A few days after winning the 2019 general election, Boris Johnson travelled to Manchester to deliver a speech on the transformation of the city. But this was not the usual exercise in Johnsonian boosterism. Perhaps because of the influence on him of the communitarian MP Danny Kruger, he had something else to say about the historic towns of the north-west – Oldham, Preston, Burnley, Bury, Bolton, Rochdale, Blackburn – that faced “endemic health problems, generational unemployment, down-at-heel high streets. The story has been, for young people growing up there, one of hopelessness, or the hope that one day they’ll get out and never come back.”
I know the north-west well because I have family there. Over the decades, I have visited the historic former mill towns of the region and been struck by their decline and moved by what they once were: their fine civic buildings, sometimes in semi-dereliction or disuse, stand as a rebuke to what has been lost. One looks upon these works and despairs.
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