The Literary Response to Moss Side, Manchester: Fact or (Genre) Fiction?

Abstract

Today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Greater Manchester is home to approximately two and a half million people. But in what sense ‘home’? Despite the postmodern discourses, both academic and popular, which have imbued the concept with provisionality, ‘home’ still bears powerful connotations of roots, rootedness and heritage (Marangoly George 1996). Home, in this archaic sense, is not where ‘you’ come from, or even where you were born, but where previous generations of your family come from: your parents, your grandparents and, quite possibly, your great-grandparents. Yet this is manifestly not the case for anyone whose home is Manchester. As Dave Haslam, author of Manchester, England (2000) sums up:

Unlike London, which was a thriving metropolis three hundred years ago, Manchester is a hybrid town, born all in a rush one hundred and fifty years ago, when those arriving for work in the fast-growing factories, workshops, warehouses and foundries included large numbers of Catholic Irish, as well as Scots, and Germans and East European Jews. These migrations have been replicated since, with incomers from the Caribbean in the 1950s and from the Asian sub-continent in the 1970s. (Haslam 2000: xi)