BREAKING NEWS

Friday 17 August 2007

Canal Street History


In the run up to the November Manchester field trip I'll be posting various bits of info about Canal Street, videos of its depiction on TV and clips to give a feel for "Village" life. Let's start with a bit of history. This is taken from http://www.canal-st.co.uk/ and this and more will be talked about when we go on our heritage trail around the city.


Manchester’s current ‘Gay Village’ developed alongside the Rochdale Canal, which still runs through the city centre. The canal was opened in 1804 and was the ‘M1’ of its time. This was the first canal to run from the Pennines through Lancashire, bringing raw materials to the city and then finished products to the docks at Liverpool on to the farthest corners of the British Empire. When the cloth trade declined in the early and mid 20th century, the area went into decline and the old warehouses became silent, dank and derelict. The area along the canal was perfect for gay men to meet as it was dark and unvisited, but was near to good transport links such as Oxford Rd and Piccadilly Station.
The years before the Village in the 1980’s were ones of repression, with relations with the local police at an all-time low. Even with the legalisation of homosexuality in 1967, only those over 21 and in private were legally allowed to express their emotions physically and many a young gay man exploring his sexuality along Canal Street like Nathan from ‘Queer as Folk’ was still prey for the authorities. Club raids were the norm, a particular example being that of the Mineshaft in the late 1980’s when several innocent men were hauled off to the police cells. These days, things have changed enormously, with a Police Liaison Officer for the gay community and the local police being cheered as they proudly march in the Pride parade through the city streets every year.
In recent years Manchester has started to take great pride in its gay and lesbian heritage and in 2003, when the Europride festival visited the city, it was decided to initiate walking tours around Manchester’s gay and lesbian history for the general public. These trails were so popular that extra ‘trails’ had to be laid on, and they were brought back again for the following year’s Pride Festival. Nowadays, they are run on a year-round basis and in 2005, the walks were literally ‘set in stone’, as Rainbow Tiles were commissioned from a local artist and set into flagstones around the city centre, following the route of the trail, including sites around the Canal Street area. Manchester was the first city in the world to so commemorate its LGBT past in this way.
The gay community once feared that the Village would lose its identity after it became a fashionable place for the ‘in-crowd’ to go during the 1990’s but this hasn’t happened and these days everyone comes to the Village – be they young or old, gay or straight, local or tourist. This is surely as it should be. The gay community never wanted to socialise in a ghetto – it was the early homophobia of society in general that created this set-up. Today the modern Gay Village is able to look back upon a proud history of queer culture and also forwards, toward a more diverse and tolerant future – one that it helped to inspire and create.Jon Atkin, 2007. http://www.purpleprince.co.uk/

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