ABSTRACT
In the imagination of urban England, Manchester occupies a special place. From its emergence as the world’s first industrial city in the 1820s, to its more recent existence as a post-industrial playground it has always been, as the editors of a recent anthology point out, in a hurry to be somewhere else, regardless of the consequences. It has, they write, ‘been in an almost perpetual state of restructuring […] talk of revolution, like the drizzle, is nearly always in the air’ (Peck and Ward 2002: 1). This condition might well be described as anxious, for it shows a preoccupation with the future, with what might be, rather than the present and what is; its activity, its work, and its being is directed toward this future, heedless of what chaos it might actually bring.
