Hulme

It only takes a little prodding to make an old Hulmites eyes mist over all rose tinted (or just a bit red), and for them to start reminiscing about the halcyon days of the Crescents, as if recalling some kind of 24/7 version of Glastonbury that went on for years. This is always tempered by a sense of great disappointment and betrayal at what has been built in it’s place, that the community of Hulme was once again sold a lie as it was in the early 60’s when the Victorian housing was pulled down and the crescents went up.

This period is more than amply served by the excellent exhulme.co.uk, an online resource packed with old photos and anecdotes from the legendary days of the crescents, which seems, for better or worse, an age away from the modern, regenerated, disinfected yet totally flawed model which has slowly, very very slowly, come to replace it.

I caught the old Hulme at it’s death in the mid 90’s when it did indeed resemble the Glastonbury of the time, when the gangs had burrowed in under the fence to pillage at will, and the utopian dream had died under the weight of hard drugs and neglect. The last couple of big outdoor parties I went to there were dispersed in the small hours, not by the police, but by mobs of teenagers with machetes intent on robbing and trashing, and I remember spending a long night in someone’s flat listening to the stones smack against the windows frames, waiting for the sun to come up so that I could leave and go home without being decapitated on the way.

Fast forward a few short years and the new Hulme is about to be launched, the demagogue Ferguson is opening the new shiny, illuminated bridge on Stretford Road. The model proposed is that a mixture of public and private housing, and new retail and leisure services for the residents will attract a new, aspirant population to Hulme to drive a swift and spectacular regeneration of the area. Over the next few years, the rebuilding stalled and stalled again, the old residents were rehoused relatively quickly, but several of the new private developments remained half built for years, and much of the area remained as ugly wasteground. Eventually the lights in the new bridge started to go out one by one, and the Council realised that they could not source replacements and so the bridge, the symbol of the brave new Hulme got slowly darker, and Hulme limped towards the millennium half finished, and as ever, badly let down.

So, twelve years down the line, are we there yet? In a nutshell, the vision of a regenerated new Hulme led by an influx of affluent young professionals never happened. The young professionals never bought into it, preferring the City Centre developments or the chichi suburbs of Chorlton and Didsbury. Instead, the council seems intent on selling area, stage by stage, to Manchester Metropolitan University to do with as it wants. The relationship between the Met and the Council regarding planning is simply that of the Council bending over, while the University stands behind with a fistful of grant money. Already the whole of the area of Hulme adjacent to the MMU has been given over to imposing halls of residence which completely block out the sun for residents and visitors alike, with plans to build more along Stretford Road, which is currently being opposed by local residents tired of the noise, mess and antisocial behaviour which always goes along with having a large student population concentrated in a small area. The vision of building a new, stable, sustainable community has been critically compromised in favour of a largely transient population in exchange for university funding. The area alongside Stretford road by the bridge, for example, long left as a desolate playground for muggers, which was initially earmarked for community use, leisure facilities, tennis courts and even allotments were promised at one stage, is now going to become part of the MMU campus.

There are echoes of the old days secreted around the place, though, if you know where to look. The area known as the Red Bricks is a reminder of the halcyon times, but walking around there always reminds me a bit of Mad Max. I have seen Tina Turner around there on more than one occasion, and she appears to have gone to seed since the 1980’s and developed a fondness for cider, but still has the same hairstyle. Looking at the array of elderly lorries parked around the area, you’d conclude that everyone in the Red Bricks worked in removals. It’s here that you find a lot of the people who were here in the days of the Crescents alongside idealistic young activists called things like “Pish” and “Skunki”, who’s political “actions” seem to involve riding bikes around and listening to awful 90’s techno, and occasionally sitting about in horrible empty buildings until they are inevitably evicted.. Gawd bless ‘em, they’ll be bankers in a few years, but there’s no better time to explore anarcho-syndicalism for a bit and (blows whistle and adopts a weird forest of dean accent) MAKE SOME NOISE!! than during the current recession when the graduate banking internships are a bit thin on the ground. To be fair there have been some genuinely impressive innovations around the Redbricks area such as the free broadband that they plumbed in (to the councils chagrin) years before anyone else had it. On the other hand, there is Leaf Street Gardens, a jealously guarded collection of random weeds.

There’s also a strange gated community called Homes for Change (aka Bakersville or Baco, after it’s founder, the Bicycle God) which is either a pioneering experiment in tenant participation or a collection of polygamous survivalists armed to the teeth and waiting for the “Feds” to invade, I’m never quite sure which. They all share the same strange stary eyes of The Leader. However, Kim by the Sea, the café situated in the bottom of it is well worth a visit.

One of the main selling points of the “New Hulme” vision was a retail area to act as a hub for local community, finally the area was to have a proper high street. The high street consists of Asda, Argos, Instore and the bedraggled remains of Hulme Market. When the market was opened it showed a great deal of promise and a greater deal of foolish optimism. There were a range of posh food stalls that would make Waitrose blush, a Greek olive seller, a French wine merchant and a stall selling game pies (run by a bloke who looked like Ken Clarke) were among the pricey delights in there. But there were no customers. At the point that the market opened for business in 1999, the existing council tenants had just about been rehoused by the new housing associations, but the projected yuppie flats which were to provide patrons for the market were still at the planning stage. I believe the decision to park the market right next to a new Asda store had been taken by the only drunk with a pen in the park, and not noticed by officials until it was too late, and the company running the market soon went bust. These days, the stallholders are more realistic in what they are selling and there’s a West Indian and an Asian café to provide lunch for the students at Loreto college, but the high turnover of businesses in there still shows how difficult it is to make a go of things, and how ridiculous it was to put it there in the first place. There’s not much to say about the other shops, Asda and Argos are the same everywhere, suffice to say they don’t add much to the character of the area. Stretford Road is starting to perk up a bit, with some nice takeaways, and the Garden Centre opposite Baco is an unexpected delight (watch out for snipers, though), but the high street, the civic hub of Hulme, remains strangely desolate and falls well short of the promises. Again.

For an area formerly reputed to be party central, Hulme is a strangely subdued place by night. There were high hopes when the Arch Bar opened in 2004, with its mixture of club nights, live music and south American food. It didn’t take long for it to morph from a pub into a remand centre and was closed in 2007 after daytime shooting incident. The Afewe (formerly the Grants) and the Gamecock have also closed down, and the Church and the Junction (a wonderful cake-slice of a building) have been hit hard by the smoking ban and seem to be hanging on by the skin of their teeth. Local institution the Salutation seems to be doing relatively well with it’s popular acoustic nights and occasion live band or club nights, but it’s problem is consistency, on a good night, it’s still one of the very best pubs in town, a jovial magnet for eccentrics of all persuasions but on a bad night it’s a morgue with a telly. For the students, there’s the Czech bar which has a fantastic range of beers, and occasional live bands. There’s a sporadic policy of not allowing non-students in, however, and the bar is shut during university holidays. The Zion Arts Centre on Stretford road offers a wide range of participatory opportunities for young people in the area to get involved with drama, video/film making and music and the theatre has a surprising range of bands on such as Bat for Lashes and The Slits (one of my favourite bands, who played as part of something called Ladyfest, and I was too embarrassed to go!) as well as a lot of international music and theatre productions.

I don’t know if you can say that there is a Hulme at all these days in the old sense, the concept of community seems to have been consciously designed out of it by the powers that be. The way that things are evolving it would be less confusing to rename it MMU campusSouth sooner rather than later. For those who came out if the wreckage of the old anarchic Hulme hoping that the brighter future promised by the Council would include at least an element of the character of the place have been badly let down. But that’s the established pattern for this area, and in history, patterns are repeated time and time again. In the end he who pays the planner names the tune.

Only when the last tree has been felled, only when the last pub has closed, only when the last drunk has been turned out of spider park, will you realise that students cannot be eaten. Amen.

This article first appeared in Chimp Magazine #2