Divide and conquer

‘Don’t you just hate the way all this sales-speak has divvied up the city into Quarters - as if we lived in fucking Paris.’ The quote’s taken Penny Feeny’s Between Hope and Paradise, a short story in Naked City, an excellent book I picked up from Route’s stall at Manchester Literature Festival’s Independents Day.

It’s actually about Leeds, though the same could be said for Manchester, with the property developer-coined Green Quarter and - worse still - the Southern Quarter, which seems to incorporate anything that’s cool between the university and Portland Street. I spotted that one in Itchy Manchester, for your information.

Anyway, today BBC Manchester is reporting that the Museum of Science and Industry - or MOSI, to give it a cooler name - is getting a �54m revamp. MOSI, the Beeb says, will form part of a so-called ‘Museum Quarter’ in the city. So get out your OS maps and marker pens:

The museum quarter will stretch nearly a kilometre from the River Irwell to the Hilton tower.

Here’s MOSI director Ian Griffin with some more:

‘The newly-redeveloped MOSI would create a modern, environmentally sustainable museum while transforming an under-appreciated area of the city into a vibrant new quarter with its own distinct character.’

Which got me thinking about other areas of the city and what they might eventually become: Castlefield as the Quiet Quarter, Cathedral Gardens as the Kids’ Quarter, Chorlton as the Over-friendly Quarter and… well, leave a comment with your own suggestions.

9 Comments so far

Simple really. The laws of mathematics state that there can only be four quarters. Maybe we should be looking for eighths.

Great point - and scary that I didn’t think of it!

Anyway, if you applied your suggestion to the Midlands you could have the Severn Eighth…

Uh huh. I spotted this troubling trend some months back…
http://manchizzle.blogspot.com/2007/01/manc-lingo-southern-quarter.html

I think Sheffield was the first of the Northern cities to do this, with a ‘Creative Quarter’ started in the early eighties which then basically featured the Red Tape Studios and the Leadmill. SOrt of ambitious, but they’ve grown into it.
I think Leeds has seven quarters and growing. We exist in the Millennium Quarter which I guess loses relevance with every passing year (not to mention is probably the most mis-spelled name in the city centre).

Its interesting how a lot of other towns have caught on to the identikit way of trying to make town centres cool.

The likes of St Helens and Wigan now have ‘Cultural Quarters’ with er…a hairdresser and may be a photography studio

Don’t forget The Straight Village, which extends from The Moon Under Water to Knott Mill.

SOUTH fucking CENTRAL I kind you not!

Giving out extra N’s tonight………..

One day we might see the folly of our human condition and regress again to just call areas ‘over theres’ ‘near that thing’ ‘down by the mill’ oops to far, down by the redeveloped middleclass mill, where knowone does hard graft and we all get exposed brickwork. Ahhh paradise

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