Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project

by Sinclair, Iain

  A younger man attached himself to our little group, a walker, newly returned from Berlin. He said that he had set out one day, on a whim, from Alexanderplatz to Poland. He followed the railway line. He took no photographs, made no notes, carried out no research. There were drawings, sketches. He would turn the journey into a graphic novel.

  The cold water in the Premier Inn is off. The hot tap is scalding, volcanic. You run your morning bath before you turn in for the night. Give it time to stop steaming. The electricity, so they tell us, will be cut off at 11.30 p.m.: don’t get caught in the lift. Our window doesn’t shut, but the bed is big and comfortable. The breakfast bar is occupied by genial bouncers and roadies, who are exchanging tales of mayhem, life on the motorway.

  Back from the Urbis gig, Anna declines to eat in the empty restaurant, which is a low-ceilinged rabbit hutch, jaunty with muzak. You are safe, she reckons, with an Indian. They tell her, at the desk, that there is a recommended place ‘just around the back’. Blinded by the rain, twenty minutes in, we abandon this quest. It’s one of my conceits that canalside development packages come with bars and bistros and that the inner-city marinas of Manchester are now sufficiently established to have at least one of these, which has not yet been found out, declared bankrupt, rebranded, boarded over.

  Steepling warehouses, black water. Out of the gloom, a fuzzy halo of neon around an Italian restaurant. It’s one of those nights when five customers is five too many. The chef is drinking at the bar, resisting overtures from a pompous greeter in a slippery suit. When my fishcake arrives, after fifty minutes, it’s more like refrigerated cattle cake. You graze your tongue licking it, you can’t bite. ‘Everything good, signore, signora?’ And for once, sodden, starving and provoked, they get a true answer. ‘Awful.’

  There will be no charge. Snatching up her coat, Anna lets her linen napkin fall across the decorative candle, which smoulders noxiously, then bursts into flame. I throw some iced water over the conflagration and we rush for the door, leaving a charred and smoking mess. The lowlife revellers from Urbis are pissing into one of the ornamental trenches, but the rain will wash it away by morning.

  There was one more walk for the following day. Stephen Bayley, the original design commissar for the Millennium Dome, had been talking up an intervention in a revamped industrial quarter of Manchester known as New Islington. Other metropolitan commentators followed his example, enduring or enjoying the ride out of town, the cab, the lunch, a congenial interview with the Stirling Prize-winning architect: Will Alsop.

  ‘I like sitting at tables,’ Alsop said. ‘They are the horizontal planes of social discourse. Most proper conversations happen across a table, particularly if wine is involved.’

  The structure was called Chips (as in ‘cheap as’) and it looked, in magazine illustrations, like an off-cut from the container stack on the A13, downwind of the landfill mountain in Rainham. This cheery intruder on post-industrial blight consisted of a block of 142 apartments, fewer than half of which would be made available under the government’s ‘Rent to Homebuy’ scheme. The usual consultation process had been offered to locals (i.e., an opportunity to agree with what was already in place) and they were said to regard the jazzy invader with conditional affection.

  ‘I’d like to say the name Chips was my idea,’ Alsop said, ‘but in fact it was the locals who came up with it.’ Fat, golden-yellow, metal chips, oven-ready and heaped on the plate, beside a dollop of brown-sauce canal. Mouth-watering colour in enhanced digital representation. The big block lettering of containers in transit from the forgotten dirt-yard of Chobham Farm, Stratford. And I thought of another set of chips too: the last throw of a desperate gambler.

  New Islington didn’t show up on any of our giveaway maps, which meant that we were free to ramble, to follow our instincts. We had been in this unknown city just long enough to know where to avoid, how to navigate by river, canal, culture quarter. And how to rely on postcards collected from the splendid Manchester City Gallery. Last night’s Italian restaurant, I now realized, was a recapitulation of the claustrophobic gloom of Pierre Adolphe Valette’s blue-tinged painting India House (1912). Snaky reflections in the water, warehouses looming out of the murk. After the intense and unsettling experience of a tramp around the halls, stairs, chambers, of a new (new to me) museum, with the urge to see everything and still find time to concentrate on highlights, discoveries, coming away with a few postcards is a necessary ritual, a ticket of release. The correspondence I received from Ballard always came on postcards, from which you could track his movements across Europe: Rome, Madrid, Paris. His unexpected interests: Caravaggio, Raphael, Titian, Breughel, Henri Rousseau. With a reserve stock, from the Tate and the Museum of Modern Art in New York: Dali and Max Ernst. Spread Ballard’s cards across one of Will Alsop’s tables and you possess the catalogue of the Shepperton writer’s psychopathology: Sigmund Freud, Henry Ford, and the dust cloud from ‘the world’s first atomic bomb’. Crucifixions, velvet nudes. Hotel lobbies, magnum cities. Cannibalism on a Spanish beach.

  Off-map, beyond anywhere you are advised to shop, it gets more interesting, more Chinese. Supermarkets. Factory-size restaurants catering to out-of-town wedding parties. Bilingual signs for the HSBC bank (which is already Chinese-owned). Heading in an uncommitted north-westerly direction, we achieve an orient of the heart. Green tiles and orange, wide-skirted pagoda roofs: WING YIP, CHINESE & ORIENTAL GROCERIES. GLAMOROUS CHINESE RESTAURANT. A proper street, used and occupied, evolved into a nice mix of pushy incomers and doomed survivors. In the newspaper shop they are friendly, but they don’t do much in the way of news. In the kiosk-bank, the Anglo-Chinese manager sets us right for New Islington. It is more than a rumour, he lives there. And he loves it, this separation from the street, with the screening devices of contemporary design, the electronic security systems. He is delighted that we, strangers, tourists, should want to locate his building. It confirms the decision he made, his faith in a provisional, CGI future. He flips a hand-phone, taps images on a screen, a silver wafer like a device for taking your own fingerprints. He relishes this sense of entitlement, of being a pioneer, an investor in a private island: beyond Manchester, beyond anywhere. Shanghai. Hong Kong. Canary Wharf. Dubai. New Islington.

  The selling point of the enterprise zone is its refusal to connect with the street, the through-traffic heading out of town, the dignified abdication of the warehouses along the cobbled canal. Everything here aspires to Berlin’s death-strip, the shadowland of the Wall as it comes back to life, as scavenging film-poets exploit it: wastelots, rubble gardens, exposed cellars, immigrant kiosks, metal-shuttered booze boxes. A headlong collision between cocky architecture, tolerated public art and brazen hucksterism: new plaques on old mills, twisted avenues of girders mimicking dead forests, towpaths with panoramic hoardings making a movie of the future: HELPING TO REGENERATE NEW ISLINGTON. You could define the area, its distance from the commercial centre, as territory in which they can’t, at present, afford to build another prison. Strangeways, the ugly penal colony housing most of the cast of the Coronation Street soap opera, is across the river, on the west side of Bury New Road.

  Stephen Bayley speaks of Will Alsop’s ‘tipsy bravura’. The Chips stack is a prime example of the electively unfinished look, perilously balanced blocks in fuck-you colours, suitable for students, artists, city-rim campers. Copywriting for the project makes reference to vanished industries, containers, scrapyards. The effect is throwaway but not disposable. And, although it has been extensively written up, Alsop’s cluster is resolutely open-ended, a work in progress. That is its charm: it feels squatted, builders stroll through at a recreational saunter, their tools have been arranged on concrete slabs, like conceptual art waiting for a sponsor. Alsop says that what he is trying to promote is ‘space’, unmediated, empty as a scooped skull. ‘Everyone goes through the same door. You can’t tell who isrelatively wealthy and who’s not.’ Neither can you tell who works here, who lives here, and who is trying t
o cobble together enough material for fifteen hundred words in the broadsheets. Everybody we see through the window is carrying furniture. Natural greenery (weeds) have been set in concrete tubs in a field of stone chippings. Curls of barbed wire dress green-mesh fencing.

  ISLINGTON WHARF: BUY TO LIVE. TRY BEFORE YOU BUY. LIVE FOR 1 YEAR WHILE BUILDING YOUR DEPOSIT (LIMITED AVAILABILITY AND SUBJECT TO STATUS. ONLY VALID WHEN PROSPERITY IS PURCHASED.)

  The rain gives Alsop’s containers a glaze of authenticity. Nobody is around to make the pitch. The offices for the neighbouring development, the tower block, are shut. This is as close as we have come to SuperCity: parked units, mobile homes that do not move, a vertical trailer camp heaped in a dangerous arrangement that isn’t going to crash. The building predicts a community that may or may not arrive. It exists only because funding has been achieved, at a certain level; but not quite enough, so it appears, to get the thing done.

  Drenched and weary, we complete our Manchester trajectory with a return, across town, to Trafford Park. That monster mall, the Trafford Centre, conceived in 1984, is more of an antique than the Victorian mills of New Islington. The Thatcherite optimism, the glitz, the Cinecittà bravado, is suicidal, insane. Fascinated by what the posthumous history of a redundant mall might be, here was my answer: a space–time singularity. White hole. The absence of gravity. This swollen epic of consumerism was waved through, in 1989, as a job-creation scheme. There were 35,000 unemployed people within a five-mile radius. No public investment was required. The centre would provide 6,500 jobs, as well as taking on 2,000 construction workers. It didn’t much matter what was being built: the same argument plays for all grand projects. Coshed by an excess of retail opportunities, fast-food outlets pastiching global cuisines, multiplexes showing eight kinds of Harry Potter and four kinds of dinosaur, we flop in a phantom New Orleans and prod at some inedible oil slick, Gulf of Mexico fish substitute. If you arrive on foot, pushing your way through a hedge into the supersize car park, you are an alien, a non-consuming wetback. Get yourself spotted on CCTV using a camera and Special Branch will kick down your door, at first light, for no extra charge.

  The Trafford Centre has its own microclimate and it smells like dead television. Like the aftersweat of an Oscar ceremony: hope dashed, lust curtailed, fear tasted. That heavenly dome. The Gloria Swanson staircases. The muscle beach statuary. Our clapboard Basin Street has no bougainvillea, no heady scents: it stinks of recycled air, in-transit passengers, plastic headrests. Muzak is malfunctioning in another room, there are no street bands.

  ‘It is unlikely,’ John Parkinson-Bailey wrote, ‘that another out-of-town centre of such a size will ever be built.’ But the Trafford Centre isn’t out of town, it is a town, a suburb bent on making Manchester its feeder satellite. And in this aim it anticipates the ambition of Tesco: to become a primary developer, by setting their provide-everything hangars within a secure ring of blocks and towers; thrown up, with the connivance, and approval, of local and central government.

  The Trafford Centre is a quantum explosion of statistics: three miles of shopfronts, twenty-seven restaurants, a food court seating 1,600 people (eventually), nineteen escalators, forty-three hydraulic lifts, banks, financial services, eighteen ‘food on the go’ outlets, travel agents and estate agents, lottery points, parking space for 10,000 cars. The centre is an oil vampire, a carbon-emission hotspot. A De Quincey hallucination of superimposed cultures, pub-quiz quotations: Aztec, Chinese, Hercules Conquers Atlantis, The Fall of the Roman Empire, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers ocean-liner modernism. Granite and marble from the quarries at Montignosa and Querleta in Italy, at £5.8 million: lottery-winner acquisitiveness on an heroic scale. Premier League Xanadu. And all of it fixed in another era, the 1980s: retro television, Ashes to Ashes. In the great gold rush of Old Tory/New Labour consumerism, the Trafford Centre became the epicentre: of traffic congestion, blocked roads with anti-pedestrian earthbanks, strategic plantings. A shopping city and football stadium in the same park. An extension to the Metrolink was turned down by John Prescott, the Environment and Transport Secretary, who overruled the local planning inspector, while reasserting, with a thump on the lectern, his commitment to reducing private motoring.

  It wasn’t long before the news came through that Urbis was blown. The thing that was never grounded, that never managed to find a workable description for the money that leaked away into the gutters around its wind-blown square, was exposed as a metaphor of foolishness, not an engine of regeneration. The icy skin reflected the world, but it was not of the world: a solid void. Redundancy notices were delivered to two-thirds of the staff, the invisibles. Urbis came into being in 2002, on the tide of New Labour boosterism, post-millennial loose change. And like all the other vanity interventions across the north of England, it crashed: the berg melted. But a neat solution was found, relocating failure, in the expectation that, after so many lies and prevarications, nobody would notice. The collapsed National Museum of Football in Preston could be transferred to Manchester. Fail better, fail bigger. Urbis will reopen as the thing they were determined to spurn, a museum, a museum of football: in a city where there are already two major enterprises running on their club shops, their global-branding initiatives, their TV channels. Urbis, it seems, is retreating to a form I remember so well from my childhood, from Blackpool’s Pleasure Beach: waxworks of Stanley Matthews and Stan Mortensen, after the monochrome Cup Final triumph of 1953.

  Chinese Boxes

  Staying away from Hackney, and out on the road, I took any assignments that were offered, an untenured motorway lecturer, hawker of threadbare polemics: a low-rent turn. I staggered into retail-park campuses from epic detours around overturned lorries, potatoes spread across the M11, red-cone avenues, to face ranks of urban geographers, conceptual architects, land artists – never literary folk. I was spared that. When I returned home, after a few months, it was to check on outstanding invoices (outstanding in tardiness), to placate the bank, to shuffle red postcards for undelivered packets and summonses. The more I worked the less I had. Expenses piled up, nobody rushed to reward a person operating at the outer limits of the system. Promised fees melted away in massive tax deductions. Invoices were mislaid, or returned so that the expense claims could be filed to another authority in another office. There were unfortunate epidemics of Chinese flu in the finance department. At one point, after three months of delivering talks composed in transit, finessing journalism that might be profitably recycled, slapping down introductions for over-optimistic reissues, I added up the figures: I was owed more than £12,000. And I had no time to chase it. Keep moving. Another suitcase, another Travelodge.

  Unless you walk everywhere, the new England is unutterably strange, a carousel of disorientating jumpcuts; coming off-road is like random digital stutter. Another plate of congealed fish and chips. An invitation to join the Automobile Association. A health check by slot machine. Another lecture to deliver: a madman talking to himself in public. Sunk in apathetic reverie, like all those other ghosts in neon cafeterias, I began to wonder if grand projects had ever been successful. And if, having once failed, they couldbe revived. I remembered the earlier trip with Chris Petit to Morecambe. And the Midland Hotel. That memorial to streamlined Style Moderne. To the age of the railway poster.

  The sweep of bay has more cloud than it can comfortably accommodate. The pleasure to be derived from sliding back a glass door against the force of the wind, after checking in to the revamped 1930s hotel, and remarking the narrowness of the balcony, is tempered by wondering where exactly the nuclear power station locates itself, and where the Chinese cockle pickers were trapped by the tide and drowned.

  While Anna rested, I made a tour with my camera, after deciding that it would be more interesting to investigate the network of small streets behind the showpiece esplanade. The pictures, when they come back from the chemist, are never right. You can’t capture it. The way Morecambe has worked so hard to reverse history, to bring back the era of l
idos, pleasure gardens, well-kept municipal parks: the last resort. All Lancashire – industrialists, solicitors, showmen, Masons and Rotarians – flocked to dinner dances at the Midland. Buck Ruxton, the Lancaster GP, hanged in 1936 for the double murder of his wife and his maid, was a regular at social functions. On parallel avenues, running away from the windswept front, the town carried on its real business: failing tea rooms, Eric Morecambe heritage pubs, covered markets converted into budget malls, drinkers slumped on bus station benches, dope deals of spotty cyclists on wastelots behind abandoned petrol stations.

  Oliver Hill’s Midland Hotel, from 1933, is a significant part of the unsunk fleet of English modernism: low, flat-roofed, rimmed with slender balconies. And always hungry for another coat of white paint. Deco curves arguing with starker German geometry. Hotel or hospital? Fresh air, exercise, sunbathing. The lull of the 1930s, the years when the middle classes felt good about themselves, when they experimented with Europe. Hill’s only experience of hotels and resorts was staying in them. He came from an established family. His connections with Sir Edward Lutyens (who designed an annexe for Manchester’s Midland Hotel in 1930) helped to secure the Morecambe commission. On a continental tour, Hill visited the Stockholm Exhibition, and took a fancy to the Scandinavian version of modernism. The space, the light. Like a vision of the coming Ikea philosophy.