It rained and rained and rained
The average fall was well maintained
And when the tracks were simple bogs,
it started raining cats & dogs

After a drought of half an hour
We had a most refreshing shower,
And then most curious thing of all,
A gently rain began to fall!

Next day but one was fairly dry
Save for one deluge from the sky
Which wetted the party to the skin
And then, at last, the rain set in.

I have been into and through Manchester hundreds of times in my life. Until I moved to London and despite having never lived there, Manchester was my home city.



On the last occasion, I was paying a short visit over a weekend and found myself in the city's HI Hostel, on Potato Wharf in the docks. Manchester's docks grew strong on the flows of the Manchester Ship Canal which brought imports directly from the coast to the mills of Lancashire via the River Mersey and bypassing Liverpool. They are now however largely a mixture of office developments, industrial units and a smaller section of freight docks. The area where the hotel is is Salford Quays, already home to the Manchester radio station clusters ofGlobal Radio and Manchester Evening News owner Guardian Media Group ;neighbour to Manchester United and the extraordinary shattered globe of Daniel Liebskind's Imperial War Museum North. The next few years will see the BBC and ITV move into the Media City development, climaxing in the move of several national departments of the UK state broadcaster.

The hostel is also next door to the iconic Castlefield Basin, where the Bridgewater, Ashton and Rochdale Canals converged and which was playing host to the last ever D:Percussion festival in the city. Castlefield as an area and D:Percussion as a festival sum up Manchester as a city. A relic of the age where railway superceded water as a transport method, which became an urban heritage park and the home to the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. The rebirth which started in Castlefield swept through the city in the time of my visits to leave a unique hybrid of large Victorian warehouses and modern infrastructure. Even a large bomb by the IRA terrorist group just allowed the city to finish stages of its rebirth which had stumbled under a lack of funding or political organisation.

The festival itself was a direct response to the IRA bomb, a visceral scream of frustration and anger fed into the electronic equipment which had given the city its reputation for electronic music. The people of the city gathered unbidden in Castlefield on the occasion of the first festival to show that they were not scared to gather en masse. And now, 10 years later, the festival was being wound-up. And as it was free I made my way in.

I arrived when it was empty but by the time it had filled up, it was so busy that anyone leaving the site was not allowed back in and spent their moments in the many pubs dotted along Liverpool Road or just walking past the surreal sight of the MSIM tourists unaware of the festival next door. Walking from Castlefield into the shopping core of Deansgate, I pass the rectangular hulk and walled compound of ITV Granada in Quay Street.

The GMEX tram station is a misnomer. Twinned with Deansgate's train station, it is named after the former name of the exhibition centre below the complex. The centre began life as Manchester Central train station, an unusual example of joint-venture planning by competing rail stations before it lost its function but became the Greater Manchester Exhibition Centre, or GMEX. 2007 saw the semicircular lattice of the listed building become Manchester Central once more. Standing in its shadow, the semicircle has gained an extraordinarily tall aerial like structure from its right flank in the guise of the Beetham Tower - which is a mixture of hotel and residential space.

The centre of the city is also marked by the river Irwell, the boundary between the conjoined cities of Salford and Manchester. But the rivers and canals rise and fall from view in a visible expression of the incoherant attitude to the river in the city. When I met my companions at Deansgate Locks, the water was once more evident under our feet but only as a relish rather than as a main meal.

The further North one walks, the more the rail heritage of the city takes over from the water. Salford Central, Salford Crescent and Deansgate mark the path of goods away from the Ship Canal before one reaches the rail hubs at Piccadilly and Victoria which delineate the city centre. Just on the Manchester side of Salford Central is a unique museum - the People's History Museum, charting the history of the trade union movement from a canalside pumphouse of a suitably dark hue.

Deansgate road itself is marked by the goods warehouses of the Great Northern rail line - now a shopping complex - and the old Kendal Milnes department store, now a House of Fraser.

In much more of a way than Piccadilly, Victoria station sees the conjunction of rail and water as the station and its conjoined leisure facility the MEN Arena sit above the river and across the road from the Strangeways prison and Boddingtons Brewery.

I have spent many happy hours in the arena, watching the successes and failures of the city's former basketball (Giants) and ice-hockey (Storm) teams but basketball is now represented by Magic in the Whalley Range area of the city and ice-hockey is now in the hands of the Phoenix.

But where is Manchester?

I ask this question because local government reforms have left the answer to the question obscure, to say the least. In a municipal sense, Manchester is the city under the control of Manchester City Council. Manchester Town Hall is on Albert Square, possibly the least changed square in the entire city but the core of activities in the city is arguably Deansgate or Market Street.

I would argue that Manchester is a metropolitan city like London, and I would argue that the area of Greater Manchester is actually Manchester in the same sense that areas outside of the twin cities of Westminster and the City of London are still considered to be London.

My argument for this thesis comes from the geographical presence of bodies which serve Manchester and those which are named after the city. Manchester United's Old Trafford stadium and its namesake Lancashire County Cricket Club are both in Trafford Borough, Manchester City's Eastlands stadium is within the City of Manchester area, local media are spread across Salford Quays and the City of Manchester. With the cost of property in central Manchester, the reborn ice-hockey team from the area set up in the Trafford town of Altrincham whilst still carrying a Manchester name.

I have been attending games at Old Trafford for a number of years. The setting is definitively post-industrial with the immediate surroundings being mostly industrial units and the Manchester Ship Canal. In the time I have been attending, the stands have grown to comprehensively overshadow the surrounding docks. When I first sat in the Stretford End, the voluminous green transmitter tower at the head of the World Trade Centre was still visible from my seat whilst the stadium has grown to the extent that it is now impossible to see anything other than the stadium from within.

Despite often clashing with London, I have my favourite corner of this city, my home for almost two years. I present my own little piece of Brixton here