TheNamelessThing.com

I’ve been meaning to share something with you all for some time. It’s a hypothesis of mine called “the 4 Quadrants of Manchester”. The 4 quadrants are sectors, regions in Greater Manchester County, which possess definite identity and character, fault-lines in the ancient crust of our city. Just as Paris’ arrondissements are arrayed as a gigantic snailshell, in a tight clockwise spiral around the central core, so are Manchester’s degrees of suchness concentrically packed, like jam roly-poly about its lively heart. These 4 self-organising quadrants evolved slowly over time. Most importantly, the quadrants are not equal, and their lay-out is neither physically nor technologically symmetrical. A quadrant’s inhabitants may sound completely unlike each other in different regions of that quadrant, but ultimately there is a commonality which is continuous until it hits the border, where it is suddenly converted into something else altogether. You can feel it when you pass from one to the other. None of the Quadrants are perfect, and some are a load of old toss, full of wannabes and hair-splitters, anxious to be considered true Manc (like you, you cunt), whatever that is these days. Quadrants aren’t defined by place or area names, but I will use place names in this essay, for the convenience of supporters of Manchester United, the greatest in the world. I’m going to blow the lid on the whole affair here, so fasten yer seatbelts and let’s have no whingeing (you know who you are). And I know I’m ripping Meatbag (of United We Stand) off by saying things like “like you, you cunt”, in brackets, but he’s my hero, even if he doesn’t live in Q1, which is where we’ll begin.

Q1. This is the heart and soul of what it means to be a Manc. It is by far the largest quadrant. Q1 originates in (and completely encapsulates) the city centre, extending south a very short distance into Ardwick, Longsight, Victoria Park, Chorlton-on-Medlock, Rusholme, Moss Side, and Hulme, before swooping across White City and the Theatre of Dreams into Salford Quays and around the outside of Eccles. Trafford Park and the Ship Canal are within this mixed-use environment. Q1’s western border is a series of frayed tendrils undulating in a strange American glow. The silhouettes of Barton Bridge and the Trafford Centre shimmer in the setting sun, among the assorted red precincts of Urmston, Flixton, Irlam, and Cadishead. The gas refineries and flowing motorways bake in a Los Angeles-style heat-haze, where the radial spoke of 602 meets 60 and 62. This is the heavy-duty extension whose ultimate roots lie in Salford Docks and OT itself. Beyond that, one may feel it, hear it, extending along the edges of Boothstown, Worsley, Little Hulton, Swinton, Clifton, Stoneclough, Whitefield, and Unsworth. It then travels across the magic mushrooms and green slopes of Heaton Park to embrace all of Blackley and New Moston. Q1 is the business, the heart and spirit of the city. In a clockwise rotation from Moss Side to New Moston, there’s a similarity that is difficult to pin down, a wonderful sense that we should relax and laugh, and be happy in the world. Q1 is where proper Manc accents are heard (be it Moss Side, Salford or Collyhurst), and the architecture, the plants, the dogs, and the churches actually feel alive. But here we find the first truly interesting fault line; Q2.

East Manchester is an awkward place, populated by cavemen and other throwbacks, not to mention the Council House. Q2 isn’t the same as Q1, no way. Q1’s side of the border with Q2 contains New Moston, Moston, Collyhurst, Harpurhey, and Ancoats where it rejoins central Manchester. Q2, at the other side of this invisible force-field between worlds, contains Failsworth, Newton Heath, Beswick, and Openshaw, before finally giving way to Q1 in the form of Ardwick – back where we started, just south of town. Q2 spreads out to the direct east in a filthy uninformed haze towards Steel City, where you might smell Clayton, Bradford, and Gorton, unparalleled shiteholes where illiteracy, backwardness, and time-warps-within-time-warps are rampant. Of the many troubling parts of Q2, Openshaw appears particularly prone to this time-warp effect. Humankind may never know why this little corner of inner-city Manchester suddenly expresses a radically altered character from its neighbour, but it does. The gasworks factor, Fort Beswick, incredibly ugly streets, and the blue nature of certain people certainly don’t help. It’s more like a charcoal drawing, by LS Lowry withdrawing from crack, than reality. This section of Manchester frightened the life out of me when I was a kid; it felt evil, the product of a malevolent subconscious landscape made flesh. The fixtures appeared new yet old-fashioned, like a world in doom and used to it. The indelible stamp of those structures remains, like a ghost in the memory banks; the steaming wet bricks, gasometers, low railway bridges, unfashionable clothes, and hopelessly out of style work-vans carrying men with unacceptable hairstyles and amounts of facial hair. Fucking weird. Q2 progresses from this urban nightmare into the putrid hollows of Droyslden, Dukinfield, Audenshaw, Ashton, Stalybridge, Mossley, Denton, Hyde, Mottram, Hadfield, and Hattersley. This what they call "The Heartlands", the intensely concentrated vestiges of a once-great Mancunian tendency to fight The Man and invent, invent, invent. They invented FC United of Manchester here, so the legend goes. They say where's there's muck there's brass, and there's certainly plenty of muck. Yorkshire is at the end of it. It wouldn’t be a lie to include Oldham and Rochdale in Q2, so let’s do that, shall we? Thankfully, the whole ordeal peters out when it hits the bleak moors, and the less said about that the fucking better. As you can see, the coiled quadrants can come to resemble a pile of dogshit rather than a tremulous gelato, once we venture outside the lush realm of Q1. But there is an exception: Q3.

Q3 is what people refer to as “South Manchester”. It includes yer Hazel Groves and your Stockports, parts of which threaten to overlap into Q2 (as does Levenshulme). For the most part, Q3 describes a quite gorgeous patina of tree-lined avenues and attractive rows of well-kept shops. It’s almost as good as London. The only problem is the people. For reasons that have never been made completely clear, they seem to think they’re a cut above. The denizens of Q3 are ignorant tossers who make ridiculous claims like, “my mates went to Prestwich and everyone in the pub was staring at them ‘cos they ordered pints and they were women.” Just for the record, if you go in a pub in Prestwich, and you’re an unknown, everyone will stare at you. They don’t care if you order pints of liquid LSD in Prestwich, or if you’re a chimp, but if you’re an unknown chimp, that’s a different matter. People from Q3 think flying to New York is still a big deal, while north Mancunians practically live there. You can always spot them on the plane going over; they think they’re on the fucking Mayflower. Q3’ers labour under the extraordinary notion that they speak “properly”, but I have news in that department, too; when inhabitants of both genders from Levenshulme, Fallowfield, Whalley Range, Withington, Didsbury, Northenden, and Chorlton-cum-Hardy exaggerate their “posh” accents, they succeed only in sounding like wizened, bisexual brothel-keepers and other plastic purveyors of the sleaze industry. Mutton dressed as lamb isn’t in it. The soot, the mills, and the poverty shine through crystal clear, and Salford produces far better-spoken individuals than these clowns. Q3 is obsessed with bigging up its “ethnic” diversity, yet they wouldn’t be seen dead in the Moss unless they’re scoring heroin. But their sense of verve and desire to be cosmopolitan via high connectivity with the city centre earns them a “Manchester” tag, bringing us to Q4, which most certainly fucking doesn’t, not that they care.

Q4 is hell on wheels, with knobs on, and is boring into the bargain. It composes all remaining areas to the west and north of Manchester, mainly far-flung satellites and bizarre hybrid new towns, like Partington, Altrincham, Leigh, Astley, Wigan, Ashton-in-Makerfield, Kearsley, Farnworth, and Bolton. These outliers are hotbeds of contradiction and treason, often quite blatant in their disregard for the greater metropolis to which they belong. Partington was created by mating Salfordians with people from Wythenshawe. Those individual areas are full of excellent people, but some species weren’t meant to fuse. The result is the highest concentration of scumbags, blackmailers, and litigious weasels this side of Dallas. Only the magnificent presence of Q1’s gargantuan industrial structures provide any form of redemption in this quadrant, which is really a nonentity in most respects, so I won’t bore you (and them) with further descriptions of Q4. They are not real people.

Finally, we must address the oddballs and unpigeonholeable remainder. Miles Platting is an enigma, there’s no doubt about that. The place resonates in the endless rain, and its space-age council hovels are pulsating hives of thievery, strangeness, and a palpable urban reek that both satisfies and terrifies in equal measure. Miles Platting is the electric fence between Q1 and Q2, straddled masterfully by the bard, Michael Duff, to whom I hasten to whisper: Come over to the bright side, Mister, don’t fall in the Q2 cesspit; you’ll end up like Rab C. Nesbitt. Note the use of (yet another) semi-colon there; I’ve got a degree, and I live in America; how can I possibly be wrong? You may accuse me of not being fluent enough with the kind of connectedness prevalent between north and east Manchester on this topic, but I do have eyes in my head and a nose for queerness, and as you pass from the one to the other, the unmistakable stench of the Quadrant Borderland fills the nostrils and causes the eyelids to tighten. The Wythenshawe “annexe” is another anomaly, certainly not Q2, Q3 or Q4 material, but physically disconnected from Q1. And then there’s Stretford. What do you do with Stretford? And Old Trafford, not the Theatre itself, (which is in Q1) but the place? Difficult to say. I wouldn’t want to insult them by putting them in with Q4, but Q1 is too good for them. And Bury? Is it Q1? You tell me.

To recap, Q1 is boss. Q1 and Q3 are quite nice in parts, but Q3 are a deluded lot of cunts whose attitude more resembles that of ignorant cockneys than it does Mancs. Like Londoners, they rely on mainstream sound-bites and clichés for effect. Q2 is horrific. Q4 is a mixture of sly criminals, weird ne’er do wells that fit no known categorisation, and sometimes violent sheepshaggers.

And I don’t want to see any feedback either, about the fact that Newton Heath is in Q2; it’s a sulking shithole, and if you’ve got a problem with that, then consider Bernard (Q1) Manning’s story of a drunk who entered a boozer and declared to one half of the room, “you lot are a load of bastards” and to the other, “and you lot are a shower of cunts”. A big Irishman stood up and shouted, “Hey, I’m not a bastard!” to which the drunk replied, “well get over there with the cunts!” I will say to you who declare, “Hey I’m not a Q2’er!”, “well fucking move house then, you shithead.”
I hope I’ve been of some help here today in guiding you all to your spiritual homes. Sad blue cunts like to harp on about The Theatre of Dreams not being in Manchester, but let them, for as you can now see, the man-made borders are illusions, and the real diagnosis overrides any such nonsense.
There; the hypothesis is now a proof, and I defy anyone to contradict it convincingly. The most important aspect of this hypothesis, though, is that I’m not being paid to write it. I’m writing it because it’s true. I haven’t lived in England for 14 years, but I’ve got a good memory. So, thanks all, and, as ever, it’s been real.