Meet Me At The Cemetery Gates: Manchester’s gothic traits

 I enjoy indulging in celebrations of the dark and deadly at this time of year, despite the green witch wigs and noses sold in the Co-op. The celebration of the supernatural, of the occult, of the spirits and fairies that appear to have frightened the British people of the past is now part drinking excuse, part hideous commercial hypnotism and part rebellion against rationalism. But is it also the stirring of a desire for ancient ceremony and national traditions? Do I like it because it feels strangely familiar?

As a city of dark and damp winters, Manchester has a deep gothic seam only half unearthed. However I can see The Manchester Gothic in Lowry’s ‘The Lake,’ a horrific masterpiece of a ruined landscape, as poisonous as a post-nuclear wasteland, with lurid gravestones lurching in the foreground.  The city’s ghosts are drab and practical, but terrifying non-the-less. Instead of the royal spirits of London and Edinburgh, the decadent ghosts of Cheshire’s stately homes or the treacherous and heartbroken wraiths of the moors and hills, Manchester’s past reveals poverty and desperation, faceless crowds bent double, breathing their last through soot-blackened lungs.  Clichéd images, I know, but where do their forms linger outside of Lowry paintings?

Manchester is chasing its shadows away, with light-reflecting glass and steel of the new business districts you are distracted from soot-blackened bas-reliefs and crumbling chimneys of Salford and Ardwick. Is it trying to erase the tragic elements of its past and forget the empty factories’ dead? Perhaps it’s this time of year that leads my thoughts to these will’o’the’wisps of the cobbled streets.

Hélène Mariaud’s photographs (below) have captured fleeting, fascinated glances of the grand old Southern Cemetery(final resting place of Lowry) just as we would see it when hurrying home as the evening draws in. Does lingering around those gates as the light fades seem weirdly attractive? That depends on your gothic traits.