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DAN HILL
Institute for Popular Culture
Manchester Metropolitan University

Here we can begin to trace an element of the Northern Quarter as a site for transgression. Similarly, Angus Bethane Reach found the experience of Oldham Street at night rather too much for his sensibilities. This feeling of witnessing and taking part in the excesses of city centre culture will be occasionally familiar to visitors to the area today:

"In returning last Sunday night, by the Oldham-road, from one of my tours, I was somewhat surprised to hear the
which floated out of the public-house windows. The street was swarming with drunken men and women; and with Now, I am not one of those who look upon the slightest degree of social indulgence as a downright evil, but I confess that last Sunday night in the Oldham-road astonished and grieved me. In no city have I ever witnessed a scene of more open, brutal, and general intemperance. The public houses and gin-slops were roaring full. Rows, and fights, and scuffles were every moment taking place within doors and in the streets.
A tolerably intimate acquaintance with most phases of London life enable me to state that in no part of the metropolis would the police have ever tolerated such a state of things on a single Sunday..."

The current focus on the night-time economy in Manchester (see Lovatt and O'Connor: "Cities and the Night-Time Economy" here) again has strong precedent, both here in the night-time leisure sector, but also in the marketplaces of Smithfields/Shudehill. The night-time economy here was about the marketplace, but crucially it was both about buying but also experiencing the city centre. For the people of Ancoats "the trip to Shudehill was a trip to 'town', providing a welcome break from the neighbourhood life for women and men alike." :

"The trip we loved best was to be taken to town on an occasional Saturday evening. Here was life at its gayest and rowdiest; the open shop fronts lit by paraffin flares, competing traders bawling their wares, and narrow streets crowded with buyers, or gaping sight-seers. The poorest groups hung on until closing time, near Midnight, when one-shilling parcels containing a rabbit, assorted vegetables and fruit could be had, making sure a good Sunday dinner.

Another aspect of transgression is in the diverse cultural tapestry of the inhabitant's ethnicity. The NQ was a key location of immigration. It was, with Hulme, the centre for Irish immigration in the nineteenth century, with the pivotal Smithfield market "the single most important employer of Irish labour" . Now much of the textile production in the area is owned and worked by Asian families.

'Dangerous' youth culture has extraordinary precedents in the shape of the Napoo gang, the sons of carters, porters and stall hands from Smithfield Market - who terrorised Oldham Street from 1910-1920:

"Manchester's dancehalls also served as meeting places for gangs of male youths, who were just as obsessed with fashion and the film world as teenage girls. The Napoo gang, for instance, which regularly met at a dancehall in Belle Vue immediately after the First World War, wore a highly distinctive uniform borrowed from American gangster films. The fear the gang aroused among the population of Ancoats, where its members lived and worked, suggests that the Napoo should be viewed essentially as a pre-Teddy Boy youth cult. There is evidence, for instance, that they even pulled up cinema seats in the 'Cosy Corner' picture-house in Ancoats shortly after the First World War."

The Northern Quarter is now focussing on developing a street culture, around street art and vibrant aesthetics in the built environment, dance music festival and carnival (this year, the Christmas Lights moved up Oldham Street for the first time - they were turned on by cult TV stars Reg Holdsworth and Mrs. Merton, accompanied by a laser display, a parade of classic cars, and a drive-in movie). These exercpts from histories of the Northern Quarter indicate a strong tradition of the area as site for street culture, including these descriptions of dance music:

"Street dances flourished in Manchester and Salford throughout the 1900s. The sight of dozens of young people performing polkas, waltzes and schottisches to music provided by Italian organ-grinders (... usually setting out from the Italian quarter in Ancoats ...) was a common feature of that urban scene."

Here, James Middleton describes the impact of the built environment in nineteenth-century Oldham Street, whilst noting that the area was still essentially about production and trade:

Visitors have ever been in the habit of going leisurely down one side and up the other, comparing quality and price as they went along. If they had not money to spend, they spent their judgment, and there is pleasure in that. Business was conducted on the old-fashioned lines by people who had been in the street for a long time ... Oldham Street was wonderfully fascinating to the boy of twelve. The street itself, the traffic, the crowds, and the shops furnished sights and sounds calculated to challenge attention. The street was not all shops - there was a number of private houses, and at least one surgery. Lever Street, round the corner, through the square, was still something of a residential neighbourhood. But the shops were attractive, some of them, in their own quaint way ...
where natural history was taught by living examples. Birds, dogs, rabbits, poultry displayed in the windows or outside the shops were an eternal delight to anyone with a stray mind and a spare five minutes."

Similarly the area has a history of exciting street events and carnivalesque:

"Saturdays brought their special features. There was the man who sold Chelsea buns from a basket, and the Circassian Lady with pink eyes and white hair, who stood by the kerb mutely asking for alms. June and July brought almost weekly pageants in the form of friendly society processions. The Foresters and Oddfellows and other 'sacred orders' as the country folks called them, filled Stevenson Square with their glory. The precessionists, decked out in the magnificence of their regalia ... made the street brilliant as they filed by, with all the errand boys watching."

So, these excerpts have been used to intimate that the choice of the Northern Quarter as a creative quarter is perhaps not as arbitrary as initially indicated. The combination of this rich history of popular culture - print, including radical literature, dance music, street culture, night-time economy, festivals and carnivalesque, youth cults, transgressive behaviour, vibrant aesthetics - with the low-rents and general neglect forced on the area by the shifts in twentieth century culture, have enabled the Northern Quarter to develop into a zone for experimentation and creativity. It is upon this firm cultural foundation that the regeneration of the area can progress. The Northern Quarter Network project should build on this history of production and trade, but within a framework of creativity and popular culture, if the area is to avoid returning to the degradation associated with the initial industrial revolution, reverse the bankruptcy caused by the retail revolution, and position itself to exploit the oft-predicted information revolution.

Part I

Part II

Part III

E. Gaskell (1987) 'Mary Barton', Oxford University Press: Oxford
James Middleton (1920) 'The Old Road: A Book of Recollections', EJ Wildgoose: Oldham
Angus Bethane Reach (edited by C. Aspin (1972)) 'Manchester and the Textile Districts in 1849', Helmshore Local History Society
AH Brody (1974) 'Old Road - A Lancastrian Childhood 1912-1926', EJ Morten: Manchester
A Davies (1992) 'Leisure in the Classic Slum 1900-1939' in A Davies and S Fielding (1992) 'Worker's Worlds: Cultures and Communities in Manchester and Salford 1880-1939', Manchester University Press: Manchester
S Fielding (1992) 'A Separate Culture? Irish Catholics in working-class Manchester and Salford, c.1890-1939' in Davies & Fielding (1992), op cit.
D Fowler (1992) 'Teenage Consumers? Young wage-earners and leisure in Manchester, 1919-1939' in Davies and Fielding, op. cit.

Title fonts: 'Dolce Vita' by Swifty, +44 (0)171 729 3003

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