The Trouble With Archie

Yesterday, in an otherwise uneventful morning, I walked out of Piccaddilly Station and narrowly missed being flattened by a tram.  Now my family has a chequered history of dealings with the Manchester Metrolink- older drivers still talk about the Saturday afternoon when the 14:21 out of Market Street suddenly found itself playing chicken with a B-Reg Volkswagen Golf, which my dad, in the process of attempting one of his tricky three-point turns, had somehow manoevred onto the tracks outside the Midland Hotel.   But yesterday morning wasn't my fault- honest.  It was the fault of the shiny young people handing out the shiny leaflets in Piccaddilly Station when I stepped off the 8:21 from Levenshulme. 

I've always been a sucker for shiny people handing out shiny leaflets, so I made no attempt to evade the gaggle of youths strategically strung across the station exit, each one resplendent in a bright purple T-shirt bearing the slogan 'Walk All Over Me Today'.  'New Bridge Over Town!' exclaimed the spiky-haired young lad who collared me, showing commendable zeal considering he'd presumably been there since 7AM and had already exclaimed 'New Bridge Over Town!' to something like 4200 glaze-eyed commuters.  'Go on, take a couple!', he continued, even more enthusiastically.  And so I strode out of the station, excited at the opportunity to be one of the first Mancunians to try out the city's newest architectural feature.

Now if there's one thing we know how to do in Manchester, by the way, it is design a futuristic curvy bridge.  Over the past ten years they've been popping up all over the place.  There's one arching over the Rochdale Canal at Castlefield, connecting Dukes 92 to Barca Bar (which is owned by Mick Hucknall and a haunt of the rich and famous, so was presumably where Noddy Holder from out of Slade was off to when I met him on there one day on my lunch-hour).  And there's at least two in the newly-rebuilt Hulme, and, now that I come to think of it, another lesser-known one, more grandiose and pleasingly pointless than any of the others, which lazily arches across not a train line or a main road but a perfectly pedestrian-friendly concrete square between some office blocks behind the Salford side of Deansgate.  So this new fellow on the block- Archie, we'll call him, shall we?- has plenty to live up to. 

The good news is that Archie- or the Manchester Curve, as he is officially known, does a fantastically space-age job of carrying us up over the main road then swooping us on past a water feature (with a specially-commissioned poem engraved in it, if I am not mistaken) and bringing us down to ground level.  There is just one slight snag, in that on reaching ground level and attempting to proceed straight forward onto Canal Street and on towards the city centre proper, the unsuspecting commuter is liable to step straight into the front of one of the hurtling Metrolink trams which just at that point swing sharply right on their way out of Piccaddilly Station towards Bury.   

Now I am not a Town Planner as such, but it occurs to me that sending daily trainloads of potential investors to an unimaginably painful death under the wheels of onrushing suburban trams is hardly the surest way for the City Fathers to cement Manchester's hard-won status as the Self-Styled Business Capital of the North.  So it came as no surprise to find, on my return to Piccaddilly yesterday teatime, the new bridge cordoned off almost all the way along at the bottom, and at least twenty-five men in hard hats and flourescent orange jackets standing around looking concerned and pointing animatedly at clipboards.  Tonight the situation looked graver still: the bridge was closed off entirely, and early-evening revellers looking to make the crossing towards Canal Street were being turned back by a pair of particularly stern and senior-looking hard-hat-and-fluorescent-jacketed blokes, each with their own clipboard.  I sidled up and, addressing myself to the bloke in the yellow jacket, who seemed slightly less stern than his friend with the orange one, essayed a few innocent enquiries:

'So, er, what's with the bridge, then?  It was open the other morning when I came down.'

'Been closed, mate.  Safety reasons.  Metrolink have complained'.

So there we have it. Apparently the minor inconvenience of seeing the 8:34 for Altrincham delayed while the charred remains of a carriage-full of accountants from Marple are dislodged from the undercarriage has been too much for the craven, lickspittle functionaries who run the Metrolink service, and they have, in the words of our man in the yellow fluorescent jacket, 'complained'.  I ask you. It's clearly a sad indictment of the litigious, health-and-safety crazed modern world we live in- and I for one wonder where it will all end.

One thing I can promise you though- when Archie is reopened to great fanfare (there is loose talk of erecting some kind of railing), or alternatively, unceremoniously demolished amid acrimonious backbiting between important-looking men in bright orange fluorescent jackets, you will be sure to know.  I am on the case, folks- and as ever, prepared to brave the wrath of the hurtling 14:24 for Altrincham (via Stretford) in order to get to the truth. 

The truth, I say! Our city's fine fine tradition of pointless but pleasingly post-modern curvy metal bridges occasionally frequented by the frontmen of 1970s glam-rock bands deserves nothing less.  More here, just as soon as we have it.

Comments

[MQ]

Wow. Wasn't there that long ago myself, and I don't remember any sign of a bridge at all. They build things fast, don't they. Thanks for keeping us up-to-date with the latest Manc news. It's almost like being there, only (usually) less rainy.

On which note, what about that new skyscraper you blogged about a while ago? I don't remember seeing that either when I was back in the summer. Not that I was really looking for it, but you might expect it to sort of jump out and hit you in the face (in a manner not unlike the trams at the end of Archie...)

[jonathan]

Oh the skyscraper is still there MQ... in fact if I am not mistaken it made a recent fleeting appearance on these pages (see the The Third Rule Of Cheap Week in the post before this one). Keep with the programme, man!

I can quite see how you could fail to notice the skyscraper though... The Hilton Tower, as I believe it is called, was being built right next to my work for about two years and I never noticed until it had been completed for a month... I think the thing is just so unfeasibly large that the average brain can't cope with the sheer enormity and is liable to blank it out. In order to properly satisfy yourself of the skyscraper's existence what you really need to do is retreat to some distant suburban location (such as the platform of Levenshulme station) and then try to catch sight of it out of the corner of your eye...

[looby]

Is the Hilton tower that incredibly thin tower (or looks like it from the train from Lancaster anyway)? It is staggeringly tall, and makes me have involuntary unpleasant thoughts about...going down but not in a lift.

I'm gladyoung people still give you leaflets about things in the street. I've giveup trying to get exciting new offers about cheap calls to Kenya and Poland after a few incidents rather like your one with your new pal in the Polish shop where I've put out my hand tentatively and been ignored, which has kleft me with a day-long sense of personal failure that in the eyes of the young I don't even deserve a discount off calls to Slovakia.

[beth]

oh, is that Beetham Tower?

With the swimming pool with the glass bottom & that???

I feel slightly queasy just imagining it.

[looby]

You're right Beth. I've just found the brilliantly-named Skyscraper News :)

http://www.skyscrapernews.com/buildings.php?id=132