Radical Manchester

A lovely story in the Grauniad about its former home town, and its relationship to Marxism.

Jonathan Schofield is sitting at one of the most important tables in the history of the world. "Parts of the communist manifesto were written right here," he says. Five hours into his tour of radical Manchester, Schofield lets his voice become reverentially hushed for the first time. "Marx would sit on one side of the table and Engels on the other. Whenever I bring people from the Chinese consulate here and get out the old books that Marx and Engels touched, they weep."

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We're in the reading room of Chetham's library, a venerable and cloistered building. The bay window in which the table has sat for centuries was a preternaturally quiet spot to hone ideas of socialist revolution while the first city of capitalism seethed unseen and unheard outside.

This, at least, is the historian's contention about the city's importance in catalysing communism. "Without Manchester there would have been no Soviet Union," Schofield says with a challenging look. "And the history of the 20th century would have been very different." Imagine - no Lenin, no gulags, no Mao, no Nazi-Soviet Pact, no Cultural Revolution, no cold war, no nuclear arms race, no Che, no Che T-shirts, and, without doubt, no faithful Chinese communists crying among the bookshelves. Oh, Manchester (as Morrissey sang in a very different context), so much to answer for.

Can it really have such a central role in history? "Yes it can - and does," he says. Schofield directs me to a passage in Asa Briggs' Victorian Cities. "If Engels had lived not in Manchester but in Birmingham," wrote Briggs, "his conception of 'class' and his theories of the role of class in history might have been very different. The fact that Manchester was taken to be the symbol of the age in the 1840s ... was of central political importance in modern world history."

It's enough to make a Londoner weep, were it not for the fact that Marx lived and died in Middlesex, rather than in Lancashire. A point made in the photo attached.