‘Hulme was a failed utopian dream on a council estate,” says the DJ Luke Una. “A city within a city. Like nowhere else I’ve ever seen.”
Una lived in Manchester’s Hulme Crescents in the late 80s and early 90s. Constructed in 1972, the vast brutalist estate was the largest public housing development in Europe and could house up to 13,000 people. Intended as a futuristic blueprint for social housing, design and safety flaws became apparent within two years. In 1974, a child died falling from one of the easily climbable balconies. Cockroaches were plentiful, the heating system unaffordable, and residents were soon petitioning to be re-housed.
By the mid-1980s, the council wanted to demolish it but couldn’t afford to, so they stopped charging rent. It became a magnet for a disparate crew of squatters – students, travellers, punks, ravers, anarchists, artists and drug addicts all living in chaotic harmony – and a dilapidated incubator for Manchester’s future musical talents.
“It was a creative epicentre,” says Martin Moscrop of the post-punk funk outfit A Certain Ratio, who lived there. X Republic vocalist and resident Lily Laina Munster concurs: “It was a bringing together of minds through rebellion and music.” A Guy Called Gerald, the Smiths’ Mike Joyce, Ian Brown, Mick Hucknall and countless others also lived there, as did the film critic Mark Kermode and even Nico from the Velvet Underground. “Although I think she stayed for the cheap heroin,” says Una.
Richard Davis, host of a forthcoming talk and photography exhibition on Hulme and Manchester culture, arrived as a 22-year-old photography student in 1988 and built a studio and darkroom in his flat. Davis was shooting bands and the emerging comedy scene, photographing Steve Coogan and Caroline Aherne in there. Coogan wasn’t as enthralled by Hulme though. “Steve was breaking through so he already had his first big sports car,” recalls Davis. “He’d say, ‘I’m not parking my car near your flat.’ I’d have to meet him on the edge of Hulme and walk him through.”
Davis wasn’t the only person utilising space. The poet and musician Edward Barton knocked two flats together and built a giant throne in the middle; there were multiple recording studios, DIY gig venues and Dogs of Heaven – a performance collective using the entire estate as a pyrotechnic playground. All the while, fires burned, stray dogs roamed, graffiti was sprayed and sound systems boomed endlessly around the estate. “We put speakers on our balcony and people used to knock on our door with a blank tape asking for a mix,” recalls Moscrop.
“You could do what you wanted,” says ex-resident and DJ Kath McDermott. “You were free to pursue your dreams. We didn’t have to get jobs. We could live on our wits, hustling for a bit of money here and there.” One hustle was for another on-site business – an all-female taxi company offering safe cabs for women. “I used to be the taxi operator,” she recalls. “Although we used to get a lot of heavy breathing men ringing up, so we had this PE teacher’s whistle that we’d blow really loudly down the phone.” When not deafening creeps, McDermott was part of “a massive queer enclave in Hulme” where a gay community was growing around politics and partying (plus a lesbian-run fruit and veg shop).
Jamie Nicholson was also doing some home remodelling, knocking through walls to join two four-bedroom flats together and opening a recording studio called the Kitchen in 1986. He recorded the likes of Frank Sidebottom, Dub Sex, Marcel King, New Fads, and the Ruthless Rap Assassins. It was the first studio A Guy Called Gerald ever set foot in, where he keenly watched how a sampler was being used.
“The demo we recorded in the Kitchen got us on Radio 1 and a record deal,” says Mark Hoyle of Dub Sex, a post-punk band whose sound mirrored their raw industrial surroundings. “It changed my life.”
Meanwhile a young promoter had other ideas for the Kitchen. “I was 17 but a hustler,” says Tim Williams. “I said to Jamie: ‘you’ve got this space but you’re not using it properly; let’s do some business together’.”
Late night blues parties had been run locally by the Black community for years, but by 1987, ecstasy and the burgeoning dance music scene brought an appetite for a different kind of early-hours do. So the Kitchen as a late night club was born.
Scrawled graffiti on the walls in the estate provided directions for party-goers to reach the top floor of Charles Barry Crescent, where a sound system pumped out funk, hip-hop and imported house and techno. “On the first night there were 500 people,” says Williams. “It was crazy.” Nicholson remembers “a jam room upstairs for musicians and then DJs downstairs.” Williams recalls the room functioning for other activities. “People used to do a lot of fucking up there,” he laughs.
Chris Jam and Tomlyn of the Jam MCs were brought in as in-house DJs. “The first time we walked in to Hulme it was like a scene from Mad Max,” recalls Jam. “It was lawless.”
In the Kitchen you could buy beer, spirits, weed, Es and a very potent strain of acid. “One guy thought he was a gymnast and was balancing on the top floor veranda,” recalls Williams. “He fell off but was OK. He’s a very famous photographer now, so he must have gotten some creativity from bumping his head.”
Williams promoted the club with Paul Pryce, with the aim of forging a distinct identity. “We didn’t want to be seen as an extension of the Hacienda,” he says. “We created our own music scene. We played a lot of very deep underground house, taking our lead from Chicago and Detroit and lowering the bpms.” Jam recalls tracks by Mickey & the Soul Generation, Art of Noise, Renegade Soundwave, and Ten City all being big hitters.
Members of the Happy Mondays, New Order or the Stone Roses would be there, while “Public Enemy came down and hung out until the sun came up,” says Jam. A host of Hacienda DJs, both residents and guests, played, including Frankie Knuckles, David Morales, Sasha, Robert Owens, Mike Pickering and Graeme Park. It was gaining a serious reputation. “I knew people going to Amsterdam and Berlin who found it boring because Hulme was such a bonkers place,” recalls Una.
But the Kitchen was not glamorous. “It was a dive,” says Jam. “A very basic derelict concrete room with nothing in there. Manchester is rainy, so sometimes the floors would be wet from the rain coming in from the balconies, along with the sweat dripping off the walls.” Parties would often run until noon the following day without interruption, with the estate being described by many who lived there as “a no-go zone” for police. “Pigs get the fuck outta here,” read one piece of prominent graffiti. “If the authorities came around people used to throw flour and eggs at them over the balcony,” recalls Munster.
However, this free-for-all had its drawbacks. Burglaries were so frequent that Hucknall slept with an axe by his bed, while Kermode got robbed so many times he had a security door fitted – only for that to be taken off its hinges and stolen. “There was bad shit too,” says Una. “Violence, muggings, poverty.” Munster remembers Joyce’s flat being “so full of cockroaches you couldn’t sit on the floor.”
By 1989, the Kitchen had built up such a reputation, the team got offered their own club and left to run Konspiracy. The final party there ran for seven days and nights straight. “I still meet people today who tell me what a special part of their life the Kitchen was,” says Jam. “It’s mad how we got away with it.”
In the 1990s, Manchester got darker, druggier, and more violent during a period of increased gang activity and Hulme was not immune. “There were more muggings and I had a knife at my throat once,” says Davis. The Kitchen continued as a studio and occasional party space but wrapped up around 1992. “I hung on as long as I could,” says Nicholson. “The studio got burgled and then burgled again and that was the end.”
By 1993 demolition began. However, even in its final, decrepit, crumbling, dying hours, Hulme managed one last party courtesy of Dogs in Heaven. “It was like some post-apocalyptic Blade Runner meets Berlin rave scene,” Una says of the wild send-off, which involved cars being dropped off the crescent roofs.
Despite being deemed a staggering failure – “Europe’s worst housing stock,” said Architect’s Journal – with families let down and displaced, Hulme Crescents was indescribably formative for those who clung on to its crumbling foundations. “I’ve never seen such community,” says Una. “I don’t think anything has been more profound in affecting the cultural sphere and journey of Manchester than Hulme.”
This rent-free creative mecca for young people who shaped the future of Manchester sits in stark contrast to the city today, one which trades heavily off its own musical and cultural legacy but with a housing crisis that makes living there simply unattainable for many. “One of the reasons you get such incredible art, effervescent culture and creativity is because of a low or no rent situation,” Una says. “Rent is biblically expensive in Manchester and there are no areas where counterculture can be allowed to grow naturally and develop. Hulme was a haven for that.”
McDermott echoes this: “Creative people in the city are being completely carved out. To just explore creatively, it now feels like you’ve got to come from a rich family. I feel privileged to have experienced that.”
“I feel I owe Hulme,” says Davis. “It was like a social experiment that shows what people can do when left to their own devices and allowed to develop at their own pace. It was the best time of my life. It was fucking madness but in a really creative way. It was life shaping.”
• Hulme History and Manchester Culture is at the Salutation pub, Hulme, on 28 September.
