Penn State Newswire Extra

Dispatch from Manchester

Jeremy Cooke, a Schreyer Honors Scholar, is one of 40 undergraduate students studying in Manchester, England, this semester as participants in one of Penn State’s many Study Abroad programs. Cooke has agreed to give Newswire readers a glimpse into his experiences both in and out of the classroom.

For information about Penn State’s Study Abroad Programs, check the Web at http://www.international.psu.edu/ieps/programs.html

Installment 7: The Manchester cityscape

MANCHESTER, U.K., March 11 -- Recent alumni of Penn State’s Manchester program might be interested to know: You can’t while away your midnights at the Hacienda anymore. They just finished knocking it down to make way for luxury flats. Instead, we students of today have to wait until next month to see what all the fuss was about, when a new film about the place, enticingly titled “24 Hour Party People,” hits British cinemas.

What’s gone from the Manchester cityscape is the legendary nightclub. What isn’t gone is the kind of dynamism that helped to make it a mecca for British clubbers from the late ‘70s to early ‘90s, as “Madchester” (after the jovial madness of it all) set trends in dance and house music. The Hacienda’s no more but other buildings and attractions have taken up where it left off.

Like the sky overhead, this town around which 2.5 million people live, work and study is constantly in flux. Visitors returning after a decade or so might not recognize corners of the place, as I’ve suggested to a few Newswire subscribers who e-mailed me about my observations.

Unlike London, Manchester is still a rather new city by English standards. It does have a few Roman-era paving stones to offer inquiring tourists, but the mother lode of its history has been written in the past 250 years -- a timescale that feels downright American in some sense. “The world’s first industrial city” is the phrase the local listings magazine likes to use, as a tribute to this former nucleus of the cotton industry with its network of canals and warehouses and factories.

Not that Manchester hasn’t had its critics along the way. When Frederick Engels -- Karl Marx’s mate -- beheld the pitiable conditions of the working classes here in the mid-19th century, he prophesied revolution. Lucky for the locals, perhaps, his prediction proved incorrect. Maybe fellow social observer Alexis De Toqueville, known for his notes on democratic America, had things better figured out, when he quipped of the city, “From this filthy sewer, pure gold flows.”

The tenements were torn down and the streets cleaned up, but it’s fairly obvious that there’s still a lot of money flowing in and out of here. Look no further than the number of cranes and layers of scaffolding around town. City planners discovered consumer goldmines when they started converting Victorian-era buildings into retail outlets and entertainment complexes. About 25 years ago, the owners of the Royal Exchange traded textile merchants for thespians, and created beneath its domes a theatre-in-the-round that looks like a gigantic trapped metal spider. But the effect is far from frightening, and the shows usually are top-notch.

More recently, just down the street, the triangle-shaped Corn Exchange became an upmarket shopping center, and the old newspaper printing plant grew a 20-screen multiplex and a Hard Rock Cafe. With the slick Filmworks and dozens of other screens in the area, we never need feel too far removed from Hollywood -- or Bollywood, for that matter.

Those of us who live in the Fallowfield flats south of the university pass through Rusholme nearly each day. It’s known as the “Curry Mile,” and it’s home to dozens of Indian and Pakistani restaurants, food markets, off-licenses (alcohol vendors), clothing shops and bookstores. Most nights, the eateries are open late and all that neon makes it feel just a little like Vegas. If pizza and hot dogs are what we might crave back home after a night at the bars, it’s kebabs and curries here. The smell and the prices are usually enticing enough.

But change in Manchester hasn’t always come from within. In June 1996, it came with a terrorist attack, as a 3,000-pound IRA bomb ripped into the shopping district near the Royal Exchange Theatre. No one was killed, but more than 300 people suffered injuries from the debris and nearby buildings were heavily damaged. A lone red-pillar mailbox remained unscathed on Corporation Street.

The explosion seems nearly inconsequential next to the events of Sept. 11. But even still, at a time when rebuilding is on the minds of many people in Lower Manhattan, it might be comforting to know that the aftermath proved to have a revitalizing effect on the area. Six years on, that part of the city has bounced back and filled the hole with bold modern structures in steel and glass.

Within view of the former devastation, workers are putting the finishing touches on a great blue ski-slope of a building labelled Urbis. It’s being touted as a “museum of the modern city,” with its stunning all-glass façade and high-tech gadgetry inside. What’s going to fill the swooping interior space is still something of a mystery, but that’s just part of keeping buzz around the place alive.

Unfortunately for us here now, the grand opening might not be scheduled until we’ve left for America. But that’s just one more reason for other inquisitive students to sign up for next spring’s Manchester courses.

Installment 6: The religious scene

MANCHESTER, U.K., Feb. 19 -- Each weekday we hear its bells chiming at noon, and see its broad Gothic-looking spire as we step outside for lunch. In past decades, the boxy concrete of the university has grown up around, but never overtaken it.

Its church hall has become a pub now, and there was recent talk of converting the main building into a temple or a nightclub.

But for now at least, the Holy Name of Jesus Roman Catholic Church has survived in its original purpose, 130 years on.

On good days, the smell of incense and melting wax still fills its pale-white cavern. Candles are 20 pence; you drop your coins in the ponderous black safe just inside the door. More ...

Installment 5: Canning for Charity

MANCHESTER, U.K., Feb. 4 — With a bit of squinting Saturday, I might have assumed I was back at Penn State, revelling in two true blue-and-white pastimes: Rattling a can for charity and watching guys in uniforms scramble for an oval-shaped ball. But while it may be Super Bowl and Dance Marathon time back home, the British characteristically have their minds elsewhere, as I discovered this weekend on a road trip to Scotland. More ...

Installment 4: Down Memory Lane

MANCHESTER, U.K., Jan. 27 — The first time I went to school in England, I found myself lying sprawled on a swath of brown poster paper one day while my classmates traced my silhouette with markers. On my sketchy likeness, they penciled in a 10-gallon hat, string tie, chaps, boots and spurs.

At that time in 1988, devoted TV viewers on both sides of the Atlantic were glued to the soap opera Dallas, and my initials just happened to match those of the main character J.R. When it came time for the World Cultures unit, I was their resident model for the “traditional” American. In actuality, I had just as little first-hand experience with cowboys and the Wild West as they did. More ...

Installment 3: Meet the author

MANCHESTER, U.K., Jan. 17 -- The Author Who Spurned Oprah is getting quite an introduction here this evening. The bookshop clerk who won the toss to introduce Jonathan Franzen is pulling out all the stops, as he invokes the names of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Thomas Mann to put the American author’s latest work in context.

Franzen -- in black-rimmed glasses and grey sport coat -- is bent over in a chair nearby, elbows on knees, pretending to cover his ears. After the applause, at the podium, he says, “Boy -- This is my first time in Manchester, and I’m liking it already.” More ...

Installment 2: Time for some culture

MANCHESTER, U.K., Jan. 15 -- After a few nights of admiring the color and composition of the beers here, several of us went looking for some of this city's more long-lasting works of art last weekend. Visitors to Britain and citizens themselves benefit these days from a new push to make admission to the country's art galleries free of charge.

And those in search of cheap visual culture need look no further than our morning bus route to class: Rub away some of the condensation from the window to see a Victorian-era red-brick building that might be able to pass for a stately mansion if not for the handicapped ramp at its entrance. More ...

Installment 1: Learning the Lingo

MANCHESTER, U.K., Jan. 8 — Avoid dodgy blokes loitering around cashpoints after dark. Try not to get too wellied, so that you’ll be able to mind the couple snogging on your way to the loo. Crossing the thoroughfare, look right, then left. Oh, and the crummy weather? Sod it. It gets better.

There’s an education to be had here in the pub and the flat as well as the classroom, as shown by such tips. For less than a week, we — a group of 40 upperclassmen from Penn State studying economics and communications — have been getting our bearings in one of England’s largest cities, and we’ve already started tackling one of our most informal and amusing assignments: Learning the British slang of the day. More ...

Dispatches from Manchester