À la recherche du villes perdu

Last Saturday was Manchester music night on BBC4. The line-up included live performances of Mancunian luminaries through the ages and a documentary tracing the Factory story. I didn't need to watch it - I know the details in the same way as Evangelicals know their Scripture and have probably bored as many people with my proselytising. Hell, I'd even seen this documentary before but I quite happily sat through it again. So much of the music I love was made by Manchester bands and now that I live in the city, programmes like this take on an extra resonance. It's not just a history of the record label and the bands associated with it but a social history of the city at the time, and how this was as big an influence as the legendary Sex Pistols gig at the city's Free Trade Hall in 1976. With two days holiday coming up and no plans it was obvious what I had to do - wander round the city I now call home and just see what's out there.

Remarkably enough for Manchester the weather held. Two days of something you could call 'summer' and not breach the Trade Descriptions Act. Perfect conditions for dandering around, camera and notebook in hand, recording impressions of the city and formulating an all-emcompassing theory as to what's made Manchester so integral to the last thirty odd years of British music. The problem is that the city described in all those Factory retrospectives is not the city I'm living in now. The Granada TV studios that Tony Wilson called home may not have changed that much but pretty much everything else seems to have.

The site that was once the Hacienda is now home to a block of flats which, according to the marketing blurb, offers its tenants "stylish, luxury living in a vibrant urban environment." Unsurprisingly that didn't sit well with those who remember it as the world's most famous nightclub.

Manchester is awash with new developments, most of which were no doubt accompanied by sales brochures promising the same as the Hacienda's. I can't really comment: the flat I live in is part of a block in the Northern Quarter that was at one time a warehouse of some kind or other. As I roamed around the city I couldn't escape the feeling that I got here at least twenty years too late. I still get to play at living in the 'bohemian' part of town but it looks as if the city that seduced me from afar as a teenager no longer exists.

I probably haven't been here long enough to write about the city anyway. Chances are I'm not looking in the right places, or maybe I just need the right guide to take me out there and show me what Manchester is truly about.