Dominic Kirkham writes about the past and present of an historic area of Manchester.
In 1866 a cattle plague swept through Cheshire which not only killed animals in their tens of thousands but ruined my great-grandfather’s livelihood. So he did what innumerable people before and after him have done – moved to the nearest big city, Manchester, with the dream of a better life. From country squire to city squatter, he settled in the then booming suburb of the industrial workshop of the world, Gorton.
From being flat featureless farmland, Gorton had rapidly become a manufacturer’s paradise of cheap open spaces and low rates – ideal for the engineering workshops that sprung up by the dozen. Here manufacturers could dream up and create world-changing machines, like locomotives. Gorton’s reputation attracted people from far and wide. It certainly attracted Charles Frederick Beyer, a talented mechanical draughtsman from Dresden. In 1851 he entered into partnership with a local engineer, Richard Peacock, to create one of the most innovative locomotive workshops in the country, Beyer-Peacock. Their products were sent across the globe.
Just down the road – or rather, lane – was another, very different place of dreams, Gorton Monastery. The vastly ornate edifice of its church would express the Gothic ideals not only of its famous designer, Edward Pugin, but of a revitalised Roman Catholicism that was then sweeping through the country. In 1850 the Pope had restored the Catholic hierarchy and Cardinal Newman dreamed of a ‘Second Spring’ of the old faith of England as innumerable zealous missionaries, like the Franciscan friars, spread among the urban working class poor with their promises of a better life to come. To enter through the imposing monastery portico was to be transported into an incense-laden world of fantasy and faith: not just an opiate for the people but ‘the heart of a heartless world’, as Marx also wrote.
For those who couldn’t wait for dreams of a better world to come, there was temporal respite nearby in Belle Vue Zoological Gardens. Opened in 1836, it became the biggest and most popular entertainment park in the country. For 140 years it provided something for everyone – a place of recreation and fantasy. Somehow, everyone in Gorton has a happy memory of it. For my parents, the chance of an evening’s ballroom dancing in the grand Elizabethan Suite was the highlight of their week.
Further up Hyde Road, an enterprising local manufacturer, Robert Grimshaw, built himself a country residence in 1796 called Gorton House. His dream was of a great power loom factory – one of the first of its kind – built in the centre of Manchester that would produce cloth in a revolutionary new automated way. Sadly, his factory was burnt down, probably by impoverished and resentful hand loom weavers, and, being bankrupted, his house sold. Around his house a great reservoir system was built to supply fresh water to the Manchester people and then, alongside it, Debdale Park was created. Like Belle Vue this became a much loved recreational place and treasured open space. I remember my father saying how he would go there on a Sunday afternoon with his father in 1910, while on holiday from India, to listen to the band.
Both my father and grandfather were engineers from Gorton – he once lamented that I had not become an engineer, a proper job for a man. I have an old photo of my grandfather as Chief Engineer of the Bengal Railways with a young Indian apprentice standing at his side who had come to learn how to run an engineering workshop. His name was Lal Tata and he dreamed of making steel in India. People laughed at his audacity, but now the Tata manufacturing dynasty, which he helped to found, is making cars in Britain. How things change!
That’s how it is with dreams – you never quite know how they will turn out. Belle Vue closed in 1977 to great local regret, by which time Beyer-Peacock’s rail works had also closed, transformed into a nondescript industrial estate. I have my car serviced at a garage there, in the shadow of the still imposing locomotive work shed, testament to a lost world. Soon the Franciscan monastery would also be abandoned. The dreams of the past seemed to have evaporated to leave an empty, poorer world.
Nevertheless, today the people of Gorton continue to dream, building on the dreams of others before them, which are far from forgotten. In 1996 local people formed the Gorton Monastery Trust to rescue the building that had been badly vandalised. Two decades and millions of pounds later, they have achieved a magnificent restoration. It is now a nationally acclaimed event centre and ranked a world heritage site, up there with the Taj Mahal.
The Friends of Debdale Park dream of a new Belle Vue, a park where there will be something for everyone, a place of recreation and escape. And in 2013 they set up a registered charity to restore Gorton House, which was also sadly decaying. We – that is the Friends of the Park, of which I am the secretary – have been trying to raise the £1.5m needed to restore to life this historic building as a community facility. Though derelict in itself it is surrounded by projects run by the Friends that are very much alive: today volunteers at the Eco Centre work on creating new raised beds, also part of the training and therapeutic courses for local people. In the old barn, just next to the house, the Cycling for Health group meet for their weekly ride. Just across the courtyard is the Hammer and Nails woodwork project for adults with learning difficulties and special needs.
These are just a few of the many voluntary projects that are running in Debdale Park, restoring to life what council budgetary restraint would curtail. We want there to be something for everyone and they help to explain why last year we won the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service. But, as I stand talking to the manager of the new nursery about the prospects for further development, there is always the uncertainty of future funding, if there will be support from the council, whether the projects will be sustainable. The ghost of uncertainty constantly haunts all such social projects like ours.
But I am not perturbed. I, like many others, draw strength from ghosts of ages and generations past, local people who had their roots in this area and with whose heritage we are now entrusted: their heritage, our heritage and the heritage of future generations. It is perhaps no coincidence that the year the grounds of the park were taken into public ownership, 1851, was also the year of the Great Exhibition when Victorian industrialism was at its most confident.
The Great Exhibition epitomised the inventive and industrious spirit of the nation. But it also illuminated the division in society between the beneficiaries of progress and its casualties – a division searingly revealed by Friedrich Engels in his study of The Condition of the Working Class, written of the Ancoats suburb just a few miles from where I stand; where the mills made cotton for the world and unseemly profits for their owners and the workers were worked to death, then thrown in their thousands into the unmarked charnel pits of nearby ‘Angel Meadow’.
Such was the nature of Gorton’s proud industrial past as the workshop of the world, of the city which Benjamin Disraeli (in his novel Coningsby) had described ‘as great a human exploit as Athens’, yet its people’s lives were often touched by tragedy: technological progress / personal tragedy – the two so often seemed to be intertwined for the rich and for the poor. We tend to forget the tragedy which is so often the cost of progress.
Today Gorton’s greatness is past. It is now amongst the most deprived wards in the country with some of the worst health statistics. It seems as if the benefits of progress have passed it by. Which is why I think these memories of the past, these ghosts of history are important today as part of our heritage. We are reminded by them that progress often comes at the price of human misery, but not inevitably so. Gorton House has decayed, like the area its history reflected, but the hope of restoration lives on. We too can create a better community and world by our attitude and effort, as the Rochdale Pioneers of the co-operative movement thought and did.
It is why I think that the Park is more than just a pleasant green oasis. Though this is important, it is also important that this is a place where people can come together in a different way; where different values are at work and revered. Where there is something for everyone’s benefit and all can experience that there is more to progress than greed and the pursuit of private profit. I would like to think it is itself a ghostly semblance of that primal dream of an earthly paradise named Eden, where everything is good for everyone.
Dominic Kirkham is the Secretary to The Friends of Debdale Park. SOF is publishing his book From Monk to Modernity: The Challenge of Modern Thinking and it will be launched at the annual SOF Conference in July.