MARVELS OF MANCHESTER

How would L S Lowery depict Modern Manchester?

MARVELLOUS MANCHESTER 

Well as we battle with Coronavirus memories of places discovered and enjoyed will become even more important.  

Last week I was in Manchester as discovered what a wonderful place it is. It is remarkable for the way concrete and glass towers nestles along side Victorian flights of fancy in familiar red brick.

I was working in an office a short walk from the city centre. At the end of the first day I walked back to the hotel along several canal side paths. There are about 10 miles of canals running through central Manchester, dating back to the city's industrial heyday in the 18th and 19th Centuries.  Parts of the city with its gothic brickwork have a positively Venetian atmosphere!

My hotel room looked out on a cluster of skyscrapers nearing completion part of the new Deansgate Square area. What I was gazing across to is part of a seismic change to the city centre and highly controversial.

Oliver Wainwright in the Guardian, reporting in October 2019:

They will ultimately become 17- and 22-storey slabs that will in turn be dwarfed by a 41-storey tower, all surrounding the park with a glacial wall of “ultra-sleek urban homes”. And not a single one affordable.

This is MeadowSide, a £200m development by the Far East Consortium, a Hong Kong developer registered in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands. This site – once the gateway to medieval Manchester and depicted in the paintings of LS Lowry – is being ripped up to make way for 756 luxury homes, many already sold off-plan to investors in Hong Kong.

A glacial wall of “ultra-sleek urban homes?

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