Not nearly as racy as that title might suggest.
From Manchester's The Mill, November 23:
How Whalley Range changed the course of history
In the mid-1830s, Samuel Brooks did something remarkable: he left Mosley Street. It was a place he had lived for many years, nestled in Manchester’s urban core just four blocks from the newly-built Royal Exchange. Among his neighbours were the city’s great and good, merchants and bankers described by one author as “some of the most opulent characters [in] the United Kingdom”. This was simply how cities worked: the elite in the centre, the poor on the outskirts. That is, until 1834, when Brooks broke ranks.
It was many years ago, while researching a book on the future of housing, that I had my second encounter with the little-known banker-cum-visionary of suburbia Samuel Brooks. My research had led me to a book first published in 1987 by the American academic Robert Fishman. It was called Bourgeois Utopia: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. Most of it was about the US, but his story starts in the UK, first in London where merchants first set up weekend retreats in Clapham. But it was the third chapter where Brooks made his entrance, and where my interest was piqued. Fishman was making the case that the world's first proper suburb was Whalley Range in Manchester.
He told a story that I already knew a bit about. Back in the 1980s, I had been a planning officer for Whalley Range and my team had started to worry because developers were coming in with proposals to demolish the Victorian villas in the area so that they could build apartments. We decided to designate it as a conservation area so that nothing could be knocked down without our permission.
A conservation area is partly based on the architectural quality of an area but it also depends on history. Which is to say: if we wanted to save the villas from the bulldozers we’d need to argue for the area’s historic importance. So, I was sent off to the local history section of Central Library to see if I could find anything interesting. I spent an afternoon going through the card index tracking down articles. The story I uncovered — about a merchant and banker called Samual Brooks who finally decided that he could no longer stand to live in the city centre and instead built his suburb — felt like it belonged to me, as things do when you discover them from the original sources. But years later, here was the same story in Robert Fishman's book, and his claim was that Whalley Range wasn't just Manchester's first suburb, it was effectively a world first!
The fact that Manchester is home to the world’s first suburb shouldn’t come as a great surprise, it is after all the world’s first industrial city. You just have to read Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), to understand why you might want to leave the city centre if you could. The irony is that when I first visited Whalley Range on moving to Manchester in 1979 it was itself a place to escape from. In my second week I set off from my student halls on Oxford Road to visit a friend in the area. Clutching my A-Z map and somehow navigating Moss Side and Alexandra Park without incident, I reached Whalley Range. I had never seen anywhere quite like it, a lost world of huge ramshackle villas divided into bedsits, buddleia growing out of the gutters, moss coating the walls. With its huge street trees pushing up the flagstones and dripping on my head it felt like a rainforest, and then as I turned onto Wood Road there was this wonderful vista through the trees to the tower of the College.
This was a couple of years before The Smiths sang on their debut album “What do we get for our trouble and pain? Just a rented room in Whalley Range.” Morrissey was asked by a London music journalist at the time whether Whalley Range was a real place. “I’m afraid so,” he replied, “it’s a little suburb of Manchester, bedsit land, and everyone who lives there is an unrecognised poet or a failed artist.” It was also Manchester's main red light district, the haunt of streetwalkers, pimps and kerb crawlers.
The story that I uncovered in Central Library described how Samuel Brooks lived in his large townhouse on Mosley Street in the city centre along with most of the powerful people in the city (The City Art Gallery was built as their gentlemen’s club). He was known to be a compulsive worker whose home was covered in quotations from Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. Of the wealthy men of Mosley Street, Brooks was among the most prominent.
Until this point people used to measure their status by how close to the centre of the city they lived — how close they were to the centre of commerce and power with the factories and poorest housing pushed to the edge. But as Manchester industrialised, the centre became increasingly overcrowded, insanitary and intolerable....
....MUCH MORE
If interested see also:
When “Cottonopolis” Was One of the Ten Largest Cities on the Planet: Manchester After EngelsThis is the third piece in a series on how Engels suckled on the teat of slavery and Marx suckled on the teat of Engels.
Or something
"The Cotton Bond Bubble" or How the Confederacy Might Have Won the Civil War
Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Marx and Engels Got To Go!
....Because that story reminded me that Friedrich Engels' fortune was built on the cheap cotton produced by American slaves via the family's business Ermen and Engels. In fact 'ol Freddie spent a lot of time in Manchester representing the fam at one of their cotton thread factories and seemed okey-dokey with the fruits of the slave biz even while decrying the condition of the Manchester laborers....
Also, The Guardian, February 4, 2013:
Lincoln's great debt to Manchester
In 1863, The US President wrote to the 'working men of Manchester' thanking them for their anti-slavery stance
