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DAN HILL
Institute for Popular Culture
Manchester Metropolitan University

As discussed previously, there were no real models or guidelines for a project of this type. The NQ is such a unique area, that even if there had been, they would have been unlikely to 'fit' the area. Previous projects provided elements to be re-formatted for the NQ. De Digitale Stadt in Amsterdam suggested the importance of strong aesthetics and public participation, and the freenets in US suggested the importance of evoking the physical community; though the NQ is different to these models as it is not built on public access or as a civic system, due to its focus on support for cultural industry production. New York's emerging 'Silicon Alley' provided several key features: the focus on usable tradition and existing talent; the importance of city-centre based projects, generally based on SMEs involving partnership and cooperation; the role of intermediaries as facilitating partnerships with business to enable an accessible infrastructure and create space for innovation (city government in NYC, MIPC in NQ); the focus on creativity and innovation in new media, together with a creative, supportive milieu in which to work. Due to joint research interests, Tilburg in Holland is likely to be the subject of future comparative research, where their project to construct an intelligent quarter has both strong similarities and significant differences with the NQ.

The Northern Quarter Network project fits into a set of holistic urban regeneration strategies for the area which are intended to enable networked mixed-use communities and revitalised public spaces and residences. Some advantages for these other projects of the Network working with digital media in city-space are not immediately obvious. Currently, the visual and textural impact of the built environment in the Northern Quarter reflects a two centuries of heavy industry and associated traffic. By building some of the future industry in the area upon digital foundations, the physical transportation of capital and employees is transformed into the lightspeed web of data in cyberspace, with little environmental impact after the initial cable-laying. The facility of teleworking may mean that work can be located in virtually any physical location, indicating a freedom from previous capital-related constraints for architects, policy-makers and citizens in city centre cultures. This freedom ought to be translated into experimentation with the aesthetic spaces in the built environment of the Northern Quarter.

This project is a response to one of the challenges faced by former industrial cities such as Manchester. How can they creatively exploit the productive potential of advanced ICTs, avoiding its oft-argued inherent potential for marginalisation? Theorists are beginning to see the post-industrial revolution of the 1990s Pacific-rim cities - Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai - as echoing the industrial revolution of Manchester in the 1840s. What is usually not considered is a clear picture of the Manchester of the 1840s, despite the wealth of well-known material - Frederick Engels "Condition of Working Class in Manchester", Elizabeth Gaskell's "Mary Barton" and "North and South", and less well-known material. The history of the Northern Quarter itself is rich and varied, as hinted at in the introduction. It may be worth considering some historical material relating to the Northern Quarter as was, in order to give a sense of the cultural fabric of the developing city of Manchester, and intimate why the Northern Quarter should be seen as a creative quarter, thriving on experimentation, youth, transgression, and a vibrant popular culture. These excerpts are provided to inform readers with a feel for the Northern Quarter are of a century or so ago, providing a unique insight into the history of the feeling in the area today. The development of the Northern Quarter Network presently feels embryonic and tentative, echoing Elizabeth Gaskell's description of Ancoats in the 1840s - "... the party proceeded home, through many half-finished streets, all so like one another, that you might have easily been bewildered and lost your way ...". This project, and its successors, can hopefully capitalise on the potential embodied in the 'half-finished' ICTs, whilst learning from the rich history of the Northern Quarter, capturing the essence of its productive popular culture whilst revitalising and rejecting the squalid conditions previously associated with the area.

So, what justification is there for the regeneration of the Northern Quarter progressing along lines of creative, popular culture, fashion and music, experimentation, carnival and marketplace, youth cults, and transgression? These excerpts from local histories of Ancoats and the Oldham Street area cover the 1840s to the early twentieth century. This was a time of unparalled growth in Manchester. The first mill in Manchester was built by Arkwright in 1780. Manchester flared into life over the next century, leading the world into and through the industrial revolution. Disraeli declared it a "modern Athens". Engels, and by implication, Marx developed their theories based on experiences in Manchester, which then of course irrevocably influenced the future development of much of the world. By the 1880s however, London had become the focus of the British empire once again, and Manchester had faded by 1900. An immense influence in only a century. The Northern Quarter at this time was virtually the centre of much of this activity, though with inauspicious beginnings:

By the mid-nineteenth century however, Oldham Street, and its continuation into the Oldham Road, was arguably the principal trade district and thoroughfare in Manchester, encompassed within Ancoats which, with Hulme, was the principle 'operative colony' of inner-city production and working-class residence.

By studying extracts from histories of the area, it is possible to discern traces of the character the Northern Quarter possesses and aims to encourage today. For instance, the Northern Quarter was a centre for the latest fashions as this next excerpt shows. The transition from Affleck's and Brown's department store, into the nationally-renowned managed workspace for youth cultural industries perhaps embodies the regeneration of the area, building on tradition and previous experience but repositioning these attributes embedded within contemporary (post-Fordist) socio-cultural structures:

"Five or six weeks before the (Scholar's Whit Friday) Walk Our Mother and Nana would have made a journey of espionage by tram to Manchester where, with the practised eyes of natural sempstresses, they had scrutinised and mentally recorded the patterns of the new season's dresses exhibited in the display windows of Paulden's on Stretford Road and at
On these latest fashions, with suitable modifications, would be secretly modelled the new clothes that they would make us wear ..."

It is of course of the utmost importance not to be blindly nostalgic about this previous incarnation of the NQ, or to hanker after the 'good old days' when everyone went off to work at the thriving mills, seemingly leaving all their doors open all day with nary a care, their kids happily kicking a football around backyards, and the cheery proletariat ready to strike up a tune or tell a few jokes at a moments notice. The full horror of working class life in Manchester and other rapidly industrialised cities is conveyed better elsewhere but the source of some of these quotes, the Scottish journalist, Angus Bethane Reach, notes exactly the principal feeling in the Ancoats of 1849 - that of squalor:

"In the older parts of the borough of Manchester itself, along the great thoroughfare called the Oldham road, and in the Ancoats district - the latter entirely an operative colony - are situated some of the most squalid-looking streets, inhabited by swarms of the most squalid-looking people which I have seen."

A key shop on Oldham Street, mentioned in two of these source independently illustrates how the Northern Quarter could be seen as centre for popular literature/print, a tradition continued today by Frontline Books on Newton Street. Angus Bethane Reach describes Abel Heywood's shop as the principal source of popular print (the contents of which Reach thoroughly disapproves of, incidentally):

"I wished to ascertain the species of cheap literature most in vogue and I accordingly applied to Mr. Abel Heywood, of Oldham-street, one of the most active and enterprising citizens of Manchester, who supplies not only the smaller booksellers of the town, but those throughout the county with the deep works favoured by the poorer reading classes."

Another source, James Middleton, also mentions Abel Heywood's shop - this time indicating a subversive side to his operation:

"Another notable shop was that kept by Abel Heywood. The window of the shop was made up of old-fashioned quarrels in curious 'squares' about nine inches by five inches. On Wednesdays a copy of 'Punch' occupied two of the squares, being opened so as to display the principal cartoon ... I remembered Abel Heywood had more than once been in prison for selling unstamped newspapers which came to him in tea-chests."

Part I

Part II

Part IV

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Send email to: d.p.hill@mmu.ac.uk and j.oconnor@mmu.ac.uk