It was only after moving to Ireland that I had deep conversations about emigration with Irish friends who’d moved to England
Last week I returned to Manchester. I’m one of the people who doesn’t have a straight answer to ‘where are you from?’, though here my accent answers for me. England, more or less. If you’re attuned to English accents, the north, and if you’re attuned to northern English accents, the northwest, but I’ve lived in enough places in the last 30 years that you’d need to be very attuned, to recognise the exact shifting of vowels that tells one English person the class and regional identity of another.
Still, I find, I know my way around the city, though not as reliably as 30 years ago. Much has changed, the outrageous, extravagant Victorian grandeur of a great trading and manufacturing city that was still bomb-damaged and dilapidated in my childhood now regenerated and cherished, with a new, sober acknowledgement of just where that money was coming from. The city still feels culturally distinctive, not London, not Birmingham, not Bristol, a place with a proudly radical past and present.
The school I attended had been founded by the Manchester liberals, including those who established and worked for the Guardian newspaper, so that their daughters could be as well educated as their sons. The workers in the cotton factories went on a long strike, refusing to process cotton grown and harvested by American slave labour. Dirty money built the city, and also that dirt was contested and denounced from the beginning.
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