Manchester – a vibrant culture of ideas
Manchester Cathedral © Visit Manchester
With Manchester’s annual literary festival beginning on October 18th, Judy Darley heads north to find out more about the home of both Anthony Burgess and Elizabeth Gaskell, to discover what this city has to offer the imaginative mind, and to have her expectations surpassed.
There are some places that spring to mind when you consider literature. Manchester isn’t one of them. Along with the rest of the English northwest it was the birthplace of the industrial revolution 200 years ago, and more recently became the site of a thriving music scene that spawned the likes of Morrissey, The Smiths, The Stone Roses and Oasis. It’s also home to four premiership football teams including Manchester United and Manchester City. But at first glance it doesn’t seem to be the most obvious destination for writers.
Yet this city and its surrounding suburbs and villages was home to countless authors, most notably Anthony Burgess, the gloriously twisted mind behind A Clockwork Orange, and Elizabeth Gaskell, who at the other end of the literary scale penned Cranford and North and South.
Celebrating these authors and many more, the annual literature festival runs from October 15th to 25th this year, and will include talks, readings and discussions from Kate Atkinson, Martin Amis, Ruth Padel, Eoin Colfer, among others.
In the footsteps of authors
In order to get to grips with what Manchester has to offer the imaginative mind, I took the train up north and acquired the services of local guide Chris Norwood.
Chris proved a fabulous source of information about the city’s history, taking me on a three-hour ramble passed points of literary interest including the house of poet John Byrom, the graveyard where the family of Thomas de Quincey, author of The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, are buried, the church where Elizabeth Gaskell worshipped, and the Central Library where Anthony Burgess was once seduced as a schoolboy by a middle-aged woman. These unassuming streets were clearly rife with stories!
“Manchester’s literature is probably most interesting because of what it tells us about the city as it developed,” Chris says. “Gaskell’s North and South and Cranford are stories intertwined in the industrial landscape of Manchester and are akin to Dickens’ work. Isabella Banks’ novel The Manchester Man
Places to sit and write
Of the places we visited during our tour, Chetham’s Library was by far the most evocative, and somewhere I could imagine secreting myself with a notebook and pen for many hours. Founded in 1653, this is the UK’s oldest public library, with dark wood-panelled walls and shelves crammed with ancient books that exude an enticing musty fragrance that seems almost to be the aroma of language.
Many of the books are so valuable that they are stored in cages you can enter and be locked into to pore over their fragile pages, while in earlier centuries books were comparatively more expensive than laptops are today, and were chained to their shelves to prevent them being stolen.
Our tour also took us past the cathedral café, which sits between the cathedral and Harvey Nicks and offers the chance to think and write while sitting at a table beneath a double-arched bridge dating back to the 1400s. I always find the peaceful interiors of churches and cathedrals a great place to think out tricky plot conundrums, so the proximity of the cathedral is a great plus-point. It’s also rather fitting that Margaret Atwood launched her latest novel, The Year of the Flood, at Manchester Cathedral in September.
Close to this spot, Chris showed me where the IRA bomb exploded in 1996. “It was one of the biggest bombs ever exploded on mainland Britain out of wartime,” he said. “Fortunately no one was killed, but a lot of people were injured.”
The damage to surrounding shops and offices was extensive, and began a period of rejuvenation that has resulted in a glorious shopping quarter where steel and glass boxes house the likes of Jigsaw, Selfridges, LK Bennett and Ugg. Ironically, this area was once known as Penniless Hill due to the large number of homeless people who used to congregate close to the Royal Cotton Exchange, now a theatre.
Chris took me into Barton Arcade, an exquisite Victorian mall of white-painted cast iron and vast glass frontages. The arcade is also home to Kitchen, a fabulous eatery attached to the famous Circle Club frequented by media types and celebrities.
A feast of inspiration
There’s no shortage of places to eat out in Manchester, but one of the most unique is Linen. Tucked away above a casino at Manchester 235, an events venue hidden inside the North Western Warehouse, the restaurant offers a fabulous English menu. I dined on tender racks of lamb served with crushed potatoes and creamy goats cheese, followed by indulgent wedges of chocolate cake drizzled with a cherry coolie that shot us back to delicious reminiscences of Black Forest gateaux.
The decadence the food was almost outdone by the deliciousness of the setting, with its warehouse past evident in the riveted steel columns encased in acrylic transformed by colour-changing lights that gave us the illusion of being surrounded by immense lava lamps. Down the sweeping stairs, gamblers gambolled on determinedly, providing a wealth of curious characters for future works of fiction.
That night I slept at the Park Inn, a comfortable contemporary hotel with WIFI available throughout, and a laptop-sized safe in each room - ideal for travelling writers. When you need a break from words you can escape to the Pace Health Club and Nu Spa, swim a few brisk lengths to get your blood circulating again and lounge in the fragrant steam room. If you’re writing horror or sci-fi, the pool might be best avoided - the black tiles give an uneasy, but somewhat exhilarating, sensation of swimming over an abyss. Who knows what lurks beneath?
On my second and final day in Manchester I set off with a group of journalists for leafy affluent Altrincham, the location of the Vegetarian Society. A movement that took hold in 1809 spurred on by the sermons of Rev. William Cowherd, vegetarianism is one of the more unlikely success stories of Manchester.
Today the society hosts a wide range of courses at their Cordon Vert cookery school. Our tutors Sarah and Louise equipped us with apron and demonstrated a range of tapas and mezze recipes that we then got stuck into. From Moroccan Beetroot dip to bruschetta salad and spinach and brazil nut filo pastry pie, it was an extraordinary feast of flavours that we indulged in as soon as the lesson finished. As someone who often uses cooking as creative thinking time, I was happy to learn some new recipes.
Manchester has more to offer than football and a history rich in far more than industry. Sometimes it’s a good thing to have your expectations confounded, and Manchester’s hidden culture of ideas made me rethink this great city as one of the shining lights ’s on the UK’s literature circuit.
To find out more about Manchester Literature Festival, please visit www.manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk
For more on Manchester’s history, go to http://4evrmanchester.wordpress.com
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