With its slavery memorials and communist relics, US progressives should love Manchester
When The New York Times recently selected Manchester as one of its 52 places to visit in 2024, alongside the likes of Paris, Singapore and Florida, it highlighted the music which has “long been at the core of Manchester’s gritty soul” and the new Co-op Live indoor arena, opening in April. “Stars like Liam Gallagher, Eric Clapton and Barry Manilow are booked to inaugurate the 23,500-capacity space,” writes Nora Walsh.
It could be argued that the core of the city’s gritty soul stems from two hundred years of industrial development and that music has been, principally, a way out, both for the performers and the gig-goers. Anyway, two of those artists have nowt to do with Manchester, nor its grit – Barry Manilow! – and Liam Gallagher, 51, is most definitely yesterday’s rock-star rebel.
But of course The New York Times is targeting its wealthy readers. Many will have been to London, where they were served dollops of heritage, along with overpriced fish and chips, parading horseguards, posh theatres and a generous spread of TGI Fridays, McDonald’s and Five Guys branches. If that seems over-generalising and mean-spirited, I point readers to the 2018 article in The New York Times titled “Beyond Porridge and Boiled Mutton: A Taste of London”. Even supposedly cultured American journalists are not quite up to speed when it comes to Britain’s international culinary makeover – though it began almost a century ago.
Mutual misunderstandings to one side, what can Americans expect to see and do in Manchester that they will find delightful and different to what they can get elsewhere?
One of the city’s best museums houses a display with poignant links to the United States. The Science and Industry Museum has a floor devoted to the machines and manufactures of Cottonopolis. Working looms and spinning jennies provide an evocative racket, while the guides recount the sector’s links to slavery and the southern US.
When it comes to Britain’s industrial history – which is taught in American high schools – Manchester is strong all round. Hard by the museum is what used to be the terminus of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the world’s first inter-city line. Round the corner is the Midland Hotel, where Charles Rolls met Henry Royce in 1904 to talk about cars – probably (there’s no documentary proof). At the glorious Neo-Gothic Town Hall are coats of arms and mosaics featuring Manchester’s proud symbol – the worker bee. Americans, said to be workaholics on the basis of their scant holiday leave, will no doubt appreciate the symbol – though detractors claim it alludes to the drone-aspect of factory labour.
Also in the vicinity is the site where the Peterloo Massacre unfolded. Where there’s muck there’s brass, but there are also unions, protests and communism. A statue of Manchester’s most famous 19th-century left-winger, Friedrich Engels, sits on a square named after its most famous 20th-century entrepreneur, Tony Wilson Place. Idolised in his manor, the founder of Factory Records will be familiar only to a tiny music-loving intelligentsia from the US.
The most popular pilgrimage site for most Americans is the statue of Abraham Lincoln near Albert Square; as its plinth explains, the statue commemorates “the support that the working people of Manchester gave in their fight for the abolition of slavery during the American Civil War”. Liverpool, by contrast, was the site of the last surrender of the US Civil War, gets a mention in Gone With the Wind – and attracts Confederate-sympathising tourists.
According to VisitBritain, there were 4.6 million visits from the US to the UK in 2022. The top five cities were London (three million visits), Edinburgh (386,000 visits), Glasgow (136,000 visits), Manchester (111,000 visits) and Oxford (90,000 visits).
Patricia Yates, the VisitBritain CEO, said: “Britain is the most popular European destination for American visitors and the US is our largest and most valuable visitor market. American visitors are hugely important to our tourism industry and to our economy. We are forecasting that US visitors will spend a record £6.3 billion in the UK this year. This means that almost £1 in every £5 spent by overseas visitors in the UK is by Americans.”
If Manchester’s industrial past succeeds as an edifying alternative to the capital’s pomp and pageantry, can the North-West’s biggest city compete on those other essentials of a holiday – food, drink, fun and games? Manchester-born Adam Reid, the chef-patron at The French at The Midland Hotel, says it doesn’t have to.
“The whole British economy has been geared over hundreds of years to inflate London, making it a cultural melting pot with a 24/7 lifestyle and a population with expendable income and a preference for eating out. Manchester can’t rival London, but why would it want to? We do what we do up here and we don’t need to mimic or compete with anybody. Manchester will lead the way in being Manchester like it always has.”
Reid cooks for fine diners but recommends Americans go ultra-local. “Don’t visit and leave without trying Bury black pudding (freshly boiled on the market ideally), cheese and onion pie with mushy peas, a home-made tater ash with crusty bread and butter, or if you’re here in February, forced Yorkshire rhubarb and custard.
“Every region in the world has its own food culture, terroir if you will, and all you need is a little knowledge and understanding of that and a desire to tell its story. Pies, stews, pasties and offal are easy to elevate if you know what you’re doing and use quality produce.”
If all else fails, the “Americans in Manchester (Yankunians)” Facebook page is full of advice about scoring towering burgers and how to negotiate a Wetherspoons.
Manchester is changing, fast. Ask any Liverpudlian and they’ll point out – enviously – that the skyscrapers of “Manchattan” reflect a booming local economy. In October 2023, Manchester’s flagship performing and visual arts space Factory International opened – the UK’s largest investment in a national cultural project since Tate Modern. The international food scene is thriving. New hotels are opening all the time. Hollywood films love the city as a location (Captain America was shot on Dale Street). New music, wine and LGBTQ trails have been mapped across the city. A visitor pass has just been launched.
Nick Brooks-Sykes, the director of tourism at Manchester Marketing, says: “It’s a really good time to visit Manchester, with plenty of new things to do and discover, but as always we would suggest any international visitor to use Manchester as a gateway to the north of England; to explore the city and maybe some of the emerging boroughs and neighbourhood in and around Greater Manchester, then see some of the other fantastic destinations on our doorstep across the North.”
With direct flights from New York’s JFK, Atlanta and Las Vegas, Americans can bypass London and spend more time in places like RHS Bridgewater, Jodrell Bank, Salford and Macclesfield.
As for new music, any American visiting Manchester this year will find gigs every night of the week in pubs, small venues and medium-sized concert halls like Band on the Wall and New Century – both of which reopened in 2022.
In The New York Times entry championing Manchester songsmiths, Walsh segues “from Joy Division and the Stone Roses to Oasis and, now, Harry Styles”. It’s easy to be sniffy – but she’s probably on the right track. Joy Division ended with Ian Curtis’s suicide in 1980. “Madchester” was pretty much over by 1990. Harry Styles, raised in leafy Holmes Chapel and nurtured not at Factory Records but on X-Factor, is more representative of modern Manchester than any of the legendary miserabilists. He’s also massive in America.
