‘The shortest way out of Manchester,’ it used to be said, ‘is notoriously a bottle of Gordon’s gin.’ But that was a long time ago, when ‘Cottonopolis’ was the pivot of the Industrial Revolution, the British empire was expanding and life was cheaper. They tend not to drink gin any more in the bars on Deansgate. It’s cocktails, a tenner a pop. The hub of George Osborne’s ‘Northern Powerhouse’ is a much-changed city.
Now they’re queuing to get in, even though the super-duper HS2 rail link may go no further than Crewe, which is in Cheshire, and only southerners think Cheshire is in the north. Andy Burnham is the latest chap to set his cloth cap at the rainy city. The MP for Leigh, more often associated with Liverpool on account of his choreographed support for Everton FC, wants to be mayor of Greater Manchester. My word he does. Westminster ignores us, was the gist of his opening salvo to Mancunians last week, and he has plenty of powder left to fire up a few more cannons.
‘It’s hard growing up in the north,’ says Burnham, as though he had felt Squeers’s rod at Dotheboys Hall. ‘If you say you want to be a doctor, lawyer or MP you get the mickey taken out of you.’ No you don’t, you chump. You stand on the same ground as others in the east, the west and the south.
They have schools in Manchester, as the mayor presumptive may soon find out. The Manchester Grammar School is garlanded with honours. There’s a fine university, too, which has supplied 25 Nobel laureates, including Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr. There’s a major airport, which brings in many of the city’s 350,000 students.
Has Manchester ever been more fashionable? Not even when Rolls met Royce in 1904, around the time that the Hallé Orchestra lured Hans Richter away from Vienna to conduct them at the old Free Trade Hall, nor even when Denis Law and George Best joined forces with Bobby Charlton at Old Trafford 60 years later to give English football its starriest cast, has the old city seemed so alluring to outsiders.
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