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C O N T E X T 1 7 9 : M A R C H 2 0 2 4 39 progressively cars could be locked out of the city centre. Once again, someone has been listening and the process is well advanced. Albert Square, not so long ago a huge traffic roundabout, has been given over mostly to pedestrians. Metrolink trams have removed the need for cars to penetrate the centre. And near Victoria Station, the ring road itself has been humanised, splitting the clockwise and anticlockwise flows by a few hundred metres, so that the new Cooperative headquarters building could be built without severance from the city centre. By the 1960s, only a few houses remained from 18th-century Manchester, in and around St John Street and close to what were the Granada TV studios. Nairn was prescient: ‘Here is a potential city-loving population among actors, producers and executives… they could live only a few yards from their work.’ The story of the past four decades has con- firmed that judgment. There has been an explosion in city-centre living, in converted cotton mills, warehouses and most of all in unapologetic high-rise blocks, a process acceler- ated by SimpsonHaugh and Partners’ 47-storey Beetham Tower. Critics like Simon Jenkins once portrayed this solitary super-high-rise as evidence of a municipal banana republic with a virility crisis. But no more: the wide swathe west of the city centre, on the border with neighbouring Salford, is a place transformed with tall structures, half-lovingly referred to by the locals as ‘Manchattan’. Is this a revitalising future for an old city or the destruction of its genius loci? Nairn would not have objected. Indeed, he saw it coming: ‘This area by the [River] Irwell is the new office and civic centre, a moving of Manchester’s centre of gravity which could be (with the help of Salford) its liberation from the garrotters’ hold of nineteenth century industry’. Some of these new blocks have individuality, but not all. Most are workaday, simple, tall slabs; again, Nairn would probably have accepted them. He welcomed the repetitive Albert Bridge House, built in 1958 to a Ministry of Works architect design. It was, he averred, easily the best modern building in Manchester and an example of what good proportions and straightforward design could achieve. Due for redevelopment, to modern eyes it would sit comfortably in a communist-era, east European city. Those who know Manchester appreciate that its great turnaround owes much to two remark- able and highly intelligent leaders: Sir Richard Leese, former leader of the council, and Sir Howard Bernstein, former chief executive. Leese started working life as a social worker, Bernstein as a junior council clerk. Yet in a true sense both were patrician leaders. It is exactly as Nairn had opened his essay: ‘Patrician: it is on the face of it an unexpected adjective to use for a commercial city, the home of rained-off test matches and forbidding hotels.’ The forbidding hotels are long gone but Manchester’s patrician spirit remains. Ian Wray, author of Great British Plans, is professorial fellow at Manchester University’s planning school. ‘Manchattan’ towers peer over the Deansgate railway bridge like aliens from The War of the Worlds.