hitmouse
so defeated, thinks it's funny
RMT running a series of Wednesday lunchtime demos in Manchester city centre, in support of outsourced rail staff employed through Carlisle:
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.”
Luxury penthouse in Manchester named after Friedrich Engels
Referencing socialist thinker is latest example of city repurposing its radical history for profit, say local peoplewww.theguardian.com
New book:
Launch event for said 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
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
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.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.
"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…"
“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.”
My daughter has a house there next academic year, as it seems do most students.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.
Go and slap him. If he cries, he's a student. If he stabs you, he's local.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
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.
Manchester officials sued after lending £140m of taxpayer money to property tycoon’s company
Labour mayor’s officials accused of ‘distorting’ city’s property market after alleged handouts
Manchester officials sued after lending £140m of taxpayer money to property tycoon’s company
Labour mayor’s officials accused of ‘distorting’ city’s property market after alleged handoutswww.telegraph.co.uk
I can't sign up to the Torygraph or the Times to read that I'm afraid.
Thankyou!
I don't understand how that even works, but it does!for future reference, you can copy the url of the paywalled page, go to archive.ph, bung the url in, and it will either archive it for you (so you can read it) or more often, will say it's already got it and here's
And if archive.ph doesn't work, another paywall buster is 12 foot ladderI don't understand how that even works, but it does!
NYT, piss easy to grab a page! https://archive.ph/CDIrj
Thankyou!
Apologies. I didn't sign up to read it either!I can't sign up to the Torygraph or the Times to read that I'm afraid.