A Manchester thread for all things Manc

[hitmouse]

RMT running a series of Wednesday lunchtime demos in Manchester city centre, in support of outsourced rail staff employed through Carlisle:

 

[hitmouse]

Luxury penthouse in Manchester named after Friedrich Engels

Referencing socialist thinker is latest example of city repurposing its radical history for profit, say local people

www.theguardian.com

A multimillion-pound luxury penthouse flat named after the revolutionary socialist thinker Friedrich Engels is the latest example of Manchester repurposing its radical history for profit, local people have said.

The apartment is in the east tower in Deansgate Square, where the developer Renaker says its vision for the “New Jackson” skyscraper district “is to create a sustainable and attractive neighbourhood where people feel proud to call home”.


The tower stands just off Deansgate, in what was once a slum area of Manchester, where families lived in squalid and cramped homes, and grinding poverty. It is also just a few hundred metres from a statue of Engels, which stands outside the Home arts centre.

The German philosopher spent more than two decades in Manchester in the mid-19th century, from where he researched his seminal work The Condition of the Working Class in England.

The book is a study on the Victorian industrial working class, which highlighted the issue of overcrowded housing, as well as high mortality rates and poor working conditions.
https://www.theguardian.com/society...ed-in-manchester-to-curb-housing-costs-report
Today, there is incredibly high demand for affordable housing in Manchester, with more than 15,000 applications on the waiting list for social housing.

According to the property website Rightmove, the average price for a property in Manchester is £300,521, with the average selling price for flats at £200,652.

The 290 sq metre (3,126 sq ft) flat is listed on the developer’s website as a showhome, but in promotional material it was advertised with a price tag of £2.5m.

A second penthouse apartment, “The Turing” – presumably named after the University of Manchester computer scientist Alan Turing – is also on the market for £2.5m.

“The Engels” features three en suite bedrooms, as well as a home office and a sweeping open-plan living area.

“It’s just another iteration of that thing that Manchester’s been very good at doing, which is reabsorbing radical elements of its history into a brand,” said Isaac Rose, from Greater Manchester Tenants Union.

“[Engels] deliberately fled the life of the bourgeoisie to live and be among the working class, but maybe he’d have found it ultimately amusing that things have got this mad that they were naming penthouses after him.”

The affordable housing crisis in Manchester, Rose said, was “pretty bad”.

“We see the effects of it every day,” he added. “A mix of lack of social stock, rent rises in the private rental sector by quite substantial margins, and those two things combining to mean that the only option for people is to be put in temporary accommodation.

“Especially in the areas immediately south of where those towers are – Hulme, Moss Side – [there have been] massive rent rises, and if people are kicked out of their private rented home it’s very unlikely they’ll be able to find anywhere in the area … you’ve got this kind of expulsion of people from their neighbourhoods.”

Jonathan Schofield, a writer and guide who runs Engels tours of Manchester, said: “It’s actually built on a slum, if you go back in history. Basically it was very, very densely packed terraced housing, and now, 350ft up or something, there’s a penthouse named after the one who wanted to see the end of all that.”

Describing the name as “hilarious”, he asked: “How did anybody think this was relevant? Did they just read a list of names and thought ‘Oh they’re quite famous, let’s put his name up there.’ The father of modern communism, with Karl Marx, who believed in common ownership.”

 

[Don Baumgarten]

Luxury penthouse in Manchester named after Friedrich Engels

Referencing socialist thinker is latest example of city repurposing its radical history for profit, say local people

www.theguardian.com

Is it true that a lot of Chinese visit Mannie due to the Engels/Marx connection? Maybe that’s a reason they’ve given it that name. That and of course the free publicity it surely must have garnered with people now discussing how preposterous it is.

 

[Don Baumgarten]

New book:

The Rentier City: Manchester and the Making of the Neoliberal Metropolis - Repeater Books

In cities across the world, gentrification and the housing crisis are facts of life. But how did we get to this point? And is there any way we can fight back? A good place to begin answering these questions is Manchester, England. Over the last thirty years, corporate developers, rentier...

repeaterbooks.com

Launch event for said new book:

Book Launch: The Rentier City

Launch event for Isaac Rose's new book on Manchester, The Rentier City, out now with Repeater Books.

www.eventbrite.co.uk

“In 1969 Manchester City Council commissioned the artist William Mitchell to make a work called Four Estates”



It’ll come as no surprise to anyone to know it was a kids climbing frame for a long time. I remember one of my Mum’s boyfriends refused to help me down off it once when my bottle went stood on the top of it.

I was only 19*

He later got his eye taken out in the Osborne pub over the road, then his assaulter spent the next few months terrorising us in our maisonette - Eastford Square - It’ll all be unaffordable property soon with names like Gail Platt Mansions or whatever..

*I was 7

 

[hitmouse]

Is it true that a lot of Chinese visit Mannie due to the Engels/Marx connection? Maybe that’s a reason they’ve given it that name. That and of course the free publicity it surely must have garnered with people now discussing how preposterous it is.

Huh, dunno, I suppose there's a lot of Chinese people in Manchester generally and I'm sure the city council is very keen to get in on any CCCP investment money but I dunno how important the Engels angle is there... the only place in Britain that I can think of as being specifically a Chinese tourist spot is that one Boots in Barnsley.

 

[Wookey]

We’ve got an Engels House here in Eccles! It’s possibly the only brick monument to one of the founders of Communism in the place, despite these being the very streets that informed The Conditions of the Working Class in England, that so inspired Marx.

It’s a housing association tower that used to be poxy when I was a kid, but is quite sparkly now. In its shadow, I would play as a little kid on a derelict mill site (yes, dangerous) that Fred’s dad had owned, and was the reason Fred got sent to work in Salford as an angry young piss-head in his 20s.

In terms of the social cleansing that’s taking place in Manchester, with these gleaming towers of over-priced apartments that require a London wage to fund, somebody wrote this about 130 years ago…

"The growth of the big modern cities gives the land in certain areas, particularly in those which are centrally situated, an artificial and colossally increasing value; the buildings erected on these areas depress this value instead of increasing it, because they no longer correspond to the changed circumstances. They are pulled down and replaced by others. This takes place above all with the workers' houses which are situated centrally and whose rents…can never increase above a certain maximum.

"…The result is that workers are forced out of the centre of towns towards the outskirts; that workers' dwellings, and small dwellings in general, become rare and expensive and often altogether unobtainable. For under these circumstances the building industry, which is offered a much better field for speculation by more expensive houses, builds workers' dwellings only by way of exception…They will provide new dwellings for hardly more than a quarter of the workers actually evicted by the building operations…"

That was Fred Engels, 130 fucking years ago, based on his observations of Manchester. And it stands as true today as it did then. With developments using any jiggery and pokery to get out of any kind of affordable housing commitment - which is weak to start with.

He also wrote in The Housing Question, some 27 years after Condition:

“How is the housing question to be solved then? In present-day society just as any other social question is solved: by the gradual economic adjustment of supply and demand, a solution which ever reproduces the question itself anew and therefore is no solution… But one thing is certain: there are already in existence sufficient buildings for dwellings in the big towns to remedy immediately any real “housing shortage,” given rational utilization of them. This can naturally only take place by the expropriation of the present owners and by quartering in their houses the homeless or those workers excessively overcrowded in their former houses.”

So we have reached a kind of peak irony. Engels was a proponent of forcible expropriation (love that term!) of essential housing assets by the working classes. I hope his new, private and non-affordable namesake tower can live up to those lofty ideals (Dibs the penthouse…!)

 

[hitmouse]

If anyone fancies listening to a radio show about Manchester housing and renters issues, there's now a monthly show happening on Steam Radio about it. First episode is now up on mixcloud:

 

[spitfire]

I’m in a garden in Fallowfield and the people 2 doors up are playing The Stone Roses so I am actually from Manchester now.

Although Fallowfield seems not particularly PFWC so not sure how it all balances out.

 

[Winot]

I’m in a garden in Fallowfield and the people 2 doors up are playing The Stone Roses so I am actually from Manchester now.

Although Fallowfield seems not particularly PFWC so not sure how it all balances out.

My daughter has a house there next academic year, as it seems do most students.

 

[Winot]

dp

 

[spitfire]

My daughter has a house there next academic year, as it seems do most students.

Yeah I reckon the lad playing SR 2 doors up is a student.

 

[Wookey]

Yeah I reckon the lad playing SR 2 doors up is a student.

Go and slap him. If he cries, he's a student. If he stabs you, he's local.

*more top life tips coming soon

 

[Favelado]

Go and slap him. If he cries, he's a student. If he stabs you, he's local.

*more top life tips coming soon

Paul Calf manual for Mancunian living.

 

[spitfire]

Go and slap him. If he cries, he's a student. If he stabs you, he's local.

*more top life tips coming soon

I did neither of these things because he was well buff so would probably have knocked my block off either way.

 

[Wookey]

I did neither of these things because he was well buff so would probably have knocked my block off either way.

I didn't think anyone had knocked anyone's block off since the late 1600's, good to hear it still goes on in a way.

 

[hitmouse]

Huge new James Meek piece on Greater Manchester and the housing crisis, worth a read:

James Meek · Market Forces and Malpractice: The Housing Crisis

Andy Burnham uses the phrase ‘perfect storm’ to describe the current surge of homelessness. Clichés become clichés...

www.lrb.co.uk