Manchester’s Northern Quarter

4.2. Manchester’s Northern Quarter

Manchester has a rich and distinctive musical history and its rock and pop bands have achieved national and international notoriety (from Herman’s Hermits and The Hollies in the 1960s, to 10CC, Buzzcocks and Joy Division in the 1970s, The Smiths, New Order, The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays in the 1980s, and Simply Red, Take That and Oasis in the 1990s).This success has contributed to the development of local music scenes and busi- nesses: recording studios such as Strawberry, set up by 10CC; record labels like Factory; and venues like The Hacienda, which played a central role in the development of the UK Acid House scene and the so-called ‘Madchester’ scene of the late 1980s. The latter involved white, male guitar bands such as the Happy Mondays and Stone Roses performing indie music with strong dance sensibilities (Champion, 1991; Collin, 1998; Cornerhouse, 1992; Middles, 1991; Rietveld, 1998; Savage, 1992). ‘Madchester’ attracted the attention of the international media and music industry and led to an explosion of club culture within the city, involving a proliferation of clubs, record shops, DJs and designers. Consequently, it has been suggested that Manchester now has

a strong local music industry (perhaps the most developed in the UK outside London) which, alongside the city’s music scenes, has helped to promote and regenerate the city. ‘Madchester’, for example, is believed to have contributed to a 25% increase in student applications to Manchester’s three universities during 1990 (although figures are hard to confirm), attracting to the city young people who not only provide a market for local music businesses, but also set up their own. Further, the success of Manchester’s music at

a national and global level has been one of the reasons for the growth in small, often closely networked groups of music-related businesses within the city. Although this has had an impact on other areas previously, since ‘Madchester’ this has been most evident in the Northern Quarter (NQ).

The NQ is situated at the northern edge of Manchester city centre. 1 A major popular shopping and market area since the mid-19th century, it was devastated by sixties rede- velopment and the building of Europe’s (then) largest indoor shopping mall in the early 1970s. When city centre rents rose in the property boom in Manchester around 1987-

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1988, the availability of cheap rents, flexible letting, high vacancy and small properties all encouraged a migration of small cultural businesses to relocate to the area from the late 1980s onwards. This was also fuelled by the Enterprise Allowance Scheme (a grant addi- tional to social security given to new self-employed persons and much taken advantage of by the cultural sector) which demanded that a business had to trade from premises to be eligible for funding.The take up of the Enterprise Allowance Scheme was particular- ly noticeable in the music industry. Long a centre of popular entertainment and pleasures up to the 1970s, the NQ rapidly became a focus for the ‘Madchester’ and later club/dance scenes. The area includes major independent record retail outlets such as Eastern Bloc and Piccadilly Records; cutting edge music venues and clubs; numerous music-orientated bars such as Dry 201 (formerly owned by Factory Records/New Order); trendy fashion outlets, especially in Afflecks Palace; and numerous offices and workshops used by micro cultural businesses. In contrast to Sheffield, however, this agglomeration of cultural businesses (now around 200) did not result from, nor result in, a concerted cultural industries or cultural quarter strategy from the city. The city was mostly concerned with a basic building stock, envi- ronmental and economic audit and strategy in line with the then Conservative govern- ment’s requirement to produce unitary city centre plans. The Northern Quarter was, indeed, a name invented by the city to designate a ‘leftover’ bit of the city centre. The specific push for some cultural element to this development plan came from a local community organisation made up of traders, residents and workers in the area. It was this association that insisted on a cultural remit in the Regeneration Study commissioned joint- ly with the City Council in 1993. This Regeneration Study (Urbanistics/Manchester City Council, 1993; O’Connor et al., 1993) recommended (amongst other things) seeing the area as a ‘creative quarter’, both a seed-bed area for new cultural businesses (production, retail, venues) and using the cultural sector (making no distinction between ‘subsidised’ and non-subsidised sectors) as a unique and creative input into the regeneration process. The renamed Northern Quarter Association (NQA) has since attempted to push forward on this ‘creative quarter’ agenda, but as we shall see, this has happened with little finan- cial support and a ‘hands-off ’ policy which actually revealed a failure by the City Council to fully buy in to the ‘creative quarter’ strategy. It was a laissez-faire policy which reflect-

ed the attitude to the cultural sector generally, but especially to the music industry. Manchester City Council took a long time to catch up with the existence of a global industry on its doorstep. When it did so it was largely on the basis of its contribution to

a vibrant image for the city. The Hacienda had a particularly high profile, serving as a launch venue for a number of public initiatives — unthinkable a few years earlier. The increased interest in Manchester as a youth and popular culture destination, from ‘Madchester’ onwards, led to Manchester’s Visitor and Convention Bureau, featuring the Hacienda in its promotional material, whilst the then leader of Manchester City Council defended the city’s premier club, when under threat of closure from magistrates and police, thus: ”The Hacienda is to Manchester what Michaelangelo’s David is to Florence”. (Graham Stringer, quoted by Anthony Wilson, interview) In addition, local popular music images were used in Manchester’s (unsuccessful) bid for the 1996 Olympics, which includ-

ed the Stone Roses’ landmark 1990 Spike Island concert, and later in the successful 2002 Commonwealth Games bid. More proactive support came in the form of strong backing for the Hacienda when the club was closed by the police and magistrates in 1991 after a licensing dispute over drug taking. The Council’s ‘European’ and ‘24- hour city’ strategies were a concerted attempt to take on police and magistrates and to loosen licensing laws.This included experiments with relaxed licensing during the 1993 Manchester Festival and the Euro96 ‘Soccercity’

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events, although it did not lead to a more permanent solution to the problem. However, in terms of more specific support for an increasingly high-profile music industry, the city had a hands-off approach, bar the development of two, small community recording studios. 2

A city council consultancy document stated: ”The [music] industry craves new prod- ucts, new ideas, and it is important that the environment which enables this small-scale activity to flourish is maintained — a hands-off, but strongly supportive approach from the City Council”. (Urban Cultures Ltd, 1992, p. 31). According to the City Council’s Arts and Cultural Policy officer, Lyn Barbour: ” ... the (local) music industry didn’t want any council intervention. What they wanted was a city that they could operate in more effectively.They wanted transport sorting out, they wanted licensing sorted out, and the kind of issues they were concerned with were not about supporting busi- nesses ... that wasn’t the way they felt we should be intervening.They felt we should create a city which doesn’t have the barriers which exist at the moment. So we didn’t include within our strategic vision any specific intervention into the cultural industry sectors and specifically popular music”.

Although the City Council did provide modest support for In The City — the UK’s first major international music industry convention, which began in Manchester in 1992 — it has tended to stick by its ‘hands-off ’ approach. Such an approach is supported by many businesses in the city. Our research has confirmed other related research that there is a deep scepticism in the music business (however widely defined) towards central or local government intervention (MIPC/Manchester City Council, 1999). Some prominent members of the local industry, such as Anthony Wilson, constantly point to the ‘success’ and vibrancy of the music scene in Manchester, contrasting it to that of Sheffield as a salu- tary lesson about irrelevant municipal meddling in a sector it cannot understand. Below this lies a particular understanding or model of the cultural sector in general and the music sector in particular which is set against the ‘top-down’ approach in Sheffield. This is not straightforward, however. Many in the local sector have little knowledge of what such support initiatives might be — often equating them with ‘grants’ and ‘council recording studios’, etc. in a very simplistic fashion. Many did not realise that certain events,

such as In The City, did indeed have council sponsorship. 3 Many did not equate initiatives such as training, or Enterprise Allowance, or city-brokered European Structural Fund invest- ment, into events, or the joint development of managed workspaces, etc. with ‘govern- ment intervention’. As we shall see, in many cases further discussion led to a change of attitude towards ‘intervention’. A similar process may have been observed with respect to the debate around the Government’s Music Industry Forum and Creative Industries Task Force , whose creation uncovered a deep hostility toward intervention in general (‘med- dling’) and the perceived threat to pop music’s rebellious and/or Darwinian ethos.These deep-seated attitudes, coupled with a lack of local structures for the articulation of needs and demands (as exist in the more traditional subsidised sectors), meant that the City found its own distrust of intervention reassuringly echoed by the local music industry. Recently the Council (or part of it) has begun the process of establishing a local Cultural Industries Development Service , indicating a growing interest in enabling and supporting small-scale cultural business activity (MIPC/Manchester City Council, 1997; MIPC/ MCC, 1999) This will be discussed below. In the next section we will try to contrast two models of ‘cultural quarters’ as a way of opening up the whole issue of local ‘music industry’ strategies.

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