The Manchester Mill As 'Symbolic Form'
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JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM ISSN 2029-7955 / eISSN 2029-7947 2015 Volume 39(1): 70–78 doi:10.3846/20297955.2014.961742 Theme of the issue “Center and periphery: borderline cities and borderlines of cities” Žurnalo numerio tema „Simbolizmo tradicija architektūroje“ THE MORPHOLOGY OF THE POST-INDUSTRIAL CITY: THE MANCHESTER MILL AS ‘SYMBOLIC FORM’ Eamonn CANNIFFE Manchester School of Architecture, UK E-mail: [email protected] Received 26 May 2014; accepted 1 September 2014 Abstract. The contemporary post-industrial city has developed within a system where every square metre of its area might be assessed for its economic productivity and market value. Retail space, leisure space, even public open space, as well as housing and work en- vironments are quantifiable and comparable in financial terms as the ultimate test of their value. This conception of urban space as units of capital has its origins in the industrial development of centres such as Manchester where, largely unencumbered by earlier urban patterns, the idea of the modern city could thrive. As a ‘shock city’ Manchester, during the peak of its industrial growth in the early nineteenth century was an object of fascination and repulsion to the visitors it attracted. Opinion and rhetoric dominated social economic and political debate but dispassionate spatial analysis was rare. In the view of contemporary authors the town had few significant public spaces, instead being largely comprised of the vast industrial structures that crowded around the roads and canals. The mills were assessed for legal and insurance purposes, however, at a time of rabid competition and the prevalence of industrial accidents. The surveys that have survived provide the first opportunities to assess these examples of new urban space. The image results of a settlement composed of a single type, the mill or warehouse. Ancillary structure, most especially the workers’ housing did not merit recording. In these products of spatial calculation the Manchester mill can be seen to set the pattern both for the productive spaces of industry and the spatial framework of the contemporary city, where the public space is one of consumption rather than community. The su- pervised and privatised public space of the contemporary city finds its genius loci in the industrial typology of its commercial origins. Keywords: laisser faire, Manchester, morphology, regeneration. ‘The utopia of Bentham’ (Leon Faucher Manchester in 1844) As someone who has now devoted nearly four decades built environment (Parkinson-Bailey 2000; Hartwell to the study of architecture and urbanism, it was a 2001). This is something of a paradox since the city salutary experience to observe the relatively low status is extremely aware of its image, and its architectural of the built environment in Manchester’s official repos- character, both historically and contemporaneously, itory of record. In 2014, in the newly reopened Central is how the city represents itself to outsiders. It is the Library, the Local History section’s holdings on archi- contention of this paper that this disinterest shown tecture in Manchester account for considerably less internally within the city (and outside of the profes- shelf space than the ghost-written biographies of local sions in architecture and the built environment) is the television celebrities, even only those associated with result of the history of its industrial development and one particular long-running soap opera. The plain the economic basis of its recent regeneration. truth is that Manchester, in general, has little regard The history of a city, even merely of the architecture for its architecture and is only begrudgingly concerned of a city, can never present a definitive picture. When with it. The literature on the subject of Manchester’s that city is itself in a self-conscious state of transition, architecture is sparse and, despite some academic with the apparent discarding of many traces of its own interest, reflects a general lack of concern with the history as so much dross, an urban historian can see- 70 Copyright © 2015 Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (VGTU) Press http://www.tandfonline.com/ttpa Journal of Architecture and Urbanism, 2015, 39(1): 70–78 71 mingly be engaged on a particularly thankless task. Yet and inequality leads to claims either of provincial the recording and the assessing of such a recent phase pretentiousness or of unrealistic over ambition and as the nearly two decades since 15 June 1996 (when the abandonment of commonsense. This is evid- the city of Manchester suffered substantial physical da- enced by the disconnection between the city centre mage to its commercial core) seems worthwhile with and its surrounding ring of impoverished areas memories still relatively fresh, because the effects of which have continued to resist successive waves of the bomb and the strategies adopted in its aftermath remediation since the early twentieth century. Bar- were profound. The change in the visual appearance riers exist between the architectural languages that of the city, coinciding with transformations in urban cross this divide, in terms of density of occupation, policy which changed other northern English cities as scale of building, material expression and social well, represent the greatest rupture in the continuity factors which the pursuit of trickledown urbanism of Manchester’s urban development since the Second has failed to overcome. World War (Rogers et al. 1999). On the near side of such The purpose of this paper is to explore some details a breach, with all context affected, it is often difficult of why the architecture and urbanism of Manchester to recall what it was like on the far side, in a past the looks as it does, and how the promotion of the regene- circumstances of which have clearly been abandoned rated city seems at odds to the experience of residents forever. But we need to know why we are where we are and visitors alike. As an academic working in the city to be confident that we know where we are going, and I am often asked by visiting colleagues to account for the that the contemporary architecture of the city presents discrepancy between the generally laudatory literature a sustainable model. available and the somewhat disappointing reality that There is doubt in my voice mainly because what literature claims to represent (RIBA & Manchester City we see in Manchester’s recent urban regeneration is so Council 2004). It therefore seems important to provi- difficult to admire, presented through the marketing de an alternative account, partial, personal and maybe of the city as a great triumph over adversity, but in the even provocative, which could help illuminate the puzz- experience of many visitors a completely generic expe- ling reality of the city. The original growth of the city is rience providing a good range of international brands still a pervasive cultural influence and the pattern set but increasingly few unique elements that might define then still persists. It is my contention that the utilitarian urban quality. attitude has a major role in that continuity. Architecture is often described as a language, ge- Urban morphology too has a role in such persisten- nerally by those seeking to codify or predict its use ce. In the morphology of the traditional example of the and effects. But how might that metaphor be seen to genre, such as Nolli’s plan of Rome (1748) there is, in operate in Manchester? The core of the architectural the eyes of many theorists, an assumed equivalence language of the city is blunt and terse in its vocabulary between the solid and voids of the city, often repre- and syntax (one would not reasonably expect it to be sented by figure-ground reversal. In the situation of anything else). With those characteristics comes a cer- Manchester, however, that balance is entirely missing, tain defensiveness that can be construed as rudeness or the solids are defined, discrete, and autonomous but even crudity by the outsider, yet as with any language, the voids are just that, absences, fields without bounda- the explicit layers of meaning are dependent on custom ries. Joseph Aston was among the first to describe the and culture that open and define the worlds of language architecture of the rapidly developing industrial town to the insider. It surely is the same for the language of (Aston 1804). His frame of reference was the Georgian architecture, leading to that sense of incomprehension, town where an Italianate influence pervaded the plan- bewilderment and alienation people feel in the face of ning and design of new planned districts, but he percei- deliberately uncommunicative buildings. This experi- ved in Manchester nothing of any significance in the ence is only magnified when the architectural scale is provision of public space. In contrast, the buildings of expanded to that of the city, with its myriad compro- the expanding industrial town offered the prospect of mises between private and public interests. apparently spontaneous growth as structures rose up For Manchester, of course, that issue of language is for manufacturing and warehousing. By the time of inevitably tied to the aspect of class that pervades the second edition of The Manchester Guide in 1817 every aspect of British cultural life. The assumption the updated plan of the town is circled on its outskirts of notionally sophisticated forms of architectural by large rectilinear blocks the new megastructures of speech, far from overcoming the barriers of class the ‘shock city’. The rational organisation of internal 72 E. Canniffe. The morphology of the post-industrial city: the Manchester mill as ‘symbolic form’ processes which building on open land allowed creat- sion’. However he was fascinated enough to take back to ed the characteristic urban morphology of modernity Berlin the germ of an idea which would be synthesised with disconnected monofunctional buildings placed into the design of the Bauakademie (1832–1836) and in competitive rivalry to each other in a neglected or the customs warehouse, Packhof (1829–1831) in the city.