How Manchester city has changed since ‘The Manchester Man’

Dear readers — In 1876, Isabella Banks published her magnum opus 'The Manchester Man', a novel which has been variably described by the frequenters of Good Reads as "a lost classic", "a lovely Manchester read", and "not a great book" but "charming in its badness." Telling the story of Jabez Clegg - the eponymous Manchester man - it paints a strikingly honest picture of the city in the 19th century, drawing regularly from true accounts and historic details.

But how does this picture of Manchester compare with the Manchester we know today? In this edition, urban planner and regular Mill contributor David Rudlin investigates the key sites of the novel, exploring the ways in which Manchester's streets have changed over the last 150 years - for better and for worse. That's after the briefing.

Your briefing 

🏨 The Greater Manchester Immigration Aid Unit have published a report about the experiences of children in asylum hotels run by the Home Office. Many of the children who participated in interviews for the report were based in local hotels, and many reported feeling isolated, lonely, unsafe and some reported experiencing suicidal ideation. In a joint letter that will be sent to secretary of state Yvette Cooper, the children wrote: “These experiences have made the UK feel like an unsafe place for us. We left everything behind, our families and home countries, hoping to find safety. We ask you to hear us, acknowledge what we have been through, and change this system – it’s terrible. We don’t want the young people who come after us to go through what we have gone through.”

🚣 Northern Group is preparing to submit a planning application to develop 200 apartments along the shore of the much-loved Levenshulme Secret Lake — not exactly a secret but a bit tricky to find (those who know, know). The property developer says the scheme will be 50% affordable and say they recognise the lake is a valued public space and that they “want to make it safer and more accessible for future users”. 

📔 Teachers at Moorside Primary School are on an eight day strike over an increase in violent student behaviour. Jac Casson, member of the NASUWT union, said teachers were sworn at, punched, kicked and had their classrooms trashed, blaming a lack of leadership: "No school can guarantee staff will not be assaulted but the risk can be managed - that has not been done this year."

👮 Greater Manchester Police have charged a 45-year-old man in connection with fraud offences and malpractice at Bolton Council. A force spokesperson confirmed Richard Shaw of Harrier Close was arrested in connection with offences committed between February 2015 and April 2023 and said the local authority had assisted closely in the process.

🎶 The Manchester Music Mooch is a new free-to-use app that takes users on a walking trail around Manchester city centre, offering little insights into Manchester’s grassroots music scene as you go. Not based in Manchester? The website features everything that’s included in the app and more for those of you who are elsewhere. More here.

✏️ And finally, we're still on the search for parents in Manchester who's children are sitting the 11+ exam (or who have sat it). If you fit this description - please get in touch with us here.

There is a dramatic scene at the start of Isabella Banks’ 1876 novel The Manchester Man. A flood sweeps down the River Irk, threatening to inundate the properties on Hunts Bank (which stood where Victoria Station is now). A baby in a crib is being swept along by the rushing water, past Scotland Bridge (see map below), where it’s spotted by workers from the tannery on the river bank. Using long hooks, a tanner named Simon Clegg manages to rescue the child, who we learn a few pages later has been swept away from a hovel in Smedley Vale. 

The child was being raised by his grandmother, who perished in the flood, so Simon Clegg and his daughter Bess adopt the baby, proposing to christen him ‘Irk’ after the river from which he was rescued. However, the irascible Joshua Brookes – a clergyman at the Collegiate Church (now the Cathedral) – takes it upon himself to rename the baby Jabez at his christening. 

Next year will be the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Manchester Man. It charts the rise of Jabez Clegg from an orphaned child adopted by Simon and Bess, to a pupil at the charitable Bluecoat school (part of Chethams Hospital), his apprenticeship at a mill on Mosley Street and his mentorship by the affluent Ashton and Chadwick families living in grand houses on Oldham Street, eventually rising to become a partner in the Ashton/Chadwick business, a true self-made Manchester Man.      

I was given the novel by my sons: my illustrated copy is still inscribed to their dad ‘The Manchester Man’. It’s dated 1999 – they would have been five and ten years old at the time – meaning that the inscription is clearly a gentle dig by my wife at my obsession with Manchester. It might have been bought as a joke, but when I started to read the novel I was hooked. This is partly because it’s such a gripping tale, but also because it’s true that I’m a bit obsessed with the city, and the places and names in the novel were so familiar. I had drunk in the Jabez Clegg, (a legendary student bar on Oxford Road) and in the Joshua Brookes on Princess Street. I also knew all the places described: Moseley Street and Oldham Street, obviously, but also Market Street Lane, which was being improved at the time the book was written to become Market Street and Ardwick Green, then the heart of a fashionable suburb.

Then there was the Irk Valley. My first job was as Irk Valley Project Officer at the City Council, using government grants to clear derelict industrial sites and plant grass and trees. Part of my job was to go through the council’s old files on the sites, and I can remember coming across correspondence on copperplate letterheads from the companies that once operated the now derelict mills along the valley. In my first few weeks, the chair of the planning committee asked me to find out why there was an area called Scotland just north of Victoria Station. I see, online, that there is a theory that this was where sheep from Scotland were kept prior to being taken to market. But my research in the Local History Library suggested that a ‘scot’ was a toll and that there was once a tollgate on the bridge. This road is not particularly important today, but was once the main road out of Manchester to the north.  

I also knew Smedley Vale, with its small council estate encircled by railway viaducts. The Irk Valley was then littered with derelict mills and factories along with garages and scrap yards and an occasional hint (like an old school gate) of the community that once lived there. We know it now as a verdant corridor seen from above on the tram out of Victoria Station, but plans are underway for it to become the Northern Gateway, a new town in the Irk Valley, with 15,000 new homes, schools and facilities in seven new neighbourhoods together with a park along the Irk River. As Isabella Banks writes in The Manchester Man – the city is in the constant thrall of a “whirlwind of improvements”.  

The Manchester Man is not necessarily a great novel – critics complain that Jabez is just too good and his nemesis Laurence Aspinall too unremittingly bad. It doesn’t have the subtlety of Dickens or Trollope (although the latter greatly admired it). But to many Mancunians, the book is gripping because these are all real places and many of the characters, like the Reverend Joshua Brookes, Mrs Clowse the sweet shop owner and the school mistress Madam Broadbent, were real people.