Madchester

Walking around the northern quarter passing vintage stores and record stores, and strange bars with people on the ceiling and lights on the floor.

This is a music town, a hip town, an edgy town. You walk the streets here you need a badass mouth piercing and some torn 80s gear. You live like you in a Joy Division video. You smoke and throw your butts on the street like you give a damn.

Peter Schlosser of the Atlantic Monthly wrote this, of Manchester, in 1998:

"Despite a century of decline and 12 years of Margaret Thatcher; despite the lousy weather and even lousier prospects, despite the grim housing estates, the boarded up buildings, the shallow obsession of club culture, the drugs, the gangs, the garbage in the streets, Manchester still feels alive. That is an accomplishment, however long it lasts. The place survives through small acts of defiance. In and around the ruins of empire, kids are dancing."

Today I walked through the heart of the city, and it did feel alive. Crowds thronged the shopping arcades and public squares, and under the slate-gray sky, a most-appropriate drizzle began to fall. I bought a chorizo at a flea market and then walked through the rehabilitated Arndale shopping precinct before enjoying a cappucino in the glassy "Modern" restaurant at the top of the Urbis musuem / gallery. From up there, the city spread below - very much in motion. The ferris wheel almost seemed propelled from the sheer kinetic energy of the crowds beneath it.

Peck and Ward wrote in the prologue of their book, "Manchester: City of Revolution: ...Always a city on the move, it has been in an almost perpetual state of restructuring, right back to its early stirrings of industrial capitalism. Talk of revolution, like the drizzle, is nearly always in the air."

It is drizzling, and Monday evening I am going to hear the American Socialist presidential candidate speak. The city is living up to its name.