The Wisdom Curfew

I left Manchester after my 2nd stretch of living in the city in 2021. When I left for London after my first five-year stint, the only building that touched the clouds was the Hilton hotel on Deansgate. After loading my car outside M One, a studio space I rented in a former cotton mill on Lower Ormond Street, I set off on a last melancholy stroll up Oxford Road to book-end this chapter; I was leaving for family reasons, with excitement, but also a heavy heart. I’d had nine of the best years of my life here, including the birth of my children and my brother living in the same city.

I’d anticipated something of a reflective walk, but instead, I found myself gawping up at what had once been sky above the old BBC HQ. No sky was visible, only the glass and metal of expensive new accommodation to house a new wave of city centre inhabitants. It was all documented in Manctopia, a BBC documentary about the billion pound property boom.

It felt alien to me, and I didn’t know how to feel about it, but what I feared, and on a deeper level knew, was that this mirrored the ugly side of gentrification I’d seen play out in Brixton a few years earlier. Many of those vibrant people buzzing around its lively streets, I’d been fascinated by in 2008 when I’d first brought my illustration portfolio to London had been driven out by the middle classes and regeneration. Personally, I’d preferred the pockets of degeneration because there were more stories to tell, and creativity could be smelled in the air along with the weed and the fried chicken.

Brixton had enough edge to thrill and a welcoming charm that made me return to the £ 11-a-night hostel many more times in my formative freelance years.

I found exactly the same crackle and warmth in Manchester when I moved there in 2009.

In 2025, it’s hard to ignore the rarity of this balance. It’s still fun, and it still feels safe, but the safety is now the dominant breed. The characters who made Manchester what it was have been pushed into stubborn strongholds that feel at risk of terminal refurbishment when leases end and money talks. The lush crops of independent musicians brimming with ambition that I immersed myself in when I co-founded Quenched Music with Dirty Freud in 2010 have been dredged like seagrass, replaced by a hip but orderly crowd. All of the new venues that have spread in every direction look wonderful, very eloquent and varnished with funky design, but I miss the fights, the funk, the fag bins, and the madheads who can teach you far more about the human condition and creativity than the more predictable crowd.

For that, you have to work harder and head out to the surrounding suburbs because you have to pay handsomely to play in central Manchester today, and while it’s still a great place to be, the chronic sameness of our generation has seeped in.

I catch the 84 bus on a Thursday afternoon. It goes to Oldham, and it’s worth keeping your head out of your smartphone for the duration.

The mix of people is absorbing.

I’m in a mindful moment, gazing out of the window, when a man of around 30 gets on the bus. I notice the electronic tag on his ankle, wrapped around smart trousers. This tag is the kind issued to those with a criminal conviction, and it comes with a court-ordered curfew that usually requires them to stay indoors outside of designated daytime hours. Legal vampires consigned to the shadows. I can’t help but think of how demeaning this is, an official grounding like a teenage wrongdoer. It would be far more interesting and effective to offer up a menu of compulsory dance, drama, sport, or art programmes in the way that the wonderful Dance United has proven to be an effective rehabilitation of marginalised people who have wandered from their better path.

He’s with his mother, and a minute or so later, is recognised by a friend who asks if he’s heard about ‘Skeggy’. Skeggy has been sent down, but I can’t quite hear what for, as I take a keen interest in this story. They discuss the electronic tags, how bored they get when they have them, before going on to discuss their video game crime sprees on Grand Theft Auto. I’m not fabricating this, and I have to catch my judgment before it takes fire at them. Characters like this are abundant in my hometown of Keighley, and I know that, despite the stereotypical characteristics of the chronically mischievous, like any pocket of humanity, there are layers.

Seconds pass in silence before the friend talks about not having his phone. Something has happened; it’s not a choice, but again, I don’t catch the reason. He then turns and starts to scan the bus before telling his tagged friend how liberating it has felt not to be scrolling on it all the time. They nod in unison, taking in the majority of passengers who have their necks craned, lost in the digital dystopia of our age, burning all that energy, losing all that lived experience. Missing the good stuff.

Finally, almost on a breath, he wraps up his realisation by saying that only since not having his phone has he realised how ‘locked in’ they have everyone.

One or two look up and meekly slide their devices away, but the rest present a disturbing illustration of this simple truth.