JONATHAN Schofield is no enemy of progress. In the week he was barred from a Town Hall meeting because of his opposition to the crass redevelopment of a historic district, his latest book, Illusion and Change, appeared.
A fascinating cast throngs the book...
And, guess what, it’s a celebration of Manchester’s urban transformation – accepting that once again our skyline is going to alter radically (upwards), just as it did in the pivotal Victorian era. His affection for the mutating city is underpinned by the deep historical and architectural knowledge that make him the doyen of our Blue Badge Guides.
The big plus is the wealth of photographs, maps and images, scarcely published before, with which he illustrates a slightly stretched thesis about urban reality and unreality. Think TS Eliot’s 'Unreal City under the brown fog of a winter dawn' meets 'Dirty Old Town'. Terminal nostalgics may get their fix from it come Christmas, but it’s too polemical to be coffee table fodder.
In the first ‘Illusion’ half there are some glorious riffs of opinion and trademark laconic wit. Then comes ‘Change’ and it takes off with a cornucopia of luminous departed places – The Twisted Wheel and Tommy Ducks, the Kardomah Cafe and a car showroom on Corporation Street chosen to exhibit Picasso’s Guernica, while among myriad Victorian marvels there’s the glittering Assembly Rooms up Cheetham Hill, where socialites danced to the latest Viennese music dressed in ‘Snow’ and ‘Night costumes’ with one enthusiastic maiden coming as ‘the Owl in the Ivy Bush’. The site is now a car wash.
The front cover A fascinating cast throngs the book – famous figures such as Engels and Thomas de Quincey alongside the Pals regiments who camped in Heaton Park before marching off to decimation in the Great War. There’s a focus on the city’s game-changing architects – and one who failed to be. Check out the subsequent adventures of great explorer and bigamist Thomas Witlam Atkinson.
This was a story new to me, but so was one familiar to Mancunians of a certain age. I remembered the ill-fated ‘B of the Bang’ sculpture up at Sport City (yes, that gets a section, too) but, as a ‘foreigner’ was unaware that one of the UK’s deepest coalpits lies under the Etihad Stadium. Bradford Colliery was a hugely productive working mine until 1968 – the year Man City won the First Division title, at Maine Road, of course – but was capped because of the subsidence threatening the now heavily populated area.
Past and present come together in Schofield’s vivid evocation of the 870m shaft: “To get an idea of how deep this is take a look at the image of Beetham Tower. Turn Manchester’s tallest building on its head and slam it into the ground so it extends 169m into the earth. Now multiply that distance by five and you have an idea how deep Bradford Colliery plunged. One report said it could take up to 14 minutes to descend to the depths.”
Remember those ghosts, Premier League prima donnas ‘warming down’ after a ‘tough’ training session.
Illusion and Change by Jonathan Schofield, Manchester Books Limited, £16.99 - buy here There are 144 pages in an A4 book featuring more than fifty buildings and schemes with over two hundred, pictures, maps and images.
Some pages from the book can be seen below.
