Urban Legends

January 10th, 2008 at 04:21pm Host

Urban legends often make their appearance during a tour.  Perhaps walking though the city jolts a person’s memory into reciting a story that they have once heard.  The thing about urban legends is that they are invariably second-hand.  The story being recited almost always involves a friend-of-a-friend, a brother-in-law, or a more distant relative.  For sure, the story itself is known, but the direct access to the truth is always one step away.

As it happens, the subject matter of the legend is almost always related to something beneath the city.  For instance, during a tour of the Cathedral, a couple claimed that their brother had once walked a nearby street while building work was taking place.  Seeing the construction site unmanned, he took his chance and walked down an open hole.  The man suddenly found himself in a well-preserved medieval street buried entirely beneath the city.  Of course, the exact details of where and when were not part of the couple’s story, and the fact that it was their brother-in-law gave it a grounding in truth, but one to distant to actually check up on.  This same urban legend appears in variations as well.  Another person claimed the medieval street is under Market Street, rather than near the Cathedral. 

Underground tunnels are often the subject, or setting, of urban legends.  The infamous myth of crocodiles living in the sewers of New York is one example.  Two years ago, an archaeologist friend of mine was digging in rural Ireland.  He was surprised to have locals asking if he had “found the tunnel yet”.  The legend went that there was a tunnel running out of the nearby town into the countryside.  It had only ever been seen by a friend-of-a-friend, or a nameless relative. 

Manchester in paricular lends itself to these undergound urban legends.  It is in the shape and development of the city.  In the 15 years leading up to 1800 the city’s population trebled and conitnued to grow at pace.  Manchester harnessed the industrial revolution and in the words of Frederich Engels ermeged as the “centre of the manufacturing world”.  The Victorians built the new industrial city overtop of much of the Medieval one, leaving buried and forgotten spaces behind.  This may be the origin point of many of the urban legends dealing with a Manchester undergound – legends that abandoned 60’s nightclubs remain in the cellars of the Arndale Centre.  That there is a massive cold war bunker beneath the city centre.  That rivers flows underneath the Town hall and Victoria Station. Or that there is a tunnel underneath the Irwell connecting the Hanging Bridge to Ordsall Hall, complete with Tudor treasure and skeletons. 

During a tour focusing on Manchester’s recent redevelopments, I was asked if I knew the location of the pub which had an underground tunnel linking it to the site of the former gallows.  I was told the condemned man would have his last drink in the pub before being escorted straight to the gallows using the secret tunnel.  I had never heard this one before, neither of the pub or the tunnel, but perhaps it was just a variation on a theme.

Of course, some of these legends are true.  I have seen the river Irk flow beneath Victoria Station and the massive Cold War bunker, which has its entrance in China Town, is now publicly documented.  There are real and interesting spaces beneath the city we know, but more often than not they emerge in the form of an urban myth.        

Entry Filed under: Urbis