Some years ago, when a national newspaper editor headed north to view the property boom that is transforming Manchester’s city centre and its skyline, Andrew Spinoza was entrusted with the job of tour guide.
“I put him on a Metrolink tram outside his hotel to Salford Quays,” writes Spinoza in Manchester Unspun, which has deservedly been fast tracked into a paperback edition. “This ride showed off the arrestingly mashed-up historic and current Manchester. The city’s crumbling and ripped backsides were being integrated with classy modern buildings. The views from St Peter’s Square through Castlefield to the Lowry Centre were, and still are, a brilliant 20 minutes’ advertisement for the resurgent urban centre.”
These days Spinoza would doubtless also direct the curious visitor to Aviva Studios, the lavish and cavernous £242m arts venue that has just opened on the site of the old Granada Studios. The inaugural show, a dance version of The Matrix directed by Danny Boyle, is packed with references to the cultural history of the Republic of Mancunia – a New Order soundtrack, Alan Turing, images of yellow trams heading towards the charcoal-grey sheen of the proliferating Deansgate towers. Welcome to Manchester, or “Manc-hattan”, as some now like to describe it with a certain degree of ambivalence.
Elegantly interweaving his own biography with that of the city, Spinoza narrates with panache the story of how the place once known as Cottonopolis has reinvented itself. Part of the motive for writing Manchester Unspun appears to be sheer astonishment at the scale of the transformation.
When the author arrived from the south to study at the university in 1979, the city centre economy was on its knees. Between 1972 and 1984, Manchester lost 207,000 manufacturing jobs. Its centre was depopulated, decaying, and in violent pockets of its former industrial core, dangerous to visit. Spinoza quotes the urbanist David Rudlin, who started his studies in the same year and recalls a wasteland where “from the heart of the city to its edge, a distance of some six miles, we walked through uninterrupted dereliction”.
Enter Tony Wilson. Spinoza’s engaging thesis is that the quixotic cultural revolution led by the co-founder of Factory Records in the 1980s paved the way for an economic renaissance. The Factory aesthetic, channelling Manchester’s industrial past, pointed the way to a future in which spectacle and entertainment would constitute the new production line. The charismatic, recession-era gloom of Joy Division, the aura of the gang-infested Haçienda nightclub, and the blissed-out excesses of the “Madchester” era, gave the city a cumulative allure that council leaders Richard Leese and Howard Bernstein could monetise.
Abandoning the notion of pursuing municipal socialism in a Tory-dominated country, Manchester’s two most powerful politicians spent the 80s and 90s controversially opening the city up to private investment on the most favourable of terms. The “24-hour party people” celebrated in Michael Winterbottom’s film homage to Wilson, says Spinoza, created the aura and cachet that helped them sell Manchester around the world and earn the right to host events such as the Commonwealth Games. Young professionals flooded into newly built apartments. “Factory Records and the Haçienda,” he writes, “gave the kiss of life to a dying city and sparked a chain reaction of hubris, scandal, money and power politics still playing out today.”
The claim might be slightly overstated. Leese, interviewed at length in the book, thinks so. But as an impeccably connected and longstanding adopted Mancunian, Spinoza is uniquely well-placed to prosecute it. After university, he founded the arts and listings magazine City Life, before becoming a hyperactively connected diary editor for the Manchester Evening News.
After establishing his own PR firm, he became involved in some of the city’s major building projects, and witnessed overblown design disasters such as the ill-conceived Urbis building play out at first-hand. In one of many memorable encounters recounted in the book, he is summarily dismissed by that quintessential modern Manchester man Gary Neville after a disagreement over PR strategy for a proposed luxury hotel. A sympathetic property consultant tells him: “Gary very much values the views of his consultants – as long as they agree with his own.”
Neville is only one of a vast cast of characters populating Manchester Unspun, as it traces four decades of urban transformation that have not delighted everyone. Spinoza gives due space to the critics of a gentrification process that has transformed the feel of the city centre. As the growth strategy acquires an ever more corporate feel (Aviva Studios was originally conceived as “Factory International”), and the future of parts of east Manchester is outsourced to Manchester City’s Abu Dhabi owners, it is sometimes hard not to feel nostalgia for the wilder time when Wilsonian chutzpah was running the show in what locals still refer to as “town”.
In the 1980s, for example, when Factory and New Order open a high-concept bar in run-down Oldham Street, Granada Television sends a young Stuart Maconie to examine the designer urinals. Shaun Ryder and Liam Gallagher respectively stand up for more traditional Mancunian values by throwing a bottle at the mirror behind the bar and smashing an upmarket vase. Another notable clash of sensibilities occurs when the Haçienda hosts a 1996 seminar on situationism – the philosophical touchstone for the Factory way of doing things. Challenged by a heckling Mark E Smith to define what the word means, Wilson is obliged to confess he can’t, conceding: “I just like the slogans.”
Spinoza recounts such tales with wry relish. As a teenager he went north inspired by the history of Manchester’s political radicalism and the work of music writers such as Paul Morley and Jon Savage. He then found himself occupying a front-row seat for the epic regeneration story that played out over the next four decades. Coolly analytical, exceptionally well-informed and hugely entertaining, Manchester Unspun does justice to it.
Manchester Unspun: How a City Got High on Music by Andy Spinoza is published by Manchester University Press (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
