Manchester Unspun — the story of the city’s resurrection

When Andy Spinoza arrived in Manchester to attend university in the autumn of 1979, it was a grimy, gloomy place in apparently inexorable decline. A combination of factory closures and botched slum clearance had reduced great swaths of the city to rubble. Manchester, he writes, “looked like it was locked in a fatal post-industrial tailspin”.

My family had returned there earlier in the same decade, after a few years living abroad. One of my first childhood memories is of my father’s bewilderment as a relative drove us from the airport through streets entirely denuded of familiar landmarks. “Where are we,” he kept asking, “where are we?” It was if some malevolent invisible hand had turned the cityscape into a tabula rasa — though to what end no one knew.

Today, Manchester, or its central core at any rate, looks very different. Towers cluster around Deansgate, five of them more than 150 metres high and the tallest buildings in the country outside London. The BBC has a significant presence at Salford Quays, and even long-neglected east Manchester, where my father grew up, has seen large amounts of inward investment — words you didn’t used to hear very often on the Ashton New Road, once home to the Clayton Aniline Company, a manufacturer of dyestuffs that had been one of the area’s largest employers.

Spinoza’s book is an attempt to explain how we got from there to here — how Manchester went from basket case to success story. And although he is a Mancunian by adoption rather than birth, he writes with the fervour and pride of a native. “The regeneration of my adopted city,” he says, “was a noble and righteous cause.”

Mick Hucknall, the Simply Red frontman, is portrayed with surprising generosity. His investment in his hometown is contrasted favourably with that of the feuding Gallagher brothers

It is to Spinoza’s credit, though, that he acknowledges that progress over the past 40 years or so has been patchy. Property developers might like Manchester these days, but it remains one of the most deprived places in the country, according to the city council’s own “indices of deprivation”. You don’t have to walk far beyond the hipster enclaves of Ancoats and the Northern Quarter, to the electoral ward of Miles Platting and Newton Heath, to see why.

Manchester Unspun is part-economic and political history and part-memoir. Spinoza, who began his career as one of the founders of the listings magazine City Life before joining the staff of the Manchester Evening News and eventually becoming a PR man for several bits of the city’s sprawling cultural bureaucracy, is both observer of and participant in the events he describes.

The author draws the “key players” in the rebirth of modern Manchester with a vividness that might have eluded a conventional historian. We encounter Colin Sinclair, one of the founders of the Boardwalk music venue where Oasis cut their teeth in the early 1990s; Jim “Rambo” Ramsbottom, the Salford bookie who took a chance on buying the city’s oldest standing warehouse and in the process set off the transformation of the Castlefield district; and Mick Hucknall, the Simply Red frontman, who is portrayed with surprising generosity and whose investment in his hometown Spinoza contrasts favourably with that of the feuding Gallagher brothers.

And, of course, there is the late Tony Wilson, former Granada TV presenter, founder of Factory Records and the presiding genius of Mancunian self-assertion. The book begins with Spinoza submitting the very Wilsonian thesis that without the Haçienda, the nightclub that Wilson helped to launch in 1982 with money made from the success of local bands Joy Division and New Order, there would have been no “new Manchester”.

Yet, for all his obvious affection for Wilson, Spinoza knows that the proposition is “a bit overstated”. That is the assessment of Sir Richard Leese, former council leader and, along with ex-council chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein, one of the “two knights of civic reinvention” in Manchester.

At least as important in the story Spinoza tells here is Leese and Bernstein’s ability to leverage the city’s remarkable cultural heritage as part of a spectacularly successful property play. The “post-industrial pragmatism” the local Labour council adopted in the 1980s stands in stark contrast, he suggests, to the confrontational tactics of their hard-left militant counterparts down the East Lancs Road in Liverpool. And it has arguably left an imprint on Manchester as lasting and significant as the visionary dreams of Wilson and his acolytes at Factory.

Manchester Unspun: Pop, Property and Power in the Original Modern City by Andy Spinoza, Manchester University Press £20, 376 pages

Jonathan Derbyshire is the FT’s executive opinion editor

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