetration of Ferryhill, County Durham, Lee Griffiths of Collyhurst, Lita ‘How Much is That Doggie in the Window’ Roza of Liverpool and the first female singer to top the UK singles chart, Alan Hull of Newcastle upon Tyne and Lindisfarne, Annie Haslam of Bolton and Renaissance, Arthur Brown of Whitby, The EmCee Five of 1960 Newcastle, Kathryn Williams of Liverpool and Newcastle, Iain Matthews of Scunthorpe and almost Bradford Park Avenue FC, Back Door of the Lion Inn, Blakey Ridge, Hood of Leeds, John McCabe of Huyton and the Royal Northern College of Music, Mike Harrison of Carlisle and Spooky Tooth, the Oldham Tinkers, Lonelady, the Unthanks, Marconi Union, Antonymes, Quando Quango, Michael Chapman of Hunslet, Ernest Tomlinson of Rawtenstall, Harry Boardman of Failsworth, Alan Rawsthorne of Halsingden, Leslie ‘Thomas Barrett’ Stuart of Southport, pitman bard Tommy Armstrong of Shotley Bridge and Tanfield Lea, William Blezard of Padiham, Noël Coward and Playschool (and this is where a new path opens up, looping back to Ronnie Hazlehurst of Dukinfield), Ted Astley of Warrington and the theme tunes to The Champions, The Saint and Civilisation, Wally Stott of Leeds, the Goons and Angela Morley, Arthur Wood of Heckmondwike and the theme tune
to The Archers, and Barry Mason of Wigan, ‘Delilah’ and ‘The Last Waltz’.
6.
Thank you to those who have had an influence on this/my north whether they knew it or not; David Peace of Ossett and Tokyo, Simon Armitage of Marsden, Anthony H. Wilson of Salford, Marple, Granada & Factory, Alan Erasmus of Palatine Road, Didsbury & Factory and Peter Saville of Hale & Factory, and Gretton and Hannett of elsewhere, Johnny Marr of Ardwick and the major 9th, Ron Atkinson of Didsbury, Simon Stephens of Heaton Moor, Richard Boon of New Hormones and the library, Peter Coyle of Liverpool and the middle of somewhere, Kevin Cummins of Salford and City, Mike Garry of Chorlton-on-Medlock and Fallowfield, Philip Cashian of Warrington and the Royal Academy of Music, Chris Austin of Norwich and Peter Maxwell Davies, and Dave Haslam of Manchester and ‘Manchester’.
7.
Thank you to everyone at Bloomsbury for waiting so patiently for me to return, and Anna Simpson for making sure once it was all built that the paint was dry, the windows polished, the timetables followed, the roads correctly numbered and the bridges tested. Thank you to the nerveless copy editor, Hugh Davis, who gave the foundations a damned good going over, and recommended a few time-saving short cuts and time-travelling edits, to David Atkinson for the index, which created a wonderful new order, and to Sarah-Jane Forder, for the final survey.
8.
Thank you to Madeleine Morley, for knowing her Marx, as well as her Alice, and questioning everything; Carol Morley of Reddish and way beyond, for checking, and seeing, things, coupled with Cairo Cannon of the east coast and east London; the travelling Morleys, Jayne, Natasha and Florence; and the Mitchells of north Wales, Aunt Sally, Lizzie, Sian and Andrew.