Manchester mythology posits a city of warm, gritty, authentic and rooted subjects. It projects an image of itself as tough but ‘homely’. Yet the speed at which the city tears down and rebuilds presents an opposite view. Many buildings are entirely destroyed, but the façade – the frontage – is often left standing. These ‘fronts’ are the second Janus face of Manchester myth. They are also ‘fronts’ as in the frontiers of revanchism, as capitalism finds yet another space to cream surplus from – either directly off or to the detriment of – its citizens. Here is the tragic face, the counterpart to the garrulous myth of the swaggering, cheeky Mancunian on the make. Here is the evidence of Manchester as a radical right city.
Manchester: Something rich and strange challenges us to see the quintessential post-industrial city in new ways. Bringing together twenty-three diverse writers and a wide range of photographs of Greater Manchester, it argues that how we see the city can have a powerful effect on its future – an urgent question given how quickly the urban core is being transformed. The book uses sixty different words to speak about the diversity of what we think of as Manchester – whether the chimneys of its old mills, the cobbles mostly hidden under the tarmac, the passages between terraces, or the everyday act of washing clothes in a laundrette. Unashamedly down to earth in its focus, this book makes the case for a renewed imaginative relationship that recognises and champions the fact that we’re all active in the making and unmaking of urban spaces.