Atlantica - 01.02.2006, Page 43

“Well of course we are friendly and warm,”
joked Rafa. “We have to be. It’s cold here.”
for the newspaper without a ‘Luv’ or ‘Dahling.’ A bespectacled seller of
the Big Issue magazine was pleased to talk about his city. Another man
selling newspapers simply gave me one of his maps free when I asked
for directions.
“The people make the city,” said one nightclub owner I talked to. It
was a statement I heard often and it had nothing to do with Manchester’s
aspiring status to be thought of as a world-class city. The hospitality of
the north is well known.
“People are so stressed in the south,” said Rachel, a friend from south-
ern England who has been lured north by the cheaper cost of living and
the better pace of life. “In the north”, she says, “they have more time for
each other.” Perhaps that is why so many northerners who had drifted
south are now returning home.
Friendly it may be, but there is one thing that hasn’t changed – the
infamous north-south divide. (“Divide? It’s not a divide; it’s a ravine,”
joked another friend.) The English class structure, in which wealthier
upper-class people lived in fine estates in the south of the country while
the poorer working-class toiled in the factories and mines of the north, is
alive and kicking, if less blatant than it used to be. The broad vowels and
peculiar expressions of Mancunian speech can still set off some prejudice
about a person’s education. “The southerners think we have coal dust on
our faces,” complained Mark Rainey, a guide. And northern suspicions of
southern prejudice keeps the problem running both ways.
ICELANDAIR flies directly from Keflavík to Manchester two times a week,
starting 7 April 2006.
In 1937, George Orwell declared Manchester to be “the belly and guts
of the nation.” As the world’s great industrial metropolis, that was argu-
ably true, but now the city has a more aesthetic side.
“The bomb was absolutely shocking and it hit the heart of everybody
in Manchester, but that was the best thing that could ever have hap-
pened,” Sarah told me earnestly. “Everybody says that.”
But has the spirit of the city changed with its facelift? Stephen, yet
another friendly chap I met on my travels, said Manchester’s vibe used
to be more outwardly “‘rough and ready’,” and while things may be
different on the outside, he says the soul of the city is “fundamentally
the same.”
On my first day in Manchester, I took a trip up a temporary Ferris
wheel which was erected on Exchange Square to showcase the city to
fearless visitors. As I swayed precariously 60 meters above ground, I
found the recorded voice piped into my capsule gave the best summa-
tion of what I’d discovered here: “Welcome to Manchester,” it said. “The
confident capital of the world.”
The new glossy exterior covers what was always there – a hearty,
resilient population. It is this fact that makes the city so self-assured and
comfortable about its new up-and-coming status. Mancunians are happy
to wait for the rest of the world to catch on. a
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