There is a point, just before Glazebrook, where Manchester ends.
Manchester as a conurbation that is, as the relentless, English, urban sprawl that for more than two centuries has been steadily annexing the boroughs, villages and towns surrounding it.
In fact, so relentless has the advance of Cottonopolis been, if you should set off in any direction from the vast, neo-gothic splendour of its town hall, you would have to travel for quite some time before you actually left the city behind.
And even then, the civic, industrial and commercial accretions of 200 years, which surround the city like the growth rings of some mighty, iron tree, will only recede gradually, and reluctantly, before the world around you takes on a rural character.
And yet…there is a point, just before Glazebrook, where Manchester ends. And it ends with a haunting abruptness.
On my daily commute to Liverpool, just before the gleaming new train charges through the small branch station at Glazebrook, it runs along a high embankment, and each day I look down from on a single row of pretty, 1930’s villas; suburban, semi-detached and modestly middle-class.
The last house is slightly different to its neighbours, as if it had been completed to a different, more hurried timetable. Here the tarmac abruptly abates, and suddenly the fields and farms begin.
Seeing daily this abrupt end, the impression grows within me of a sudden, traumatic halt to the expanse of the city.
I can hear the lulling, Sunday whirl of mechanical lawnmowers. Gradually, one by one, they fall silent, and the sound of blades is replaced by the clipped, patrician tones of the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.
His voice, broadcast live from the Cabinet Room in 10 Downing Street, drifts from window after window, in house after house, all along the warm, sunlit street.
“This morning, the British Ambassador in Berlin, handed the German government a final note…”
Mothers, casting anxious glances up at the skies, hastily recall recalcitrant children from freshly planted gardens.
“…stating that that unless they were prepared, at once, to withdraw their troops from Poland…”
Fathers, rigid with silent anger, wonder when the call-up will begin.
“…I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently, this country is at war with Germany.”
The urban advance has been checked, for now. But the future can still just about be glimpsed, further down the line.
Alfred Searls was born, bred, and indeed buttered in the city of Manchester. After a grimly successful career in PR and marketing, which left him with a nagging suspicion he was becoming a character in a Kafka novel, he decided to start writing things he actually wanted to write.
THE CITY KEY 