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city centre flats. I’m not putting them down, but it’s just
not an area I have an interest in as a fictional subject.
They even knocked down Bottletown.”
He’s referring to a location in Vurt, a planning hell of
broken glass and towerblocks, a societal nightmare of
accelerated residents with no concern for tomorrow. Is
he saying Bottletown was real?
“Yeah, ‘Bottletown’ is this place called Hulme.
Hulme was an amazing place, and very typical of
what’s happened in Manchester, in a sense. It’s this
1960s council place: flats, ‘terraces in the sky.’ It didn’t
work as a family place at all, so all the families moved
out. And they began moving young single people in,
students and so on. Short-term people.
“So it all started to change, and that’s when I lived
there. Hulme became this hotbed of activity; lots of
bands started there. There were recording studios in the
flats, totally illegal. And it was very close to Moss Side,
the large black area, so there was a lot cross-fertilisation
between the cultures going on. Just a mad place.
“Eventually, they just knocked it down. They had to,
it was very badly built and so on. But all that atmosphere,
all that excitement, has dissipated. And they’ve
built this new Hulme in its place, which is…” He
pauses, choosing careful words. “I mean, I’m sure it’ll
be interesting in 50 years, but at the moment it’s like a
toytown. Not an ounce of atmosphere.”
Aware of what may seem to be a nostalgia trip, he
BUY Jeff Noon books online from and
adds, “Obviously, each generation has its own needs
and desires. But for my personal generation, that place
at that time represents the spirit of individuality, which
is entirely what my work celebrates. Now it’s moved,
and I don’t know where it’s gone. And I’m mostly too
old to go looking for it any more.”
Does he think someone else will find it? Was this it,
the generation gap catching up perhaps?
“Yeah, I think so. And one of the things which I hoped
would have happened by now, was for my success to
have dragged other writers up who would deal with the
city in their own individualistic way. That didn’t really
happen, and I think it should. I think it needs to happen.
Manchester needs that voice, because it’s very hard to
say anything against this New Manchester effort that’s
building up. So the city needs that voice, the alternative
voice. And it needs the alternative voice to be a success,
to a good degree rather than just being underground.”
This voice … does it have to be a native one? He’s a
Mancunian, so were Morrissey and Ian Curtis: does he
feel that sort of experience is necessary to capture the
‘real’ Manchester?
“No, no, not at all! I mean, a lot of students come
into Manchester, from all over the place. It just needs
people to talk about the city in a certain way. It’s time
for someone younger than me to do that now, because
my concerns are changing over the years, as they do.”
I mentioned that because one of the things Noon
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