Drifting through Manchester

On Saturday, we left the gray stone and slate of rural Wales for the red brick of Manchester.

I love cities - they’re where I feel most comfortable walking. My rambles in the countryside were bucolic but sometimes anxiety-inducing. My terrible sense of direction is ill-suited for roadless swaths of rolling hills. It’s less stressful to wander in cities because I’m more comfortable getting lost in them.

Manchester is lovely. It’s also dense and has very little green space (at least the part I’m in). In San Francisco, thanks to our hills, you can at least glimpse a bit of the Bay or the ocean or a green hill no matter where you are in the city, even in the most industrial areas. But Manchester is flat and on a narrow river. Now imagine that lack of green space combined with intense factory pollution — I can understand why working people in this area fought so hard for their right to access the countryside 100 years ago.

But the battle against the wealthy and the powerful for access to space isn’t confined to rural areas. Urban spaces that are supposed to be public are becoming increasingly surveilled and expensive. Think about your own city — how many places can you just be a person and take up space and not buy anything? How many places can you loiter in peace? And does everyone have equitable access to those spaces? (Anyone who remembers the infamous Barbecue Becky incident in Oakland knows that we are not all equally welcome…)

In Manchester, the Loiterers Resistance Movement is working to reclaim the streets for everyone by conducting walks and other events to reconnect Mancunians with their city.

The LRM’s founder, Morag Rose, has a love for urban walking very much in tune with my own. Walking where you live makes you less alienated from your community, forces you to negotiate difference with your neighbors, and allows you to see your city from new and different perspectives. Urban walking can also bring the stark inequities of access to the city into focus. As she walks, Morag asks “who isn’t here?” If we want everyone to experience the joy of city walking, a lot still have to change — accessible sidewalks, benches, public toilets, reliable public transit. These are actually a lot of the same things that would make rural walking more accessible — it made me realize that the distinction between access to the countryside and urban areas is actually not so large.

The River Irwell

Every month, the LRM does a walk around Manchester. On Sunday, Andy and I joined about two dozen people of various ages in front of the Manchester Craft and Design Center for the start of the walk. Morag distributed a walking “recipe” from this book (which I highly recommend using in your own city!) as a jumping off point for the direction of our walks. We split off into groups and began to wander.

The group I was in walked quite slowly around Manchester, stopping to talk about the history of a building or where you could get good curry or how that building used to be a laundromat but had been turned into some weird hipster laundromat speakeasy. I pretty quickly deviated from the written exercise and just took pictures of words and phrases that caught my eye.

As we aimlessly drifted, one of the women in the group told me about a memorial walk of sorts she had designed of places significant to her parents, who had both died last year. I showed her a picture of my walking map of San Francisco and told her how I’d changed the color I used to trace my walking after my dad died. We both got a bit teary eyed. She isn’t the first person I’ve met on this trip who’s walking has been a manifestation of grief. A memorial. A remembrance.

My map from August 2023

People open up in surprising ways when you walk with them. It seems that the LRM’s monthly “drifts” don’t just connect people with their city but also with each other. We continued winding our way through Manchester - through alleyways and past old factories with disused elevators and through pedestrianized thoroughfares and alongside murals and graffiti - and ended the day with everyone coming together to end their travels, appropriately enough, at Gulliver’s bar.