Manchester, Autumn 2000
Dear Matthew,
A short while ago you left Manchester for the first time in your life and went to Brussels to finish your studies. Three weeks have since passed, during which I have heard nothing from you. I left a message on your answering machine but you did not get back in touch, so I have decided to write, as I am dying to hear any news you may have. What is life like over there? What are you up to, what have you learned and who have you met?
You spoke to me at some length about Brussels and told me about its association with The Obscure Cities. I didn’t really pay much attention to what you were telling me about these cities, as I thought your ideas were ridiculous and boring. I must say I saw things in a different light however when, the day before you left, we went for a walk in the underground passage between the Midland Hotel and Manchester’s former Central Station turned exhibition centre, Gmex. We saw for ourselves how another city exists alongside Manchester without us or anybody else having been aware of it.
As you asked me I have been conducting some research into whether what we saw really was entirely unheard of and whether there are any records of anybody having witnessed it in the past. I consulted a pile of books in the university and city libraries, asked staff at the nearby Town Hall and everybody else I could think of who might have been able to tell me something but all in vain – I couldn’t find a single book or article about it. The only thing I was able to find was that the subway was built at the same time as the hotel at the start of the last century so that newly arrived guests in the city could get to the hotel without getting drenched in the rain. Visitors have been arriving here for decades without the faintest idea that there is a whole other city under their very feet. We are both from Manchester, yet we have never heard of a passage between our city and another - what we saw appears to be unknown to all and sundry.
That was all I was able to find until yesterday when, looking up something else in the library at the university, I came across a book by chance, written around 1820, about Castlefield and its industrial past. As you know it is only a short walk from the passage we were in, to the south east of the city centre. The author was going on about how the site was built around two canals, built to transport raw materials to the city at the start of the industrial revolution. Coal, cotton, wood, salt and grain would arrive at Manchester and everything was stored, manufactured and sold right next to the canals. The book also contained statements by several people who were involved in Castlefield’s planning and construction. Something a navvy said made me stop. A man digging one of the canals claimed that, after falling by accident, he suddenly found himself, in his own words "quite literally under the ground, yet still alive, more than ever in fact, and standing at the gateway to another city." Then he went on to mention the passage and the way he described it was like what we saw. He called it ‘Mancunia.’
Castlefield today is the world’s first urban heritage park and the old warehouses, and factories have been converted into offices, flats and bars. In the centre, you can still see where the two canals meet and above them is the Merchant Bridge, built only a few years ago. One book describes it as an steel arch, saying when you cross it, you can tell how bold a project it was to undertake. Sure enough, when you go over it, your feet vibrate with every step. I like to stop there and daydream about the two waterways, one going westwards towards the Irish Sea, the other eastwards towards the North Sea and look at all the railway bridges, brick and steel, above the canals just a few metres away, but more than anything I think of Mancunia, the city the navvy discovered beneath my feet which we were standing just a short distance from.
I can’t stop thinking about it why it was that we and the navvy saw that city. Could it really only appear to certain people at certain times, to that workman, two hundred years ago, and to us, now? Maybe certain places are more sensitive than others, like railway tracks, stations and canals… My friend Vicky who is a student in Glasgow is coming back to Manchester next weekend and we are going to walk around these sorts of places. Maybe we will discover something else.
There is nothing else to tell at present – I have told you as much as I know. Tell me about Brussels and Brüsel. Are they like Manchester and Mancunia? Have you been doing any research?
From my window I can see that the trees in Whitworth Park are now completely bare and autumn is gradually drawing to a close. Winter is almost here and ahead lie mornings and evenings of waiting at the bus stop in the cold and dark. So when are you coming back? The university seems so empty without you. I would so like to get to know you a bit better if you would allow me back into your life. You can come back into my life whenever. The door is open and I am waiting.
Fanny