ABSTRACT
Lammar, the late, outrageous drag queen host of a eponymous basement cabaret club, with an opulent interior that stood in stark contrast to the area’s dark, deserted streets long before its renaissance. In the wonderful novel The Manchester Man, written by Isabella Varley under her pen name Mrs Banks, there is a description of the area now known as the Northern Quarter. Like Isabella herself, one of the main characters lives in a respectable house in what was then a well-to-do residential quarter. In one passage the book describes the scenes as the residents are disturbed by agitated crowds filtering through its streets on the day of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819. These roots as a Georgian residential neighbourhood are something that the Northern Quarter shares with many of the neighbourhoods described in this book. However, its gentility wasn’t to last; within a few short years the Industrial Revolution had taken hold of Manchester and its Georgian past was swept away by bold, some might say brash, Victorian warehouses and mills (the Northern Quarter is, in fact, unusual in Manchester for having retained at least some of its Georgian buildings). The district became a place to trade in the cotton goods that were produced in the surrounding towns. The Northern Quarter was developed with what in Yorkshire would be called ‘piece’ warehouses – where samples were kept and trade was done – rather than with places to manufacture or store cloth. The legacy of grand buildings has allowed the Northern Quarter to be used as a stand-in for Manhattan in films like Alfie and Captain America. The city’s cotton trade peaked in 1912 when
eight billion square yards of cloth were traded. After this it entered a long period of decline as it lost out to cheaper foreign imports. But the trade never completely died and to this day there are clothing wholesalers in the area, although the sweatshops of the more recent past have largely disappeared. By the 1980s the
area was run-down and shabby. The streets behind Piccadilly were full of dark warehouses and, while few of them were completely vacant, most were in a poor state of repair. Further to the east and north there were vacant sites, used as surface car parks for city centre commuters while the northern part of the area had been dominated by the Smithfield Market. This was relocated in 1973, leaving some fine market buildings that lay vacant for years. In the late 1970s part of the market area was developed for the Smithfield Gardens housing scheme. Built as council housing with two-storey maisonettes over one-storey flats, this was the first new city centre housing in Manchester in the modern era and remains successful today. It was built around the former fish and poultry market that was converted into Manchester’s Craft and Design Centre. The birth of the modern Northern Quarter started at this time and can perhaps be dated to 1981 when Elaine and James Walsh opened Affleck’s Palace. The model was simple enough: take a vacant building and let it to young entrepreneurs on flexible low-commitment terms so that they can start selling stuff. It quickly grew into a bazaar with more than 70 stalls selling all manner of fashions and alternative products. Created in the old Affleck & Brown department store that had become Debenhams and finally closed in the early 1970s, Affleck’s has dressed, shod and shorn generations of Manchester’s alternative youth. It has also spilled out businesses to populate the surrounding streets. One of these, a young graduate called Tom Bloxham started out running a poster stall in Afflecks, before leasing the neighbouring building, knocking through and creating the Affleck’s Arcade. This was how Urban Splash started and one of their first large schemes would be the conversion of the neighbouring Smithfield Building. In 1989 Factory Records opened a bar across the road called Dry (because at one point they thought that they wouldn’t get a licence in time for the opening), with its Factory catalogue number
FAC 201. The chip shop next door evolved into the Night & Day cafe where Guy Garvey of Elbow played his first gig and where in a graphic novel by Adam Cadwell vampires party at night. By the early 1990s these developments had created a kernel of activity in the lower part of Oldham Street, although much of the area remained as warehouses during the day and deserted streets at night. It was at this time that the name the Northern Quarter was coined, even if the area is more to the east than the north of the city (‘northern’ is more an attitude than a compass point, as Paul Morley points out in his book North). A study was commissioned and undertaken by a consortium of local consultants and architects led by Nick Johnson. Soon After the Northern Quarter Association was set up involving local business in the area’s regeneration. An artist in residence was appointed: the ceramicist Liam Curtin, based in the Craft and Design Centre. He produced a range of artworks, including poems by Lemn Sissay set into the pavements. He also replaced all of the street name signs with versions made from ceramic tiles. However, the regeneration of the area was not really something that was engineered. As Manchester’s creative economy took off, the Northern Quarter was the natural place for it to be based and the whole district came back to life over the course of a decade. Streets that were once dark and forbidding are now lined with bars and cafes, and buildings once largely empty are now full of architects, graphic artists and tech companies. This is not so much a regeneration success story as an example of the natural cycles of decline and regeneration that happen in all successful cities. In the UK it seemed for many years that these natural cycles had stalled and that places like the Northern Quarter would never recover. However, with the renaissance of our provincial cities these cycles are once more at work.
