Manchester Diaries
One
1.19.20
A frosty sunny morning in Chinley a village 30 minutes from Manchester in the Peak District where I am renting a cottage. Mostly its drizzly and chilly, today is brilliant and crisp, but the cottage is on the N side of the hill, so does not get sun this time of year. The view across the undulating landscape is green and pastoral, rock walls across fields, rebuilt with Euro funds, separates the different sheep. And this is sheep country. Stands of trees, all denuded now also dot the landscape. Nearby Chapel en le Frith was founded in the 12th century by foresters. They would be hard pressed today.
This is former mill country, there is a lot of water. Textile mills were common starting in the 17th century, whose power was the lively streams and rivers. Water power though could be unreliable, and as soon as the steam engine was perfected, it was replaced by coal. Dirty, ubiquitous and effective. This area was a powerhouse of production, rail lines were built, linking Liverpool to the interior, bringing cotton from the colonies into the textile mills, exporting millions of pounds of fabric back out, undermining textile production in India, and reinforcing the slave trade for labor in the west Indies. Interestingly, the slave museum in Liverpool concentrates on slavery in the US, nothing is said about slavery in the British colonies.
Last week I went to Cardiff for an orientation. Cardiff was once the largest coal exporting port in the world at the turn of the 20th century. The first check for $1 million was for Welsh coal, in Cardiff. High quality Welsh coal sustained industrialization and coal mining jobs. The Welsh had a vibrant steel industry and exported high quality slate and copper. Today of course, coal mining is a haunting nostalgia of more prosperous past times, times when villages were vibrant and there was working class solidarity. Cardiff itself, downtown, is dominated by giant indoor malls selling inexpensive global brands, the old shopping galleries of the late 18th and early 19th century barely holding on with cafes, beauty parlors, tattoo shops and some specialty higher end boutiques. The Welsh legislature is housed in a magnificent passive energy building on the port, with a soaring oak ceiling and slate floors. The Welsh have a very high representation by women, of which they are quite proud, and are angling for more power over their territory. Interestingly each nation in the UK has different degrees of autonomy, negotiated piece by piece with Westminster. There are only 3 million people in Wales and a gorgeous countryside of worn mountains and deep valleys and a great deal of archeological history from the Neolithic onward. Snowdonia is in Wales! Surely a place that must be explored if only because of the name. The Welsh have tremendous legends, enhanced of course by the extraordinary Welsh language with ‘Ch”’Dd’, ‘Ff’, ‘Ll’, ‘Ph’, ‘Rh’, ‘Th’ in addition to C, D,F,L P, R and T. Pronunciations are not intuitive (!), and the language has aspirations, exhalations to the letters, rolled r’s and is quite harsh. Snowdonia is a large national park and the only place in Britain where the Snowdon lily is found, it rains 176’ a year! But is habitat for polecats, feral goats and numbers of birds. It is supposed to have a spectacular coastline, a must visit, I think.
Grocery shopping in the semi-gentrified part of England is largely dominated by chain stores whose shelves seem to be rapidly taken over by prepared food of all types. It is not uncommon to see shopping carts with nearly only prepared foods – Indian food, Thai dishes, Chinese, Italian, probably even French but I did not see any. A veritable international smorgasbord in the shopping cart. Most vegetables are imported with a tiny section of local product (though not always), bread is largely industrial, and overall the selection is shaped by efficiencies in manufacturing, packaging and distribution. Tesco, Aldo, Morrisons, big chain markets. At the other end of the spectrum there are, dotted about, a few high-end stores catering to a select market looking for locally grown, organic, or a nice selection of fruits, vegetables and specialty items like bulk herbs and spices, cheeses, fish, crackers, fresh pasta. These stores are small owner operated and open only a few days a week. Chinley itself has a butcher shop owned and operated by a young woman who also raises and butchers her lamb. She makes sausage and carries local chickens and eggs, as well as some seasonal produce: leeks, potatoes and carrots this time of year. She goes to the regional livestock markets to buy her beef and pork. She is open 3 days a week and reopened her grandfather’s original shop only 7 years ago. Chinley also has a postoffice/cheese shop that sells regionally roasted coffee (High Peak Roasters), High Peak chocolat (which is now recovering from Christmas sales, so the stock is low), a few cards, local wines and gins. It is a real hub for the village.
Its hard to discern what the effects of Brexit will be in this region. Sheep growing seems to be an important activity, and the EU has provided ecological and historical restoration funds to the growers. It seems that bird populations have started to recover and the walls are being rebuilt among other activities. Highland growers still struggle to make a living. But in a country with enormous land concentration, one suspects that many of the growers are tenants which must not make the economics any easier. Half of England, according to a 2019 article in the Guardian, is owned by less than 1% of its population ~ 25,000 owners – typically members of the aristocracy and corporations. Many owners remain undeclared at the Land Registry, indicating ownership by aristocrats who have had the land in their families for centuries. And there is a handful of newly moneyed industrialists and City bankers within that, that own about 17% of England. Those who own homes, own only about 5% of the total.
There are, here and there, UK flags are flown, indicated pro-Brexit, and arguments about getting under the thumb of regulatory dominance of the EU are subtly inferred now and again. Mostly now, people are simply waiting to see what will happen, accepting the inevitability of change. In this area, even with the gentrified touches, secondhand shops dominate the High Streets, and the stuff is not from estates. Mostly not very good quality household goods, old clothes and books are sold. The other striking thing is the car traffic. From the upstairs bedroom looking out over the valley when it is dark, there are ribbons of car lights along the narrow country roads. Everyone has a car it seems and given the limited rail routes due to the proliferation of dotted houses all over, the car is essential. People do drive courteously by and large and respect the speed limits; of course the roads are not made for such traffic and in many places, only one car can proceed at a time. Still it makes for maddening driving especially when one is not accustomed to driving on the left. Squeaking by time and time again, high adrenalin. Very little evidence of electrification of cars, other than a Tesla now and then.
The rail system seems still a bit chaotic despite a couple of decades of privatization. The commuter lines, like Sheffield to Manchester or Liverpool, are 2-3 car diesel trains that strain up hills, old upholstery that is spotted and worn and poorly cleaned carriages. These contrast with the sleek electric bullet train that zooms down to London, with several first class cars. And the commuter trains are full, standing room only at rush hour. Public transportation is not cheap, a train ride into Manchester can be up to ~ $12.00. Of course there are commuter passes, senior cards etc. . . but even in town bus tickets are pretty high. Rail is easily disrupted causing huge delays and crowds on the quai, jockeying for position, anxiously waiting to get home, all enhanced by the darkness of very short days this time of year. It is dark by 5 pm, dusk by 4:30. And the sun rises around 8, though this morning the dawn’s first light was about 7:15.
Isiah Berlin wrote: History does not unfold like machinery. There are many forces at play in shaping history, and no one of them is ‘ultimately responsible for everything. Beware our certainties because history seeks no goal.
Maybe Brexit will offer a step toward the unraveling of a globalization that Gayatri Spivak (2003) describes as the imposition of the same system of exchange everywhere. The globe is on our computers, no one lives there. We need, as he writes, the “planet to overwrite the globe.” I suspect that for England and the UK, a first step would have to be land reform.
