Using Examples Explain How Different Forms of Popular Culture Have Constructed a Changing Imaginative Geography of Manchester. Essay

GEOG 10091 Place of Manchester

Using examples explain how different forms of popular culture have constructed a changing imaginative geography of Manchester.

‘Representations of place can never really claim to represent everyone’s city, they can however provide us with some clues about how to navigate and respond to particular place’ (Milestone, 2008). This observation helps us understand that while the popular perceptions of Manchester are selective and partial, none the less television, art, music and film have created a strong sense of place and identity that define the city as northern, working-class and in more recent times alternative and fashionable. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Manchester grew to become the most industrial city in the world and the built environment of Manchester is heavily connected to its industrial past as the ‘the workshop of the world’. In the last hundred years popular culture in this city has rarely escaped its industrial past and decline, and has usually sought to celebrate it, making even the most seemingly forward looking and radical art movements firmly rooted in its past and its sense of identity as a particular geographical place.

Figure 1, L.S. Lowry’s Piccadilly Gardens
Figure 1, L.S. Lowry’s Piccadilly Gardens
In his paintings, L.S. Lowry seems to encapsulate Manchester’s industrial identity. His paintings appear to be faithful recordings of a particular time and geographical space, but many of these paintings were dreamscapes or composite paintings that were nostalgic in their imagining of a great industrial prowess that was fast disappearing after 1913. The perception of Lowry today is complex, but in many ways gives us an insight into how Manchester is represented both consciously and unconsciously. The paradox of Lowry is that while his painting, Piccadilly Circus (Figure 1) reached £5.6 million at auction in 2011 (Johnson, 2011); he is not considered part of the canon of art. The art...