David Wilkinson. All rights reserved.
There’s been a distinctly ‘straight’, masculine tone to the rhetoric of the Northern Powerhouse so far; all manufacturing, technology and transport, buoyed up with football analogies. Apart from giving a veneer of solidity to a still vague political conceit, what this tone has concealed is whether Manchester’s reputation as a centre of LGBT culture will have any role to play in the Powerhouse. It’s an unusual omission, given how central the city’s Gay Village was to its last round of economic reinvention in the 1990s and 2000s.
A long time ago I wrote a piece that looked at the role of the Village in Manchester’s market-led regeneration. I concentrated on a planned development in the Village called Origin. It was to be the usual glittering melange of mediocre luxury – offices, retail units, ‘boutique’ hotel plus apartments. Origin, it could be said, evoked what a satirical Facebook group has recently dubbed the ‘boring dystopia’ of neoliberal Britain. The fateful year was 2008; I finished the piece just as the financial crisis reached its peak, pulling the foundations out from under my conclusions.
