The Long Trip Home: Manchester, England Via Bury

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Manchester, England Via Bury
by Mark Byers

Bury’s bus station is an unattractive place. I think I’d sooner spend my time in purgatory. I can’t single it out as the most unattractive station in the northwest of England either, because in fact they’re all pretty similar. The same hopscotch of greasy chewing gum on the floor, the same rancid unidentifiable smells and the same pimple-faced teenagers eyeing you as if you were about to burn down their house. The landlord of the bed and breakfast where I stayed told me that there had been attempts to rid these loitering youngsters from the station by playing
classical music through the tannoy system -- a novel idea and one which quite clearly indicated that the council preferred pensioners to be hanging round smoking dope and vandalizing the benches ("Margaret woz ere wiv Archibald listnin 2 beethovens fifth in C minor").

Smiling at the thought of granny graffiti, I made my way to the tram platform which was below the rest of the station and accessible via a whirring escalator.
Bury is pretty proud of the Metrolink. I had no idea why this was, until I read in my guide that the Metrolink is "a revolutionary concept in the light rail genus" and realized my mistake.

Before getting on the tram, I was obliged to buy a ticket -- not from a nice lady behind a counter, but from a contrary and vengeful machine. If you say I’m
exaggerating, you might like to think back to the episodes of your life when a "time-saving" device has either grievously injured you, caused you public embarrassment, lowered your self esteem or, perhaps the worst, strewn liquidated food around your home without even the common courtesy of calling it modern
art. The machine clearly didn’t wish me to go to Manchester center, and suggested instead I go to various other places around the northern hemisphere. This continued for a number of minutes. After a while, I stopped sobbing and rose from my knees with the conviction of just getting a ticket to wherever the hell it wanted...Cornbrook. Wonderful.

In an odd way though, I came to like the tram. I enjoyed the way it rolled and shuddered when we passed the gentlest corners, the way the brakes squealed like
stuck pigs when we came to a stop and the way the whooshing noises reminded me of the crappy but entertaining sci-fi channels on TV. Despite the insistence of my ticket, I was making my way to the city center of Manchester. Once the
industrial home of paper manufacturing, cotton spinning and printing, the city has recently undergone a major image change and has now become popular with the young professionals, students and partygoers of the Northwest.

The machine clearly didn’t wish me to go to Manchester center, and suggested instead I go to various other places around the northern hemisphere. This continued for a number of minutes.

I got off the tram at Victoria Station and was glad to move away from the befuddled tramp who had sat beside me and plagued the latter part of my journey with baffling stories ("There’s are man, ye know, he talks to me through the walls, he does, he’s in between he is he’s there and Jack stole me pants").

Victoria Station is a wonderfully quaint station, big but filled with the charm of many decades worth of journeys. I was surprised to see the entrance to the Manchester Evening News Arena pop its head through one side of the station; plate glass and aluminum defining the passage into its interior. The MEN Arena, as it is known around here, is one of those mammoth concert venues, the kind where if you sit on the back row, the band are invisible to the naked eye and the music sounds as if it originated from a tin can.

Outside the imposing entrance to the station, the sun laid its soothing hand upon my head. I was delighted to see one of the few remaining cobbled roads in any
of the English city centers. Impractical and noisy as they are, difficult to brake on and even harder to mend, I still love their Englishness. Forget the cup of tea -- the cobbled road is the English institution. I stepped into the road and crossed, resisting the temptation of a theatrical skipping across it, Wizard of Oz-style.

I walked happily in the unexpected sunshine (I was told that Manchester saw sunshine only on the weather forecasts for other parts of the country) to the
"Millennium Quarter," where a large group of teenagers contented themselves with listening to music on personal stereos and falling awkwardly off skateboards. This area was heavily affected by the IRA bombing of Manchester in 1996, but since then it has sprung back to life with enthusiasm.

Where the teenagers sat was the garden section of the quarter, slightly reminiscent of the Teletubbies’ garden: it rises and falls in height with big mounds
in some places and shallow troughs in others. Around the garden flowed a trickling stream along a marble bed. The "Millennium Quarter's" garden is pretty in its children’s television way and the architecture surrounding it is breathtaking. On the left, the Chetham’s School of Music presents its gothic grandeur over the scene, while just a little further up is Manchester Cathedral, almost 800 years old.

What I love about this place is that opposite these two very old, imposing buildings is the URBIS centre, a hyper-modern museum. Now I know that modern architecture very often has the effect of making you prick up you nose and jerk your mouth in disgust, but URBIS is different. Yes, it’s one hundred feet high and
shaped like a ship; yes it’s made completely of glass, but it makes no excuses for it. It realizes it looks like Winston Churchill at a rave or Satan in a church congregation, but it doesn’t care.

By this time, clouds thick as blankets had formed above my head, so I walked briskly to the Printworks Complex and escaped the first sheets of rain. The Printworks is a pretty impressive place -- it took £150 million to turn this former, well, print works, into the new, trendy entertainment complex of today.

I am reliably informed by a "you are probably here or we could be joking" type map on the ground floor that there are 36 cafes in this place, 16 restaurants and a huge cinema. Not only is there a cinema but one of the screens in it, the map boasts, is 26 meters high and 23 meters wide. This sounds fairly impressive I have to admit, but just imagine sitting on the front row. Ouch.

The rain still pelted on the pavement outside, so I decided to find a relatively inexpensive café type place and have a warm drink until the weather improved. In my ignorance I hadn’t realized that there were neither "inexpensive" things to eat in here, nor simple "hot drinks." It’s the kind of place where your bill comes with page numbers and an index and where, if a drink appears too simple, it is livened up by being served in the Holy Grail or possibly a unicorn’s horn.

Having found a small bar which was kind enough to serve coffee in the day time, I sat at a small table next to the window and looked into the rain. Figures strode stiffly across the square outside. Passing by were business men in Versace suits, old people with sticks, and buskers with sopping hair and tired guitars. It reminded me again of the mixed identity and appearance of this city and how it all seemed to work, unlike so many other cities where the ancient and modern seem locked in grim battle on the city’s streets.

The only thought to sadden me was that I had to go back to Bury. I had to face the drunken tramps and the scorn of those wannabe policemen and women: the ticket inspectors.

I found some inspiration, while thinking about how to tackle these people, next to my cup of coffee. Scrawled into the surface of the table were the words: "Piss off!" Perfect.