Celebrate fact city is now better than ever
THE more I’ve thought about the article in a recent Guardian newspaper on ‘Manc-hattan’ selling its soul, apparently, the more irked I’ve become.
It’s OK for London to develop highrise luxury flats in Vauxhall, Canary Wharf, the Isle of Dogs and Battersea, but not for little old Manchester.
They mock us for our terraces (‘it’s just like Coronation Street up there, isn’t it?’); now they mock us for our impudence in thinking we can have anything that resembles the posh bits of New York or our capital.
The argument goes that it’s only for people with more money than sense and that the land should have been used for affordable housing.
Yeah, nice little three-bed semis with gardens in central Manchester – how much would they have cost? How much would the land have cost? Whatever was built there, it wouldn’t have solved the homeless situation one bit.
And the money is someone else’s to play with, not the council’s or the taxpayers.’ As for the site on Deansgate Square, it used to be the odd works unit down there and car parks, and by city standards it’s relatively small. Hardly Gotham!
And if it does provide a little ghetto for the super-rich, so what? They’ll spend their money in the surrounding businesses. The rest of us have lots of other places to live in inner-city or outer-city.
Where should they live and spend – Leeds, Liverpool, Birmingham? Because those are the places we’re up against, and if we get all precious, the investors can easily look elsewhere.
I’ve not liked all the stuff that’s gone up in Manchester, but it’s now a damnsight better than it was pre-IRA bomb when the city was a ghost town at night and the 60s architecture was rubbish.
So all that selling our souls stuff is a load of nonsense. Manchester is better than it’s ever been, and we should celebrate that. Eric Jackson, Stockport