MICHAEL Morrison, the star of my now available novel The Choreography of Ghosts, charted the streets of the city in which he lived and detailed it all in his own book Walks Through Weeping Cities. Here we join him away from his usual haunts…
THIS city is hidden now. Twenty years ago I could see it with all its beauty and its flaws, but not anymore.
For they’ve built a wall so the real people can’t see us and we can’t see them.
The aim is to hide reality from those lucky enough to be granted access to the treasures and keep away those whose ordinary lives don’t belong in this glittering new world.
I love this city - it doesn’t matter which it is - because of its scars. I can relate to them and I want to see them. I want it - any city - to flaunt its imperfections.
As I am on holiday I can see the parts they want me to from here, those in the travel guides, the ones you have to pay for, the ones that tell you this place is booming, it’s where those who need to be seen must be and for a price you too can have a small glimpse.
I suppose a trip here is a somewhat more expensive version of shelling out a few quid for one of those magazines that allows you to peek through the keyhole into the lives of the rich and famous.
Just ahead of me trains glide quietly along a railway line that has for many years provided a natural divide between the tourist hotspots and the working city and that’s fine.
Like many cities they junked the trams 60 years ago, but they’re back now. Only they are driverless; a perfect symbol of the changes in technology that are - unhappy pun intended - driving people out of work and sending them into retreat from this new world.
The signs of an emerging empire were here when I last visited two decades ago and its rulers have built a kind of Berlin Wall - the intentions of which I think are the reverse of the real one - of glass towers.
Office blocks 60 floors high squeeze in next to 40-storey luxury apartments from which the owners, who probably work next door, can watch over the city’s jewels and maybe feel a sense of ownership.
There are around 20 such “skyscrapers” - two deep just in case the not wanted should attempt to penetrate these new city walls - and cranes carry huge slabs of stone up and down to ensure any gaps are quickly filled in.
Is this change good? The answer should be obvious, but if you lack heart and soul and your desire is simply to accumulate wealth, then these New World Empire State Buildings will get a yes from you.
You can only buy take-out booze from approved bottle bars, the convenience shops, all owned by the same company, inconveniently not stocking it. They would if they could but those on the inside don’t want drunks on the streets around the tourist attractions and the financial institutions. Get on the bus and travel a few thousand metres behind the glass curtain though and there are drinkers aplenty on the streets.
The authorities couldn’t repair the slums around the city’s waterfront but they managed to demolish them quickly enough, put fancily named swanky developments in their place and re-settle the cellar-dweller classes out of sight.
Sometimes I hate the city, but don’t get me wrong, I love it more. Much more.
These buildings are not ugly, not yet. Classier than those built after the war, not old and decrepit, they do not lack architectural merit, the neon lights providing a spectacular sight as darkness draws in.
From somewhere I can find romance in these almost brutalist, non-humanist constructions and pleasure in having to work to find the love that hides in the buildings and people beyond the cold and calculated gentrification, looking up from the lower levels.
There is a glaring weakness though. More than one. These supposedly luxury apartments and exquisitely appointed offices largely rest tonight in darkness, unaffordable and largely uninhabited, suggesting the bricks that make up this wall of vanity and ego could crumble way faster than those in the real city which sits quietly in the shadows.
Avaricious developers and those who have enabled their success by renting/buying tiny sections of these giants have walked all over history, over the achievements of those who really built our cities, those which housed, educated, fed, gave work to and provided care for its workers.
They have turned the city - and again it doesn’t matter which city - into a theme park.
While true heart and soul may never return, this fun fair will undoubtedly close and along will come another saviour to tell you “the times they are a changing” for the better.
Hear this though. You may think you have hidden us from view, but actually it is we who are hiding, waiting in the shadows, and we know who you are for we can see you in your glass houses from which you throw your stones.
City I still love you but don’t shut me out.