Talking Location and homelessness with author Sarah Butler – Manchester

22nd December 2018

TalkingLocationWith… Sarah Butler, author of Before the Fire, set in Manchester

I was born and brought up in Manchester. My dad was a town planner and I remember occasional ‘unorthodox’ city tours to places off the tourist map: Hulme, Ardwick, Moss Side. However, my overriding experience of Manchester was its city centre and the residential suburb where I lived and went to school. It wasn’t until I moved back to the city after 16 years away and started researching my novel Before The Fire about a young man living on an estate in north Manchester, and working with the charity Justlife – who work with people living in unsupported temporary accommodation (UTA) – that I really started to understand that there were people living a very different version of Manchester to the one I knew.

Centre and periphery

Manchester is sometimes described as a ‘donut city’ – a wealthy centre surrounded by a ring of poverty, surrounded by a ring of wealth. In Before The Fire, I was interested in exploring how those living in that ring of poverty feel excluded from the shiny, wealthy, regenerated city centre.

Before The Fire tells the story of Stick, a young man living on an estate in north Manchester during the summer of 2011 when riots swept across England. At the outset of the novel he is planning a summer in Spain with his best mate, a plan which is blown out of the water when his friend is stabbed after a night out.

Stick glanced back outside. He counted five lit windows in the tower block at the end of the road. He tried to imagine what a street in Spain would look like but could only think of Manchester – buses heaving along Rochdale Road; Piccadilly Gardens in the rain; Mac on the back of Ricky’s scooter, razzing down Monsall Street.

Monsall Road, Monsall. Credit: Paul Dobraszczyk

Stick’s estate is walking distance to the city centre, and yet he doesn’t feel anyone ownership of the city centre spaces. Instead, he spends his time in Manchester’s urban edgelands – walking through the weeds and rubbish down by the river Irwell; finding an abandoned handbag factory to hang out in. These are the places he feels at home in.

He walked along a road that was a mess of patched tarmac, cobbles showing where bits had worn away, or been ripped up, or whatever it was that happened to tarmac. On the corner with another, smaller road, he stopped by a bit of badly fenced-in wasteland, full of dandelions and purple flowers and rubbish. There was, he saw, a gap below one of the fence panels where a wall had fallen away. It was as good a place to drink as any. He bent double and squeezed in sideways.

The ground was scattered with cracked bits of plastic, half-smashed bricks and piles of what looked like clothes – wet and dirty. A Budweiser bottle, a video tape spewing its reel, a cheap plastic joystick. Stick picked up a belt buckle. The metal was rusted so the prong bit hardly moved. He pushed and pulled it until it snapped off in his hand.

River Irwell. Credit: Paul Dobraszczyk

Riots

Before The Fire begins and ends in Manchester city centre during the riots of 2011. A brief moment in history where the city centre was utterly transformed, from retail heaven to battleground.

There were no buses, no cars, no trams. The traffic noise replaced by shouts, whistles, running feet, breaking glass, burglar alarms. The smell of traffic and coffee and Greggs’ pasties replaced with cigarette smoke and weed, and the sharp, choking stink of burning plastic.

For many in 2011, the riots offered a glimpse of something different, a reversal of power, a temporary freedom. While his own drama plays out amongst the chaos, Stick sees the city in a different way – full of opportunity and excitement.

Another version of Manchester

In 2018 I finished a novella called Not Home, which tells the story of a group of people living in ‘a shit B&B in a half-forgotten bit of East Manchester‘ where one of the residents has gone missing. I spent two years talking to people accessing the charity Justlife’s Manchester services in Openshaw (east Manchester) and Ardwick (central Manchester) and visiting the B&Bs they live in. Again and again I heard stories of vulnerable people living in insecure and often dangerous accommodation – no locks on their doors; no access to cooking facilities; dirty bathrooms; damp rooms; constant interruptions; aggression and violence; drugs and alcohol.

B&Bs in Openshaw, East Manchester. Credit: Paul Dobraszczyk

Stories allow us to step into someone else’s shoes, however uncomfortable that might be. My hope is that Not Home will enable people to emotionally connect with the experience of living in this kind of substandard housing, just as I hope Before The Fire will invite people to imagine the life of a young man who feels trapped by his class and geography.

We are giving away 1,000 paperback copies of Not Home (please email [email protected] if you would like a copy). The book is also available to download from urbanwords.org.uk/sarah/not-home.

You can buy a copy of Before The Fire through the TripFiction database

Catch Sarah on Twitter and Justlife on Twitter and Facebook

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