Chasing Engels

Fire Escapes of Manchester (27/11/10)

Yesterday I noticed for the first time the fire escapes in the 'Northern Quarter' of Manchester, an area of streets nestled beside Piccadilly Station, including Oldham Street, a magnet for those who love the alternative cultures of music, fashion, drinkin' and eatin'. No doubt there are perfectly explicable historical reasons for why these fire escapes happen to be attached to the sides of many buildings in the same area of town, the main one possibly the buildings' former lives as clothing industry workshops, tailors, and other craft-based ateliers. Some of the buildings continue to be occupied in just these ways even today. I wonder how many of the fire escapes are still in use, though of course the hope is that they are never used.

Unpacking my Library - After Benjamin

Living alongside a friend means that I share all of my personal space. Neither of us has uniquely personal space. We manage perfectly, although my friend probably gives me more leeway than I give her. Having so many books is a hazard of being a PhD student. A further hazard comes from being a post-doc researcher. A few days ago I had to return all of my books to the university at which I was registered to do the PhD. A melancholy moment, not so much because I had to relinquish fourteen books which are hard to obtain and/or expensive to buy myself, but because it resulted in the loss of lending rights. That stung: automatically the retrieval, by the institution, of my lending rights. Having those books anchored me. Now I am cast adrift, with no institutional tie-in, the possibilities of research hampered by the lack of a twenty five book limit and soon being locked out of the account I've held for nearly six years and which gave me remote access to electronic journals.

It's surprising the amount of space fourteen books liberate for your own collection. Piles can be swept off floors and slotted into ever-dwindling inches of shelving. And as any serious reader and book collector will know, the more shelving space you have, the more adult and serious your reading habit feels. A residual bourgeois tendency ferrets away in even the most Marxist of bookworms when the question of maintaining and containing a personal library is concerned.

Having spent a number of hours this week dusting, shifting, and reordering books, my thoughts turned to Walter Benjamin's essay 'Unpacking my Library'. His recollections of inspecting and bidding for books at auctions is far from my own experience of buying discounted books from the Book Depository or from secondhand shops, but nevertheless we overlap in our respective excitement over the discovery of certain titles and reflections on their previous owners.

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

And so it was with me as I restored one pile of books to their resting place in a chest whose MDF bottom sags at the weight I place on top. In his essay Benjamin talks about the 'dialectical tension between the poles of order and disorder' in the life of the collector. Perhaps the dialectic is between the two archives of (tangible) books and (intangible) memories: the books of the collector are objects through and in which coordinates of time and space cross to connect the individual to the past.

More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books.

But you do not have to be a bourgeois auction bidder to get this. My books chest is rarely opened; they never see the light of day (or night, as Benjamin teases). When the lid is opened, there is a rush of memories relating to two completely opposite life experiences: being an English student at King's College, London, and teaching students - albeit briefly - at the University of Sheffield. You can tell which books relate to which segment of life from the multi-coloured tabs hanging off the edges. But most of the books originate from my undergraduate years (when I wasn't efficient enough to use tabs), and their disordered coalescence - due to the diversity of modules I chose - has since been reordered by the three main genres of poetry, prose, and drama. This ever-evolving order has in turn been rejuvenated by MA and PhD studies, and even this week's sorting and shifting saw a few titles retrieved as they have fresh relevance in my post-doctoral life, proving the essential circularity of knowledge.

Once you have approached the mountains of cases in order to mine the books from them and bring them to the light of day - or, rather, of night - what memories crowd in on you!

An image of Foyles' red neon sign flashing. After initial confusion, I learn a new order: books ordered by publisher. Searching becomes all the more confused as I try to pinpoint the texts required for forthcoming modules by remembering and imagining which edition is published by whom. Packed to the hilt mainly of new books, nevertheless Foyles has the appearance of a secondhand bookshop, with little or no concession to uniform branding and, up until recently, the convenience of payment by credit or debit card. Inevitably it is all the more memorable for having been this way.

Criss-crossing Charing Cross Road between the eccentricity of Foyles and the bureaucratic, soft-focus 1980s Blackwell's, as I begin to settle on the correct edition, normally as a result of its competitive price but hopefully also offering the desired prefaces, introductions, notes, and other addenda. Penguin Classics. OUP. Wordsworth's Classics. Never Everyman's Library - only if you're lucky, with birthday or Christmas vouchers in hand. And only the radical students steal from the tight-cornered lumber rooms of the secondhand booksellers, as in the case of one leather-jacketed dandy(lion), news of whose theft of a well-worn copy of Beckett's Watt spun along the grapevine not purely because of the criminal manner by which it was obtained but because it seemed fitting for a postmodern text.

Stumbling on other King's students, who influence your purchase of an edition after due consideration of its usefulness for the module. Soon realise that independent study means having your own books. The library can't afford to stock enough of the choicest editions to supply poorer students with the addenda (addenda are expensive!). Later on, during the MA, a much-respected lecturer argued that books were the tools of the academic, just as bricks are the bricklayer's. (When have you heard of bricklayers swapping bricks to finish a wall?) An apt analogy for a person born into a working class family. Naturally I identified. Back at King's another instructive insight into the nature of class and education as a professor spoke of his roots in a Welsh mining town where the miners sought formal education and slaked their intellectual thirst, and who was introduced to Frank Wedekind's controversial expressionist play Spring's Awakening by his own father. The edition of Wedekind's play, obtained for that professor's lecture, was put to sleep once more in the darkness of my chest of books as the memories it provokes come rushing in.

1911/2011

2011 is the 100th anniversary of the Liverpool General Transport Strike. This Strike paralysed the city during the summer of 1911. The Strike's ferocity and solidarity was such that it is considered that Britain came close to revolution. The army was called in to control the Strike as it was happening and to prevent any increase in its force. Famously, HMS Antrim floated on the River Mersey in readiness for an all-out attack in the event of the much-feared revolution. Looking at the extensive archive of images taken at the time by the local photographic firm Carbonbora, you cannot fail but to be stunned by the impenetrable sea of flat caps on the plateau outside the immense St George's Hall. Such images convey the fact that the Strikers were a force to be reckoned with.

Hopefully this major, though still overlooked, history of organised labour will be commemorated in fitting style next year, quite possibly with strikes and/or direct action of our own in the confrontation with the coalition's cuts. The students' tuition fees demo on Wednesday 11 November indicated that the wind is blowing in a different direction these days; indeed, the Guardian reports of plans for a national day of direct action. David Cameron will be pleased. His fuck you attitude, blowing in off the eastern wind from his trip to the People's Republic of China, finally waves goodbye to the always already hollow idea of progressive Conservatism. Alongside Iain Duncan Smith's welfare revisionism, his refashioning of Tebbit-haughtiness, Cameron's monolithic defiance of the voices of over 50,000 students says it all: it's business as usual at Conservative HQ (except for the brand new glazing).

Mention of the despicable nature of the small minority of student protesters invading ConServative HQ is a convenient smokescreen, making it possible to ignore the claims of the peaceful majority. The BBC couldn't stop banging on about the violence. Interviewing Clare Solomon, one of the invaders, Jeremy Paxman went into full throttle reactionary mode, almost ejecting himself from the chair in his ferocious demand for an answer to 'Did you have to invade the building?'

The case is weakened when people get seriously hurt. As I write nobody did; so what if they did smash that window? Nobody.got.seriously hurt. Everybody is talking about the demo, though. The sad fact remains that if the demo had remained peaceful, there is no way the coverage would have been extensive. Rather than discussing the limits of protest (Newsnight's premise), perhaps we need to discuss the nature of peaceful protesting, in relation to which successive governments seem to be saying 'Of course you can have your say on the streets, but we won't listen and we will not change a bloody thing.' Cameron's response is defiant, but people are turning and his ride will not be smooth.

The coalition stands to do violence to society, whereas breaking a few windows is a crime against humanity.

As we know, it's in the DNA of Conservative governments to do violence to society. Cameron is finishing off Thatcher's grand plan in furtive style. You don't have to analyse the current situation to realise this: a little historical perspective shows that nothing has changed. In the Preface to his 1994 book about the 1911 Liverpool General Transport Strike, Eric Taplin writes that: 'Over the last fifteen years trade unions in Britain have been driven on to the defensive by successive Conservative governments. Anti-union legislation has led to a loss of influence, membership and status.' Britain is living the truth of this analytical nugget even now: beyond the students and on the basis of the trajectory of recent labour history, the possibility of mass organised labour protesting the coalition's cuts and destroying the chances of a second term through mass strikes is arguably fairly low. Thatcher's ideology of market-driven individualism in the context of an absent/negated/dismantled society laid the groundwork for the failure of nerve besetting the working class at the polls and in their union-enforced workplace. Against this record, the Big Society is a sick joke indeed.

There is time yet, and in time we may be thanking the students for igniting the collective spirit.

The final prophetic word(s) should go to a notice reproduced in Taplin's book about the 1911 Liverpool General Transport Strike:

Workers of Liverpool

Have not the events of the last few days proved to you that there are only two parties -

THE WORKERS AND THEIR ENEMIES

Liberal and Tory have alike shown themselves in their true colours. Will you remember this when next election comes round, or will you vote blindly, as in the past, for the Master Class?

Socialism is a plan which will give the worker the just reward of his labour.

The results of the present system you have before you.

SOCIALISM IS THE ONLY REMEDY

[Eric Taplin, Near to Revolution: The Liverpool General Transport Strike of 1911 (Liverpool: The Bluecoat Press, 1994)]

Dreams of the past and fear of oblivion

When Beryl Bainbridge opined that Liverpool long ago lost its status as a great city, I can't help thinking in some major respects she was right. Her argument had good examples: the loss of the Overhead Railway, the loss of some of its labyrinthine streets, the distinction of the Playhouse Theatre. Bainbridge referred to a deeper sense of the city that Liverpool literally embodied but which was now nowhere to be seen.

Not that I'm one to get all witheringly nostalgic about the old ways; not that I wish to be a troll and drag down Liverpool's resurgence. I do however lament the loss of early twentieth century Liverpool, a city of which clearly I can have no memory. On the other hand my parents did experience the tail end of Liverpool's greatness and it is mainly their recollections of this that has formed both my eternal image of the city and my sense of self.

How disastrous the loss of the Overhead Railway! The Overhead Railway was the world's first electrically-operated elevated railway. It features in the opening scenes of Terence Davies' melancholy cinematic poem of Liverpool, Of Time and the City, morphed as it is into the very lens through which we are looking as the Overhead train leads us into the dark abyss of an oncoming tunnel - simultaneously architecture as memory of place and memory of film. In other sequences we have the unalloyed pleasure of viewing footage of the inside of one of the carriages, empty but for a bespectacled middle-aged lady who bears more than a passing resemblance to Simone Weill. What a wondrous, magical thing the Overhead Railway must have been, from whose elevation passengers could view the nucleus of a phenomenal twentieth century city that was never to challenge the immensity of Chicago or New York, despite the truly iconic Liver Building's influence on the skyscraper architecture of both those cities. We can only fantasise the passage from the miles-long dock road, serving a port still living and breathing trade, towards the urban cluster around the monumental Pier Head. What an inspiration to turn the gaze skywards from within the elevated railway carriage, a rapprochement between the giddy heights and the engulfed masses on the ground. What a quiet thrill to slice through the city on what must have felt like a knife edge. Most journeys will have conveyed thousands to their humdrum working day and back again to humdrum domesticity, but nevertheless there was the ephemeral pleasure of the journey on the Overhead Railway, coaxing thoughts of the futurist kind after Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Rolling towards the Pier Head, parting the smog and smoke of a city choking itself to life at daybreak, Liverpool's Overhead Railway was the epitome of the city as metropolis. Its demolition in 1959 represents a low turning point in the status of Liverpool as what I would call a true, let alone a great, city.

Liverpool is not alone in having failed to escape the crimes of the postwar town planner. In retrospect what those town planners must have considered to be urban enhancement now stands as the death of the city as a porous, organic, uneven, chaotic phenomenon, much like the humans populating it. Thrown into the postwar planner's lethal mix of blind disrespect for the past and narcissistic carbon copying of Le Corbusier dehumanising functionalism is the rabid love of PEDESTRIANISATION. No other word in the language makes me curl over like an under-watered flower than this death-to-all-that-lives-and-breathes concept of urban planning. PE DEST RIAN ISATION. It's a hideous word and hideous thing. Whereas cities have always been and in some unscathed corners of the world continue to be a motley mixture of roads and sidewalks, the binary forms of modern movement by car and by foot thrown together, the dynamic and unpredictable ebb and flow of life defined against the rationality of street design, pedestrianised areas are amorphous, incoherent, devoid of contrast and chaos. It's the amorphousness that gets me. Pedestrianised areas are kitsch in that they feel like the city has been redesigned by one who prefers wall-to-wall carpet instead of creaking, porous, splintering floorboards. The chaos experienced in pedestrianised areas is not of the excitable kind in cities that have those on foot dodging, escaping, leaping in front of and away from, discourteous and on occasion criminally insane drivers. Instead the never-ending irritations of navigating the byways of stores is magnified on the amorphous urban carpet. There is nothing rational or imaginatively tension-filled about this ineffectual urban planning. Bodies move crosswise without purpose, whereas on conventional streets bodies move against the rational order imposed on them in dynamic ways. Like all British cities, Liverpool's high street is pedestrianised, though unlike most British cities Liverpool's Church and Lord Streets are lucky enough to have retained an enviable architectural blueprint. (Probably due to bomb damage from the Second World War, Lord Street is uglier than Church Street, but viewed from the top of the latter, there is a satisfying curve that Lord Street accentuates pleasingly on the eye with one of the few remaining handsome buildings in its possession. Of course this coherence has nothing to do with pedestrianisation.)

The lust for voiding city streets of cars has nothing to do with environmentalism (this stems from the postwar period, not one wholly concerned with preserving the planet's resources), nor has it to do with making the city more intensely urban. It does the opposite, which is why I lament the conversion of huge swathes of Liverpool to this ugly scheme. Pedestrianisation is wrapped up in the standardisation of urban design, cleansing the city of its unpredictable elements and corners of economic inefficiency. It is wrapped up in a rabid desire for property development that serves nothing but the accumulation of capital. (Not that Liverpool has had much money recently....) Liverpool's labyrinthine streets around Clayton and Williamson Squares were possessed of a much richer and more characterful life than is currently possible within the disastrous template of the white elephant post-1990s shopping mall Clayton Square and the ever-monstrous St John's Shopping Centre, the site of a much-loved traditional market that persevered until the 1960s as a humming though beautifully tiled fish market. The narrow streets with narrower buildings, legendary pubs and gay cruising grounds teeming with unpredictable and chaotic lives were cleansed long ago. The town planners provided the preventative cure with their life-sapping designs and aim of managing the flow of life to serve the needs of accumulating capital. There is no place for the economically inefficient in this vision of deathly urbanism, which is why the labyrinthine streets in which life breathed its own rhythm had to be consigned to the history pages. Liverpool died a death with the birth of the monstrous shopping malls now blighting its centre. Though the results are more aesthetically pleasing, Grosvenor-owned Liverpool One is the ultimate realisation of pedestrianised design intent on the accumulation of capital and the death of culture - real human culture, as it was lived in Liverpool during its heyday as a globally significant port. As Owen Hatherley has said, it is one of Britain's 'new ruins'. Never in the surveillance state of the 42 acres of Liverpool One will you see anything not-for-profit, independent, radical, frivolous, organic, or chaotic. Not for as long as the 999 year lease on those 42 acres of the city of Liverpool, when we, if not Liverpool itself, will definitely be consigned to oblivion.