Some days it seems as though Manchester’s self-mythologising has bloated from a simple cottage industry into the engine of its own post-industrial revolution.
Like a service station compilation CD, the same old songs are trotted out time and again: Madchester, Spike Island, and, invariably, The Haçienda. In the wake of the recent passing of Howard Bernstein, the former chief executive of Manchester City Council and a figure such compilations are apt to skip, it’s a relief to note that David Scott’s brashly thoughtful Mancunians takes a more sceptical approach to the myths of the turn of the century, broadening out into a more panoramic view of Manchester’s changing sociological and cultural skyline.
Beautifully liveried, its contents for the most part live up to the promise of its corporation orange sleeve and formidable everywoman cover star on the paperback. Taking its starting point a decade after their dissolution, the frontispiece is the only evocation of The Smiths. Scott’s sights are set on the more prosaic poets that sputtered into the spotlight at the end of the 1990s, the likes of Elbow and Doves, crafters of anthems for the unambiguous.
It’s not only the hand-me-downs of cultural journalism that Scott sifts through, however, separating out the received wisdom that’s worked its way to the top of the pile to reveal the more complicated stories that lie beneath. For example, teasing out the founding myth of the regenerated city and its supposed catalyst in the bomb detonated on Corporation Street by the IRA in 1996, Scott rewinds the narrative, freeze-framing other less explosive, but equally important moments, such as the building of Manchester Arena and The Bridgewater Hall, and the brazen bid to host the Olympics that made the successful application to host the Commonwealth Games thinkable.
By anchoring his analysis in the first-hand experience of himself and his interviewees, Scott identifies ginnels of experience that other cartographers of the city have failed to map. Few would have suspected, for instance, that it was possible at one time to raise a reasonable secondary income from being paid by Greater Manchester Police to make up the numbers in their identity parades. Such apparently picturesque picaresques, however, pave the way for a more serious examination of the police’s less becoming side, not least the disproportionate use of stop and search powers against the city’s black population. Completing the turn of the circle, further first-person testimonies bring the statistics home, as when Scott lays bare the loss of a friend to suicide, cornered by mounting drug debts.
Inclusive as it is in many other ways, foregrounding the frequently marginalised perspective of a certain section of the working class – extrovert, gregarious and uninhibited in everything but the display of male emotions – Scott’s history has a parallel tendency to skirt the quietly overlooked, sidelining the magnificent electropop folly of Performance in favour of the more readily-digestible Badly Drawn Boy, for instance.
But the gift of cities is that they’re large enough to shape in our own image. Mancunians presents the reader with the clay that Scott has sculpted from his own materials, sourced more assiduously than many of his predecessors, while leaving it malleable enough for them to be able to make their own mark. Where some might say that the past was made of stone, Scott’s curiosity suggests a less permanent way, leaving space for a future that might imagine Manchester without looking back, in anger or otherwise.
Mancunians: Where Do We Start, Where Do I Begin? by David Scott is available to buy. For more information, click here.
