SWEET SPIRES: From the deprivations of “Coketown,” says Hunt, the modern metropolis emerged.
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Known as “Cottonopolis,” the “shock city” of the 19th century, Victorian-era Manchester, as Tristram Hunt demonstrates in this architectural/sociological saga, was a modern-day Babylon of sorts — or worse if you happened to be living there at the time. For members of the lower classes, jammed into “living” quarters with upward of dozens of other workers who’d come from England’s town-and-country regions to feed the beast that was the nascent modern city, this Babylon was also a Hell, shot through with all the attendant disease, horror, and misery.Hunt, a University of London history professor, plays up the Hell imagery, taking his cue from William Blake: “And was Jerusalem builded here/Among these dark Satanic mills?” But so does almost everyone else he quotes, from Carlyle to de Tocqueville, in describing what it was like to visit what may well have been the first modern industrial city. “In Manchester, it was always worse,” he relays with an Englishman’s characteristically grim austerity. And it would seem that from this city — “the ne plus ultra of the Industrial Revolution,” with its rivers clogged with excrement and the odd decomposing body, and crime so rampant as to fire the imagination of innumerable penny dreadfuls, plus factories “vomiting” their toxic plumes and changing the color of the horizon for miles around — no good could come. But for all Manchester’s reputations as a “new Hades,” the city was also a locus of new ideas of architecture and urban design that perhaps transcended, in their historical import, the catastrophic human suffering.
Gaskell and Dickens may have been the great chroniclers of the age, but it’s John Ruskin and Alfred Waterhouse, in this history, who best represent the era’s æsthetic ideals — the one in theory, the other in practice. As conurbations expanded and more and more cities were drawn into vast industrial networks, architecture began to take on the qualities of narrative. And as we learn here, this was often a narrative of antitheses: as the poor huddled in back alleys, begrimed with toxins from the day’s labors, civic treasures began to spring up in the sky.
Waterhouse’s design for Manchester’s Town Hall — a design offered up almost as civic logarithm, such is its intricacy — was intended to suggest that Manchester was hardly Coketown. As for Ruskin, Hunt reveals him as the great visionary of Victorian architecture, one whose sense of the marriage of form and function was displayed with an avant-gardist’s glee. To Ruskin, he says, “the sham of deceits and decorations” was anathema to architecture’s ideal of producing “a more beautiful and truthful edifice.” Hunt cites the “Nature of Gothic” chapter from Ruskin’s revolutionary The Stones of Venice — a reminder of a rich past and a directive toward the future — and his championing of Gothic style, a panacea for a Victorian England whose design landscape had previously been marred by the most threadbare utilitarianism, box after box of factories and lower-class living quarters that were more like shanty towns.
The fall of the Victorian city wasn’t as dramatic as Hunt’s subtitle implies — work reform and suburbia would triumph in the end. But Ruskin’s Gothic conceits were not to remain endemic: Boston’s own Back Bay is liberally distinguished by the Victorian era’s Gothic overflow, from Trinity Church to Arlington Street’s “Castle” armory. You walk about on a spring day and there is Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Manchester, everywhere you look.
