Walking the M62

Cold War cracks and a coal face renaissance

Today I visited Burtonwood Services Westbound, via a gap in the fence alongside Charon Way (the IKEA approach road). They are virtually derelict. The service station itself - closed; peeling signs direct customers through a subway under the motorway to access the Eastbound shop and cafe. The motel - closed, boarded up, surrounded by a summer’s green growth, its approach pathways coned off to visitors. The vast swathes of concrete car park - virtually empty, for most users of this area now pass straight through to the petrol station at the far edge, its only extant commercial site. So the grass is beginning to grow through the slabs in the roadway which once bore a great volume of traffic.

Burtonwood Westbound: a victim of geography, perhaps - why stop at a services so close to the end of a motorway, so near a major city, so near your destination (except perhaps to do as I did there once - to take a short nap after feeling sleepy at the wheel)? Burtonwood Westbound is also a victim of infrastructure - once Junction 8 was completed (only a couple of years ago) it made Burtonwood Eastbound accessible from both directions, removing the need to double-up on service facilities.

The creation of Junction 8 made Burtonwood Westbound an unlikely victim of the end of the cold war. For Junction 8 was pencilled in but never built until the USAF decided that any potential crisis had passed and so there would be no future need to utilise the Burtonwood stretch of motorway in its previous role as an aircraft runway. Burtonwood Westbound looks in a sorry state (and smells like an outdoor toilet, which it obviously now is, I guess particularly at night when it’s poorly lit) but perhaps we should be thankful that its decay marks the thawing of US-Soviet relations; we should celebrate the cracks in its pavements as unlikely markers of a new era in international diplomacy.

What will happen to Burtonwood Westbound, I wonder. And I wonder this hopefully after a good afternoon stroll around Sutton Manor Wood with Glen (aka Pippy), who does contract work for Warrington-based TEP Environmental Partnership. Spends the small hours of her mornings standing in ditches counting bat numbers, or recording sightings of rare newts on sites earmarked for industrial or commercial development.

The joys of Sutton Manor Wood are many: plentiful trees of numerous varieties, good paths, easy slopes and rises, old railway lines to follow and waterways to investigate, and the ‘summit’, not very high, but at 270ft above sea level high enough to command good views across the hills of North Wales and West Lancashire, back to the Pennines. Standing there we followed the course of the Mersey from the industrial jumble of Warrington Bank Quay past Fiddler’s Ferry power station and the crags of Helsby. We identified the masts of Winter Hill, the rise of Rivington Pike. And as we stood, the M62 traffic hissed away beneath us at the base of the hill.

As every local knows, Sutton Manor Wood stands on the site of the colliery where many of them and generations of their kinsfolk worked. So the trees stand on old spoil heaps, the summit is where a pithead stood, overlooking an industrial plain which was once peppered with mines. The old colliery entrance gates have been preserved as a dramatic reminder of the tough work which brought this whole settled area into being. The wood has been developed by Pippy’s colleague Francis Hesketh and it’s becoming a pleasant, living arena for varieties of flaura, fauna and human beings. And next year it will begin to emerge in the national consciousness as it has been selected as one of the sites in Channel 4's Big Art Project. The consequence of this will be the creation of an artwork potentially as large and certainly as iconic as Antony Gormley's celebrated Angel of the North.

The Angel and the hill on which it stands have established a deep connection with the nearby A1 and those who pass by on it. The M62 passes closely by the foot of the hill on which the completed Sutton artwork will stand, meaning that a sculpture there is certain to become another of the transPennine motorway's great sights, something to catch the breath on the way in or out of Merseyside.

A little local culture

A day off the road today (long-walk purists cover your eyes) to drop into Liverpool for a little local cultural occasion. A twice-yearly repeated ritual in which a roundly-derided so-called entertainer known as 'Diver' Gerrard performs dubious feats in the Everton penalty area and in conversation with the match official once again manages to reduce a potentially thrilling sporting contest into an uneven shambles. Sometimes on these occasions it is he who gets sent off the pitch; at other times, like yesterday, he makes others the victims of his dastardly crimes. This year the highlight was his own manager realising the damage he was causing himself and the game, taking the Diver off halfway through the second half. Win or lose I really don't like derby matches. Way too stressful. It'll be a relief to return to the violent noisy smoke-filled road tomorrow.

Footfalls in Golden Square

Warrington's had a Golden Square for a long time, in one form or another. The latest development is very new, and this morning I was generously given an insider's view of it hosted by Birchwood councillor and Golden Square chaplain Allison Claxton. Allison, like many of her colleagues there, has only been in post a few months and is still finding her feet on the (slippery-shiny new) shopping centre floor.

Good chaplains need to be, I guess: approachable, personable, sympathetic, un-clubbish and incorruptible. Good conversationalists, good listeners, trustworthy with words spoken in confidence. Above all, perhaps, they have to like the people they're working with. Seems to me that Allison's in her element in this seven-point-four-hour job which she wishes could be longer.

If you like the people you're working with then they'll soon get to like you, and so we had no problems getting into conversation with:

Security staff, in the hidden depths of a complex still being built around them, and out walking the floor, young men with self-effacing humour and night jobs on the doors of local clubs;

Information team women, based on a stall in a central walkway to take customers' questions and interact, on centre management's behalf, with staff from the hundred-or-so shops;

The receptionist in the management office, fielding phone calls, dealing with requests for keys and room hire, queries about lost property, assisting shop staff asking for statistical information, multi-tasking with ease and enjoyment;

Shop workers, all young people, in stores ranging from a flagship department store to a bear construction workshop, each with responsible posts, looking to do well, busy with details;

Service staff: a woman expecting twins and still keeping the avenues of Golden Square clean, numerous young people serving food and drinks, welcoming customers and keeping their workplaces (our leisure spaces) clean.

All are concerned with a thing called footfall, ie the measure of the number of people visiting a shop or a chain of shops in a period of time. The young staff, anxious and pressured in new responsible posts, have been grateful for those quieter times which have helped them catch up with themselves in their roles, but equally feel the strain when regional managers arrive to tell them that they need to do more to get people through the door. The centre management team, in their aim to increase footfall, struggle with negative publicity (reports of the new square killing off other retail parts of Warrington). Stores watch each others footfall figures and worry about being badly-located, overlooked by passing punters.

One footfall statistic is Allison's weekly round of the stores and the offices. Most of them (there's the occasional exception) are grateful to have someone to talk to about the stuff which makes up their working life. She's looking forward to the day when her ground-floor Quiet Room is made ready for opening, and then employees and customers alike will have somewhere to go for respite, encouragement and redirection.

Mists and the military on the sequestered moss

All mosses and mists this morning on the walk into Warrington from Junction 11. Gorse Covert and Oakwood, two well-heeled estates in Birchwood, were as still and silent as the mosses on which they are built. Maybe they always are, in the hours after the school run smog subsides, as these seem to be deeply private places, all no-through roads and detached homes not overlooked. Residents are protected by high, wide hedges from freaks like myself who would dare to walk in such areas. Walkways are rationed and though their limited existence on one side of the estates' major roads gives the pedestrian permission to be there, they feel underused as if socially impermissible. Houses bearing names like Bide-a-While seem profoundly inapproachable; the first person I met on the footpath above the A574 on Pestfurlong Hill returned my greeting with a strongly distancing look.

Maybe the mist had affected my inner vision. It's likely that behind the doors of Bide-a-While there is a welcome for (sanctioned) visitors. It's probable that these avenues display a lot more life when the sun is up and the Flymos come out. But I'm aware that these most easterly parts of Warrington owe their existence to mosses and mists - and militarism. Born of obnubilation, perhaps concealment is at their very heart.

Birchwood's mossland appealed to the Ministry of Supply in the Second World War who built a Royal Ordnance Factory, ROF Risley there. According to Wikipedia, 'The location was chosen because the low lying mist and cloud helped camouflage the factory from the air; according to a local builder "It was very lonely and misty at night, and that’s why the factory was constructed there ….. it was usually covered with a mist or cloud. It was hard to see it in the day time ...".'

ROF Risley adjoined RAF Burtonwood, which Ben and I discussed later over in Warrington's new Golden Square. As these military bases faded in significance so Warrington began to grow onto the acres of mossland they'd occupied. The M62 (J8-J9) follows the line of RAF Burtonwood's former main runway; and Birchwood's subtopias (Gorse Covert, Oakwood, Locking Stumps) grew up over the mosses of ROF Risley also shared by the complex commercial estates of Risley and Birchwood Park.

Military bases being what they are - obscurantist - feed rumours. Like the one Ben and I reawoke in Caffe Nero, that Greenham Common was a front and that there were more nuclear warheads in store at Burtonwood in the 1980s. And mist-shrouded suburban detachment is given to similar misapprehensions. Such as, anyone greeting me in the woods must be dangerous; anyone walking alongside our avenue must be up to no good. The mosses hold all this, soak it in like the clinging damp fog. They have done for many centuries. We live on the moss, we live like the moss. Maybe.

Reverend John and The Church of Start Shopping

Accessibly situated near the tyre-burning circus of M62 J12, it’s like a cathedral, The Trafford Centre, with its terrific glass domes and marble pillars. So on my visit there today I decided to be Reverend John of The Church of Start Shopping.

At the entrance I sought to make a sign of water to acknowledge my retail baptism. I used the cold tap in the lavish loos, and remembered my initiation into shopping at my mother’s side when Tescos was just a well-stocked corner store, and through the requests of male family members to run for tobacco or a newspaper. I recalled my early forays into town to shop on my own, then as now being drawn solely to bookshops and record stores, and remembering how I’ve always used mail order, way before the internet (largely because of my obscure interests requiring specialist suppliers), I contemplated how little my shopping habits have changed.

I looked for a service sheet to guide me through the coming activity and at a cheerful information point I soon found a copy of Your Guide - Trafford Centre Always Ahead (sponsored by Coca-Cola). Inside it is a Shopping Guide by Category, listing probably 450 stores from Audio to Toys and Games, from Apple to Zara. This helpfully identified the store’s position in a zone on the fold-out map which proved to be more difficult to use, the sheer scale of the Trafford Centre hardly transferable into diagrammatic form. But it did help me orientate myself, find out where Waterstones and HMV were, and introduced me to the Trafford Centre’s Holy Trinity - three flagship stores connected by two luscious avenues, to and from which all the other stores flow: Debenhams, John Lewis and Selfridges.

I saw devoted people, busily keeping their part of the operation going. Shop staff in roles like vergers, arranging window displays, checking stock: in the entrance to M&S a woman was dusting down a female display model, preening her, making small adjustments to her outfit, with great attention to detail. Trafford Centre employees in identifiable red jackets, in roles like sidespeople, giving out information, handling questions, and covertly acting as security cover. And deputy managers in roles like churchwardens, guiding junior staff in their tasks, giving time and limited advice to visiting salespeople. On a settee in Waterstones a staff member and a salesman agreed to resume their conversation in a fortnight, once the new manager was back from his break and he’d advised his staff what his buying policy was going to be this year.

The music - in most stores was inoffensive and soft; I noticed that some were playing blues which although it was of the easy-listening variety, hinted at a darker, more painful subcurrent in the activity in which we - shoppers and staff - were all sharing.

As in any act of worship the prayers spoken from the front of the stores bore, I suspect, only partial resemblance to those in the hearts of the shopping congregation.

Retailers prayer

Our shopper
who art in Trafford
Read and remember our name.
Your credit comes,
Your will be won
over by our heavenly offers.
Give us today your hard-earned bread
And forgive us our promotional exaggerations
As we forgive those other stores who exaggerate promotionally against us.
Let us lead you into temptation,
For yours is the income,
the hope and the store card
Forever and ever;
Pay here.

Shoppers prayer

Our Trafford
which art near Salford
Help me get a parking space out of the rain.
Your doors are open, my will is one
with yours: to buy things here today.
Give us this day the things we need
or - forgive us - think we need
as we’ve seen others buying them before us.
You will lead us into temptation
But let ours be the wisdom, the restraint and the bank balance
Now and forever;
Discounts.

The Trafford Centre Prayer Room is empty when I go in, but outside in the mall I think that the retail workers and the shoppers will be praying on a deeper level, all manner of things pertaining to their day’s tasks and relationships with those they are with - and without.

The central ritual of the Trafford Centre experience, is The Purchase. Here, the shopper experiences elements of the Communion: the polite queue to reach the sacred service point, the holding out of hands (exchange of goods) and the giving of a receipt to affirm the validity of the purchase. Various complexities serve to elaborate and elongate the experience: the paying-by-card subritual, the still-peripheral but growing tendency by retailer or customer to question the need for the goods to be removed in a disposable carrier bag.

Acts of worship end with a blessing and words of dismissal. In shopping, the blessing is perhaps received at point of purchase, the hope of promised satisfaction via the newly-bought goods (it may not last till the goods’ arrival home, as by then a new urge for some other thing may have taken over). As for words of dismissal, The Trafford Centre will not utter them. In fact, The Trafford Centre does very little to assist any shopper to find their way out of the Cathedral. Exits are barely marked; clocks or other reminders of outside commitments are a minimum. Only out in the Car Park are dismissals ordered, via the largest EXIT signs I think I've ever seen (to match the scale of the parking).

The Trafford Centre doesn’t want to dismiss you... unless, I suspect, you decide to linger too long without purchasing anything, or continue scribbling what look like satirical versions of The Lord's Prayer in a small tatty notebook whilst sat on a bench outside Ax-Paris.

[Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping is here]

The M60: What kind of death do you fear?

The M62 was severed some time ago by a Statutory Instrument, which gave the go-ahead for the Manchester Orbital motorway to take its route and overwrite its name for the north-west splice connecting Worsley with Whitefield. Thus on one of my longest alongside-motorway routes, today, I've not been walking the M62 at all. I've been walking the M60. Anti-clockwise, Whitefield to Worsley.

I've been passing beneath landmark buildings: Pilkington's Tiles near J16 Clifton Junction, St Mark's Church Worsley overlooking J13. Discovering more abandoned roads, now given over to nature, in particular the cobblestoned Philips Park Road on the north side of the motorway near Whitefield - the opposite side to the rest of Philips Park. Discovering the messy, muddy (in the rain today) post-industrial scrubland in a triangle bounded by the motorway, the River Irwell, and a derelict Clifton - Radcliffe railway line, approaching Pilkingtons near J16 Clifton Junction. Enjoying the unanticipated beauty and industrial-heritage interest of Worsley. I've found paths through the cemeteries of Swinton and removed my damp baseball hat on the A6 Manchester Road as a funeral cortege passed by. And I've felt shocked by a reminder of my closeness to home: emerging from a footpath by Wardley Hall onto the A580 East Lancs Road... the road near which, some twenty-or-so miles westwards, is my home.

On a day when to get the map out too often would risk it becoming quickly void by rain damage, it's still easy to keep your bearings when you're trying to follow the motorway. You use your ears; the thrum and throb of hundreds of powerful engines thundering around the six-lane circuit of Manchester - it's loud and it's constant and, if you want to use that road as a guide to your peregrinations through the northern outlands of this great city then all you need do is stay close to the noise it makes. Probably the loudest and most exposed part of the journey was on the footbridge where Philips Park Road ends and the westbound traffic nears Junction 16. Whenever a cluster of articulated lorries passed beneath this not-too-high bridge over a fast and busy stretch of road, their high sides sending all sorts of currents eddying violently through the air, the bridge shook.

I was safe up there, of course, as safe as the hundreds of people per minute flashing past beneath, seemingly unaware of how vulnerable they all look to mortal error at such massively high speeds. It got me thinking, my mediation at Junction 16, What kind of death do you fear?

What kind of death do you fear?
A plummeting death, falling helpless to a messy tarmacked end?
A heart-attack death, the shocks of life - absorbed successfully for so long - suddenly taking you out?
A death by terrifying collision?

What kind of death do you fear?
Perhaps a death by stasis - a gradual slowing like in a motorway tailback, a perpetual helpless waiting?
Perhaps a death by motion - becoming trapped in an orbit of speed and light, unable to step off?

What kind of death do you fear?
One which exposes your weaknesses, that reveals your unfitness for the fast lane?
One which exposes your complacency, that judges your devotion to the central lane?
One which exposes your impotence, forever held in the slow lane?

A death by dangerous living?
A death by angry reaction?
A death by negligence?
A death by drifting asleep?
What kind of death do you fear?

Wythenshawe: people should live like this

A delight to spend the afternoon in Wythenshawe with Doreen Massey, one of our foremost geographers of space, place and social relations. Doreen has written in some depth (and from an autobiographical perspective) about living in Wythenshawe (in The Unknown City, Contesting Architecture and Social Space) and we literally retrod some of the ground covered in that seminal essay - the public spaces (Marketplace, civic forum, airport approaches, Wythenshawe Hall) and the private places (by an act of gracious coincidence, Doreen spotting an old neighbour and family friend on the road, whose home we ended up in for tea and ham and conversation, just across the road from the house where Doreen spent her childhood years).

A delight to see Wythenshawe on a sunny autumn afternoon. Back in the 1920s, Manchester council's William Jackson and Ernest Simon championed the cause of creating a garden city out in the 'healthy, non-polluted air' of the Wythenshawe Hall estate, south of the Mersey, to which the overcrowded so-called 'cave-dwellers' of Manchester's slums could be relocated. It was a political struggle which thankfully they won and over 100,000 people were rehoused in a green and spacious area which the garden city planner Barry Parker 'dreamt of .. as the ultimate in garden cities and .. regarded .. as his masterpiece' [source]. It's still as beautiful today, the green and autumn gold vista of the public fields of Wythenshawe Park being echoed down every tidy tree-lined avenue (just as, I imagine, the boulevards of the Liverpool estates which I know will now be gorgeous with falling leaves).

People should live like this. People who live decent, modest, lives, working in support of their families and communities and unseen strangers who benefit from their duties. Many Wythenshawe people are employed as staff at Manchester Airport, which literally abuts the housing estate, so those unseen strangers are likely to be from all around the globe. Yet Jackson and Simon found that much of north Cheshire disagreed that Manchester's people ought to be able to live like that. They wanted the unseen stranger with whom their lives connected, to remain unseen. Doreen's essay records the statistic that 82 percent of the parishioners wanted to resist the advances of Manchester into their area; 'yet nearly half of them worked [in Manchester]'.

I have learned a great deal from Doreen's work about how to 'read' places. I've not opened many books on this journey but I've been learning how to open up places, in all their complexity, in their interaction with what Doreen has called 'that shifting, complex, microspatiality of individual yet interconnected lives ... set within a broader social history.' Today in conversation some underlying ethics emerged. We shared our common passion for affirming the enormous worth of ordinary people, the white working class who are so often reviled by the loud and powerful, a majority whose rich, rich stories are generally hidden from view. Like the story of Wythenshawe. We also shared the necessity and spoke about the complexities involved in challenging injustices done to such as these, by outsiders and by insiders too (those whose behaviour damages their own neighbourhood, those whose denial of any injustices done to them makes protest impossible).

We celebrated heroes - like the Chartists and co-operative pioneers whose hidden histories I followed through Halifax and Rochdale, like the liberation theologians of 1970s and 80s Central America, like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela today. And we did a lot of this whilst sitting in the light, spacious and welcoming cafe in the new Wythenshawe Forum, a lovely civic space where leisure facilities, a library and adult education cente and a health centre converge in a cheerful open hall. It's as good a civic space as I've seen on my journey (or anywhere, for that matter) and many people of Wythenshawe were in there enjoying it this afternoon. Which is very welcome; because of course, the people of Wythenshawe should live like this.

Swimming in still waters

And I was woke up just before dawn
By an old man crying in the rain.
He was drunk and he was lonely
And as he passed by he sang a hymn.
And as I lay there listening,
Well I almost joined him in that song...
But instead I just held my peace,
And waited 'till that old man moved along.

Then later on that day about
A quarter mile out of town,
I found his body hanging in
A grove of pines, swaying in the wind.
And as he swang that rope sang another hymn
To Jesus,
And this time though I don't know why,
I somehow felt inclined to sing along.

I guess it's cause, still waters run,
Run deep in me
'Cause I got this crazy way...
crazy way I'm swimming in still waters.

With my good friend Adrian, seeing Jim White at the Night and Day tonight. Bringing together so many strands of the journey so far.

Spiralling around Strangeways

Two hundred and thirty four years ago today, astronomer Charles Messier discovered the Whirlpool Galaxy. Alex brought space photos and diagrams with him to introduce this astral phenomenon to me, John and Patricia as we met this morning under the Victoria statue at Piccadilly. If you're a stargazer you may know that the Whirlpool Galaxy, 23 million light-years away from Piccadilly Gardens, is one of the most famous spiral galaxies in the sky. To honour Messier's discovery and in homage to the jewel of the constellation Canes Venatici we decided we must walk a spiralling route from under the old Queen, to see what the Manchester Whirlpool Galaxy might reveal.

So we span up through the Northern Quarter, past grubby familiar and loved sites such as The Band on the Wall, and down less known paths, alleyways which revealed little hidden histories, once vibrant buildings now bricked up in attempts to restrain their inner ghosts, then out onto the engine-loud open plain of Great Ancoats Street, skirting Victoria and onto Cheetham Hill Road, before we began to spiral inwards again.

Our route took us over the Irwell and through the industrial backlands of that corner of Salford around which the river bends, meaning that we crossed it again at the end of our journey, on Bridge Street under the glass-sided glory which is the new Manchester Civil Justice Centre, a beautiful building.

And that became our theme, spinning around centres of justice. Starting at the Crown Queen's statue, ending at the new jewel in the region's Crown law system; and, before the Irwell crossing, (indeed, before the crossing of Great Ducie Street) we did a sunwise circuit of Strangeways. As we did this we noticed:
- the old prison entrance on Southall Street, a white stone sculpted archway and a little door with a window for passers-by or anxious visitors to look into;
- fantastically high walls, repeatedly worked on but in parts still very old;
- the new prison entrance, a flat, inpenetrable solid steel gate, with the windows of the security office raised high above street level, establishing a hierarchy of visibility/viability between prison staff and external onlookers;
- signs all along the surrounding streets warning of CCTV recording and regular patrols;
- the HQ of Salford Van Hire and many orange-liveried vehicles on the road behind the prison;
- trees growing out of high parts of the prison walls;
- graffiti on a workshop door opposite the prison announcing, FREE!
- prison visiting terms and conditions printed on large blue boards at the entrance - in eight languages;
- a patrol van circling Strangeways in the anti-sunwise direction, risking sending the galaxy into chaotic counter-spin and giving the driver a good face-on look at us on our slow, photographic and conversational sightseeing tour of the periphery.
- a sign on Sherbourne Street (between two prison wings): WARNING, CAR THIEVES OPERATE IN THIS AREA.

Our circuit of Strangeways was really just an eddy in our wider whirlpool galaxy but it was the centrepiece of the walk. We left the area with an unexpected image in our minds. We discovered that Strangeways is surrounded by discarded shoes. Mostly trainers - in gutters, strung together in classic urban fashion and slung over streetlamps, lining the side of a row of shops. In one poignant case we noted a tiny child's shoe poking from beneath the wheel of a massive Salford Van Hire vehicle.

Seeing some old shoes on a pavement on Great Ducie Street, shoved into a shoebox inside a ripped-open carrier bag, we began to sense what was happening here, all this footwear abandonment outside HMP Manchester. The part of Great Ducie Street parallel to the prison contains a number of discount clothing and shoe shops. And there it was before our eyes, on a busy Saturday lunchtime: the sight of people purchasing new shoes and immediately ripping their old ones from their feet, on the street, so as to be able to go on their way wearing their new pair. Leaving the old ones behind.

"We are not animals, we are human beings," famously said the leader of the prisoners protesting against the miserable and overcrowded conditions in Strangeways in 1980. What does being human mean? At the eddying centre of our whirlpool galaxy, on the other side of the prison wall today it meant a festival of cheap abandonment and shoddy decadence.

Looking for ignition points

The Olympic sprinter Linford Christie provoked the title of Manchester's most striking piece of recent public art. It was reportedly inspired by Christie's claim that he always left the starting block on the "B of the bang". So Thomas Heatherwick's metallic explosion aims to suggest the primal energy surge which fires every progressive motion. Thoughtful commentators have noted how this might connect with Manchester's recent story of rigorous regeneration, which might be said to have been sparked by the ignition of the IRA bomb at the Arndale Centre in 1996. Yesterday the lady at the Sportcity Visitor Centre repeated a view that I've heard before, numerous times, from Mancunians: that terrible though it was, the bomb woke the city up. It fired an explosion of vital new beginnings. "And no-one was killed," she said.

Today Phil and I walked back into the centre - searching as we went for the epicentre, the B of the Bang which is Manchester. Our route was (perhaps deliberately) unpromising for such a quest. We started walking north through well-heeled suburbs (Alkrington Garden Village, Middleton), crossed the green estate lands of Alkrington Hall and through the forgotten footpaths of Alkrington Woods, went through a ghost-tunnel beneath the M60 (car wreck, ghoulish graffiti) into the suburbs of Higher Brackley, discovering the quaintly packaged Crab Village en-route. And then into places of inner-urban toil and struggle: Crumpsall, Cheetham Hill, Collyhurst, emerging in the centre via the redbrick viaduct garagelands and Traveller sites of Newtown / Victoria.

One thing which surprised me was the modesty of Manchester's memorialising the explosive event of 15 June 1996. We couldn't find anything except a small plaque on the wall of the Royal Exchange to note the events of that day (though I've since discovered that a pillar box that survived the blast, despite being only yards from the centre of the explosion, now carries a small brass plaque recording the bombing). It may have been different had there been fatalities, of course. Thankfully perhaps, even in this most commercial of cities, there was no great municipal urge to mourn the (temporary) loss of 50,000 square metres of retail space and 25,000 square metres of office space.

Interestingly perhaps the deadest place we visited, that with the least spark, was the epicentre of the IRA bomb. Standing on a balcony by M&S overlooking the entrance to the Arndale Centre we considered that for all the flows of people here the commercial flows suck money, power out of the city. The energies which shape these places emerge from corporate boardrooms elsewhere. We could have been anyplace, and we were, there. The B of the Bang of Manchester is not in its shopping malls.

Maybe the places through which we walked in to town had modest sparks of their own which ignited different movements in Manchester's life. In the middle of a green in Alkrington, a cluster of trees marks the head of an old mine shaft, indicating the beginnings of industry in the area, and the source of the wealth and employment of some of its past and present residents. Alkrington Hall (still privately occupied) indicates a different form of energy: the investment of seriously wealthy families in the area which (for better or worse) has helped shape the place's history. The M60 is an energy rush, sucking around its circuit thousands of busy travellers doing the business which fires the city's life. The inner urban areas crackle with human life, sometimes breaking-up as the forces of life collide in them, sometimes sparking creativity (Nobby Stiles and Les Dawson come from Collyhurst) or influential movements (Sylvia Pankhurst's name is being celebrated in a refurbished tower block on Dalton Street).

Today, after guzzling a generous lunch at a cafe in Collyhurst's modest shopping square we enjoyed the energy of a red stone sculpture on the hill behind, overlooking the towerblocks of the city centre, a broken 'cast' of a very large 'chocolate egg'. The locals call this place Red Bank and there is evidence that people often enjoy sitting here enjoying the sculpture, the view, and each other's company. And I bet that these hilltop soirees ignite a hundred small sparks - of light, love, ideas - in those who share them. Future Les Dawsons or Sylvia Pankhursts perhaps. Not quite the sort of spark which we set out looking for, but the sort of sparks which re-ignite a city's life, everyday. Modestly.