One of the strongest responses to the suicide bombing at the Manchester Arena last May was a call for unity: for Mancunians of every persuasion to be strong and stand together. Like so many others, I felt a need to identify with the city and its people, to respond in some way that keyed into this desire for solidarity.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A mural painted in the wake of the bomb attack in Manchester’s Northern Quarter

I decided to immerse myself in the city by walking the streets and building an archive of photographs. With the edges of Manchester’s city centre in the throes of breakneck redevelopment that is seeing the construction of dozens of high-rise luxury apartment blocks, I wanted to find what had endured beyond this bubble of speculative building – and to find something that might counter it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Uniform yet endlessly varied … Terraced house in Ramsbottom

Tony Walsh’s 2012 poem This is the Place – read to a crowd of thousands the day after the attack – spoke passionately of Manchester as a city with a distinct identity that embraced international clout (music and football) and defiant localism (cups of tea and cobbled streets). But a question kept coming back to me: what exactly is Manchester – where does it begin and end?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Community spirit … Heywood Library

Strictly speaking, the city of Manchester is only a small part of a wider metropolitan region: the county of Greater Manchester, created in 1974, which brought together 10 metropolitan boroughs and two cities – Salford and Manchester – under a larger urban identity. Yet for me that wider urban region – which at 493 square miles is nearly as big as Greater London – meant very little, because I’d not had cause to visit many areas outside of the city centre.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A faded sign on Market Street, Stalybridge.

One year, 80 walks, 300 miles and 9,000 photographs later, I am still overwhelmed by the sheer variety of places, buildings and people. Everywhere was different and yet so much recurred.

There was a whole family of buildings, both fanciful and mundane, that developed out of the co-operative movement, which began in Rochdale in the 1840s and quickly spread to the whole urban region and far beyond. There were the dozen or so libraries scattered around the region that were funded by Andrew Carnegie in the early 20th century (and most of which, thankfully, were still open – proof of a longstanding communal loyalty to these buildings).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pendleton co-operative industrial building, Salford

And there were the cotton mills: towering brick edifices in various states of disrepair that grew out of Manchester’s role in the industrial revolution as the global centre of cotton production. While many of these mills have now been demolished, hundreds still remain standing as testament to the industry that once united this enormous urban region and gave it a distinct working-class identity.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shrine to Cottonopolis … Greenside Mill, Droylsden

For me though, it was the more mundane things that brought a sense of unity to Greater Manchester: the electricity substations, often built in a housing style, that told you which borough you were in; the hundreds of Victorian terraces that still make up the majority of the region’s housing stock, which manage to be both uniform and endlessly varied in their small details; and a gamut of ghost signs that identified lost industries from Manchester’s days as Cottonopolis.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An electricity substation on Mason Street, Horwich

And then there were the bees – symbols of civic pride invented by the Victorians that were transformed in the wake of the Manchester Arena bombing into icons of defiance, unity and strength. Countless bee stickers now adorn cars and windows, bee tattoos mark bodies, and bee paintings and murals enliven walls.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A ghost sign in Radcliffe, Bury

Chance encounters along the way backed up the commonly held idea that people in the north of England are friendlier; on many of my walks, people were keen to point out local landmarks and interesting buildings they’d grown up with. People were generally quick to identify themselves with the larger urban region, explicitly or otherwise. A farmer in Tyldesley spoke of the enormous pipes under his land that brought fresh water from Thirlmere in Cumbria to Manchester; a pensioner in Bramhall told me how lucky he felt to be living in Stockport – half a mile away, outside Greater Manchester, he wouldn’t be entitled to free travel on public transport.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Faded grandeur … Rochdale Town Hall

It is these networks – the hidden infrastructures and invisible boundaries – that are perhaps the most important things that bring unity to a sprawling area. And yet there are still great disparities in Greater Manchester: for instance the woeful Northern Rail network that, for many is the only form of transport available apart from buses.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bilal Mosque, Rochdale

I had not expected to come across architectural wonders outside the centre. So I am aghast that very few guides to Manchester include any detail on buildings such as Rochdale Town Hall, completed in 1871 and to my mind one of the finest Victorian buildings in the country. They also make little mention of the Monastery in Gorton, a monumental edifice completed in 1872 and reopened as a community hub in 2007. It is a gothic rampart that towers over one of the poorest districts of the city. And nowhere did I find reference to the joyous exuberance of many of the region’s mosques, or the astonishing 1930s stained glass that fills the church of St Oswald & St Edmund Arrowsmith in Ashton-in-Makerfield.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest St Oswald & St Edmund Arrowsmith church

Of course, no single resource can offer an exhaustive visual record of the built environment and there are many types of building that I’ve not covered. My project, The Stones of Manchester, is more of an invitation to see the city anew; to connect diverse and fragmentary views; to embrace the commonplace, often ignored things that make the area feel as though it belongs to us. In cities, it is what continues to endure, be it houses, amenities or infrastructure, that provides an anchor around which communities can flourish. In other words, precisely the opposite of what is currently happening in the heartland of Manchester, where buildings for the rich are disregarding not only the history of the city but also the people that made it.



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