MOTHER RIVER by Richard Skelton

When I think of Manchester’s rivers, I think first of the Irwell. For a number of years spanning the turn of the millennium I crossed it daily, disembarking the train from Wigan at Salford Central and walking up Bridge Street to Deansgate. Grey, fallow years, during which I worked at a call-centre on Lloyd Street. Each day a faint sense of dread in the pit of the stomach as I left the station. One of a throng of people seemingly moving against their will, shuttling up and down that road. An endlessly repeating last walk. And the glimmer of the morning river a mockery.

Ten years earlier I used to daily cross another river without ever realising it, whilst walking from Fallowfield to the UMIST campus. A year spent deluding myself that there was poetry in the low- level chatter of machine-code and assembly language. This other river is the Medlock. Archaically – Medeloke, Medelake, possibly from the Anglo-Saxon mēd lacu, ‘meadow stream’. A name that has persisted for over a millennia, conjuring the false image of a pre-industrial Elysian landscape, of a gentle stream winding through Albionic glades. But the Medlock is not Manchester’s forgotten bucolic river. Instead, it might be more fruitfully described as the city’s suffocated and strangled mother, and the story of that slow death is a modern retelling of the ancient myth of the killing of the wyrm. Indra, Oraētaona, Re, Beowulf, Sigurd. It was only after the soil was made fertile with the other’s blood that it could maintain human life. And so the city grew along its banks until there was no room even for the river itself, and its very waters were forced underground.

Following the modern route of the river through the city is an act of divination. From the east it ducks below Great Ancoats Street and writhes its way westwards, culverted below the old UMIST campus before reappearing briefly below Princess Street, where it winds under Oxford Road on its way towards its meeting with the Irwell near the disused Hulme Locks. Its path across this section of the city is like some kind of aberrant sinusoidal waveform, intercut with numerous passages of ominous silence.

Green’s 1794 map gives lie to the maternal mythic narrative of the city’s evolution, however. Although the founding Roman fort at Castlefield was situated near the confluence of the Medlock and the Irwell, as the city grew in the Hanoverian era it congregated around the old Collegiate Church to the north, with the Medlock forming a natural southerly perimeter. Nevertheless, scattered among the fields of Hoyle and Entwistle, Tipping and Hall, are the outlines of numerous Dye Works—parasitically grafted to the river’s banks and discharging their excreta into its glassine waters. By the time of Adshead’s 1851 map this has become an epidemic, with Sugar Refineries, Timber Yards, Cotton Mills, Chemical Works and Skin Yards, all thrusting cheek-by-jowl along the congested banks of the meadow stream. Such was the state of the river at this time that Frederick Engels wrote: ‘Along both sides of the stream, which is coal-black, stagnant and foul, stretches a broad belt of factories and working-men’s dwellings, the latter all in the worst condition.’

A particular area formed by a loop of the Medlock near Oxford Road, known as Little Ireland, Engels singled out for particular censure:

In a rather deep hole, in a curve of the Medlock and surrounded on all four sides by tall factories and high embankments, covered with buildings, stand two groups of about two hundred cottages, built chiefly back to back, in which live about four thousand human beings, most of them Irish. The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and darkened by the smoke of a dozen tall factory chimneys. A horde of ragged women and children swarm about here, as filthy as the swine that thrive upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles. In short, the whole rookery furnishes such a hateful and repulsive spectacle as can hardly be equalled...

The Celtic reference is prescient when thinking about issues of provenance, of matrilineality. Earlier forms of the place-name Manchester, such as Mamecestre (1183) and Mamchestre (1385) are commonly thought to partially derive from a Brittonic root, as the Brigantes inhabited the region prior to its Roman occupation. The ultimate etymology is unclear, but a serpentine line of thought throws up the Proto-Celtic *mamma, and the Indo-European mā-, both meaning ‘mother’. Mamma —the near-universal sound that identifies the babbling of a newborn—is therefore drawn into the watery complex of the babbling mēd lacu as it converges with the Irwell. And so the myth of the maternal river resurfaces. What is more, a heretical notion by certain linguists connects the Medlock itself with an archaic Celtic river goddess, Mam(m)a, and therefore posits Manchester—the place of riverine conflux—as a site of veneration, of ritual cleansing.

From the mythic past to the quotidian present. The polluted state of the river endured well into the twentieth century. In a 1970 paper, Frost et. al. observed that ‘increased effluent control now ensures that environmental changes within the river will encourage biological and chemical recovery’. Fifty years later, I wonder how far it has risen above Engel’s stagnant mire? Enough to entice the river goddess to return? Or perhaps she never left, but dwelt in some subterranean chamber where she lingers still, blackened by Manchester’s profligate success—her countenance resembling the antithesis of beauty. One of the lost kindred of Grendel. A thing of fear and darkness.

Bibliography

Joseph Adshead, Adshead’s Twenty Four illustrated maps of the Township of Manchester, 1850-1851.
Andrew Breeze, ‘Manchester’s Ancient Name’, The Antiquaries Journal, 84, 2004.
Eilert Ekwall, The Place-Names of Lancashire, 1922.
Friedrich Engels, The condition of the working class in England in 1844 (tr. Rachel Foster), 1887.
S.Frost, M.T.L.Chiu, M.Pugh Thomas, ‘Seasonal changes of invertebrate populations in the polluted River Medlock’, Environmental Pollution (1970), Volume 11, Issue 3, November 1976.

William Green, A Plan of Manchester and Salford, 1794. 

E.J.M. Witzel, The Origin of the World’s Mythologies, 2012.