Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (39 page)

St John Street, dating from the 1770s, consists of nicely proportioned town houses, laid out on land belonging to the Byrom family. A terrace of elegant properties, brass plates polished to a mirror-like sheen, end-stopped by Byrom Street, which runs parallel to Deansgate.

While Anna tried to identify the building in which she endured English dentistry, I investigated the park where St John’s Church once stood. A Celtic cross commemorates the scattered remains of 22,000 Manchester people. The church, consecrated in 1769, was demolished in 1932; leaving behind a damp flower garden. Churches from a boom period, conceived out of optimism, to give thanks for continuing prosperity, fell into disrepair as the population retreated. This small park, sweet-smelling in the morning rain, is a soothing refuge. Only the intrusive tower, looming over clumps of managed greenery, reminds us that we are in an unknown city, undertaking an urban expedition. Empty benches on carpets of wet pink rhododendron petals. Water-beads dripping from spread fingers of fatsia.

I wanted to pursue the Byrom aspect of the story. I read Joy Hancox’s 1992 book,
The Byrom Collection: Renaissance Thought, the Royal Society and the Building of the Globe Theatre.
Hancox discovered a cache of 516 drawings, ‘once the prized possession of an 18th-century secret society’, in an ‘old world’ house in Salford. Her brisk narrative works like a series of trapdoors. Every drawing becomes a windowless room, a poisoned flower, a spirit path. It is all here: Dr Dee in Manchester exile, Elizabethan theatres, speculative geographers. Boyle, Fludd, Newton. The Invisible College, the Royal Society and the Kabbalah Club.

Hancox quotes from Dee’s private diary. ‘At my return to Deansgate to the end whereof I brought them on foote, Mr Roger Krooke offered and promised his faithful and diligent care and help, to the best of his skill and powre, in the process chymicall … ’

The ghosts are toying with us. Double-barrelled solicitors and discreet medics. Golden quacks with burnished nameplates turn St John Street into an alchemical ditch. I can see my reflection, camera raised, smeared into a wall of names. John Byrom, inventor of shorthand, was a covert Jacobite. My great-grandfather, in an autobiographical sketch published in Colombo in 1900, wrote: ‘My parents were descended from an old Jacobite stock, at this time still rather at a discount … ’ Byrom avoided exposure, declining the post of Chetham’s Library Keeper – but joining the Kabbalah Club in 1725, as the urban cataloguer Ed Glinert says, ‘to examine the numerical pattern of the universe’.

On the pavement lay a pair of blind man’s dark glasses, with one lens missing. Now the Deansgate stack, glimpsed from the old church garden, dominated our route out. This 47-storey intruder, known as the Beetham Tower, originally appeared in 2005. We were trapped within its force field for the rest of the day. 219 luxury apartments. Sky Bar. Ian Simpson, architect of both Beetham Tower and Urbis, retained the split-level penthouse for his own use. A master of the universe, echoing Ballard’s
High-Rise
, he plotted an interior ‘winter garden’ of olive trees and oaks.

It’s too wet to consult the map. The idea is to walk, as fast as possible, away from that tower and towards the aeroplanes circling over Ringway. A hinterland of railway bridges, restored canals, insolent inner-city ring roads. Old Trafford, the footballing Mecca, has to be checked out on the day of the European Champions League final, when planeloads of supporters have already been decanted to Rome.

Our drift south towards the sprawling Trafford retail zone runs slap against the Mancunian Way, a blur of multi-lane traffic with no obvious crossing points. Until we duck down to the canal path. Wall slogans on old brick have been painted over. The Irwell, Manchester Ship Canal and Bridgewater Canal carve out an urban patchwork of locks, basins, low-level green-glazed estates: conversions in the process of selling themselves to a new demographic, based on the upwardly mobile rag trade and minimart-owning elements in
Coronation Street
. Quays-dwellers, balcony people, loft-livers. The waterways are cleaner and better kept than in London, wildlife flourishes without the thorium run-off from Olympic piracy.

There is a Crusoe isolation about this passage of our walk, reef-buildings with no visible occupants, an atoll in a sea of concrete.
COMMERCIAL SPACE FOR SALE
. Up the ramp we plod, neurotic about the possibility of being trapped in the waterway nexus. st george’s island: massive, free-standing letters. The developers, Dandara, are trying to promote the notion that island-life is secure, separate from the chaotic swirl of the city. Your own Isle of Man: without Norman Wisdom. A Turks and Caicos rum-punch paradise without the tax-haven benefits. St George’s Island is surrounded by defunct industries. A postal van is parked on the corner. I rap at the window, asking after the Old Trafford Stadium. ‘Take a right and carry on for about a mile,’ the postie says. ‘You’re not really supposed to walk down there, but you should be OK.’

As we emerge on the tarmac runway of the A56, you see what he means. Pavements vanish. Smooth gradients sweep down to the wide road. Trafford Park to Old Trafford is assertively anti-pedestrian. Motor vehicles zero in on the Trafford Centre, a New Town of commerce. A suburb in which everybody shops and nobody lives. Time to hide the camera. When those dawn arrests were processed in Manchester, hurried through as a consequence of secret papers being brandished for the newsreels, as the chief cop reported to Downing Street, the evidence against the suspect men came from shopping-centre surveillance tapes. Economic migrants were observed taking photographs in the Arndale and Trafford Centre malls. The Trafford Centre, opening in 1998, had a backstory that precisely duplicated the current Lea Valley development model in East London: sewage farm nominated as Olympic site. Retail cathedral out of wilderness.

Drudges with suspect rucksacks, we follow Chester Road and the signs for Old Trafford. Grandiose civic and commercial buildings have been abandoned, smashed windows and poster-defaced plywood fences. Respectable terraces are on the slide. We’re peckish. When Anna spots the sign for a café in Nuttall Road, I’m happy to detour.

First: as a salute to the poet-painter-trumpeter Jeff Nuttall, who lived beyond the northern fringes of Manchester, in Todmorden. I helped to clear Jeff’s books, little magazines, sets of
My Own Mag
(with all the William Burroughs material), when he made one of his life-changing flits. A great shaggy presence, wheezing hard, too large for the terraced cottage that clung to the rim of a steep river-valley road, Jeff rolled away to the Welsh borders. And a final chapter as sidekick to Lenny Henry. Walk-on bits as asthmatic judge or bent brief: the parts Ken Campbell didn’t want.

The second reason to hit the café is to pay an oblique tribute to the Manchester section of
The Emigrants.
Sebald’s Max Ferber hangs out, every morning, work done, in the Wadi Halfa: ‘A transport café near Trafford Park … located in the basement of an otherwise unoccupied building that looked as if it might fall down at any moment.’ Sebald speaks of how he had to ‘cross beneath urban motorways, over canal bridges and wasteland’. We followed, unknowingly, in his footsteps; in that shimmer where documentation loses its nerve and dissolves into found poetry.

The café is on the upper floor of an operation exhibiting camping equipment, garden furniture and sleeping bags. We spread ourselves, coffee and cakes, at a round table, in a warehouse of pup tents and beach parasols. Rain hammers on Stretford Road, its new red blocks, trees so basic in outline that I can’t believe they’re real. Somebody drives along at night and staples them to the grassy margin. A flag for
CHESHIRE FARM REAL DAIRY ICE CREAM
flutters from the balcony that overlooks the petrol station.

Back on the move, and closing fast on Old Trafford, I pause to photograph the blue plaque on the decommissioned Democracy House at 609 Stretford Road. We don’t hear this name cited very often as a Manchester luminary. ‘Dodie Smith 1896–1990. Author of
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
lived here as a child. It was so quiet and semi-rural that the corncrake could still be heard.’ Old suburb, new interzone. And where are the grain fields of yesteryear?

It’s evident, as the two roads meet, Chester and Stretford (a tight triangle enclosing our camping-store café), that we are entering a high-investment area organized around the flow of capital, not of rivers and railways. With Old Trafford, the Manchester United ground, as the symbol – virtual and actual – of status and future intent. In this spindly construction, like a splash of frozen water, is the future of the city: MUFC aligning itself through its global support, its multicultural playing staff, with Europe and the wideworld. Football heaven: South Korea, Portugal, Brazil, Holland, Serbia, Bulgaria. Distant glimpses of the stadium keep us circling. A satellite state has been built from the failure, fortunate failure, of two Olympic bids. The animatronics of dud proposals are being replaced by regiments of card-brandishing, car-occupying human beings.

The crunch comes when the pavement runs into a sheep-hurdle barrier. I’ve had enough and decide to carry on, by the most direct route, down the central reservation. Anna prefers to play it safe, she doubles back. We will meet, if we make it, outside the club shop.

It’s a damp carnival: huge red flags, a Stalinist parade marching around the stadium forecourt. Traders with plastic centurion helmets and T-shirts saluting a triumph that would never happen. Tin badges at £3 a pop: European Cup Final, Stadio Olympico, Rome, 27 May 2009. I buy one, a doomed investment.
GLORY, GLORY, MAN UNITED
.

A group of Koreans, come over to support their battery-driven, run-all-day hero, Ji-Sung Park, photograph each other alongside the plinth with the unlikely representation of the three amigos: Best, Charlton, Law. Brothers-in-triumph. Jealous colleagues, uncertain friends. Shackled in eternity.

Anna remembers her maternal grandfather, a strict disciplinarian. He played in goal for Preston North End. The club shop, monomaniacal in its redness, has everything we don’t want. I pose for a souvenir snapshot, haunted and a little crazy, beside Ryan Giggs, the superstar who shares my birth city, Cardiff. The ‘Footballer of the Year’ in his well-preserved dotage. And the urban walker on his last legs.

With the gentle ascent of Great Stone Road, we are in deep suburbia. You have to hike for hours, out from central London, to achieve this. A deserted car park, slick-silver asphalt, around the featureless block of a B&Q superstore in Man U colours.

Keeping a record of Olympic connections, wherever I find them, I snap the Bei Jing (Fish and Chips + Chinese Meals to Take Away), on a traffic island known as the Quadrant. The atmosphere, damp, lush, is less paranoid than on my native turf, where such a photograph would be impossible. The Quadrant is well tended and planted with shady trees. This walk is proving too smooth a transit to the southern fringe of Manchester. I expected a hard day’s grind. What we experienced was a drift through fields, river paths and private estates re-landscaped as public parks. And an absence of people. Where were they? The bench-drinkers? The dog-walkers? The fast-striding disciples of De Quincey, a man who wrote of growing up in the family of a rural magistrate, in a district ‘close upon Manchester, which even at that time was belted with a growing body of turbulent aliens – Welsh and Irish’.

In Longford Park, there are no aliens, apart from us, the rucksacked Londoners. Anna blames the economy, who can afford to be strolling about mid-morning? Trim hedges, brushed paths. Wisteria climbing over iron fences. The estate agent, who is attempting to flog a terrace at the edge of the park, has a punning name for his properties:
SHERLOCK HOMES
.

Coming off Edge Lane into red-brick villas with porches, Italianate mansions awaiting conversion into private flats, we follow signs for the Pennine Way. And discover a village green with a pub that wouldn’t be out of place in Surrey, the Horse and Jockey. Over a pint and a platter, I study Ordnance Survey 109 for the last leg of our expedition. The cover, which I hadn’t previously noticed, was a photograph of Urbis, credited to Jan Chlebik. The slope of the roof, in the section depicted against a purple sky, is the diagonal we have just accomplished. Put that in your Byrom collection.

To achieve the river path, you start by walking west through a wooded nature reserve. It’s no longer raining, but the clouds are low. Windbreak poplars. Yellow fields. A cobbled track alongside a beech hedge. Cows. Everything in quotation marks, a country-park experience with the comforting hum of traffic, pylons and planes. The Mersey, when we come to it, flows fast between sheer banks. Flood meadows on which, so far, nobody has any good reason to build.

Elias Canetti wrote about the period when he lived on Palatine Road and walked with his father. ‘On Sundays, he sometimes took me strolling alone. Not far from our house, the little Mersey River flowed by … A path wound through a luxuriant meadow full of flowers and high grass. He told me the English word “meadow”, and he asked me for it during every stroll … Another favourite word of his was “island”; and perhaps he thought of it as an Isle of the Blest.’

After the Electricity Sub Station, it is time to cross the Mersey, and to pass under the junction of the M60 motorway. The south Manchester suburbs are bereft of tags and aerosol signatures. Rusticated estates pretend the motorway isn’t happening, or that it’s another river. Fairmead Road. Fairmead is the name of the Epping Forest asylum where John Clare lodged, before he began his hike up the Great North Road to Northborough and Mary Joyce, his dead muse.

Yew Tree Lane has a bridge over the traffic, from which we can identify the Britannia Airport Hotel, our base in Northenden. We’re back in time for tea.

As evening entertainment, before our return to London, we sign up for the trip to the airport: £4 on the hotel coach, return. The ride brought me, full circle, to the opening of Sebald’s Manchester narrative. How he flew in over ‘a city of countless bricks … inhabited by millions of souls, dead and alive’.