Manchester Unspun: Pop, Property and Power in the Original Modern City: How a City Got High on Music

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As his business grew, he took a stand in the city centre’s ‘alternative emporium’ Affleck’s Palace on Oldham Street.

It starts in a monochrome world of bomb sites and derelict warehouses and gradually turns from sepia into the full technicolour wonderland it presents today. Manchester unspun begins in the gloom of a city still bearing the scars of the Second World War and ends among the shiny towers of an aspiring twenty-first-century metropolis. When the author arrived from the south to study at the university in 1979, the city centre economy was on its knees.Over the past forty years, the most culturally significant period in Manchester's history, Spinoza has been witness to and chronicler of the rise and rise of this city.

All blokes, and all part of a tight knit group that didn’t lack in confidence or brook dissent, but who changed the city forever. Sources used include the gamut of genres ranging from factual to fictive, from inquisitional records and different sorts of treatises to plays, novels and (auto)biographies, in numerous languages of the Mediterranean. As the growth strategy acquires an ever more corporate feel (Aviva Studios was originally conceived as “Factory International”), and the future of parts of east Manchester is outsourced to Manchester City’s Abu Dhabi owners, it is sometimes hard not to feel nostalgia for the wilder time when Wilsonian chutzpah was running the show in what locals still refer to as “town”. One night on the town he stumbled across one of his earliest developments, a former paper factory tucked into a side street near Oxford Road, which he turned into open-plan apartments in 1994. Andy Spinoza's book is readable and informative account of the changes that Manchester has undergone over the last forty years.Unspun is an important slice of Manchester (make that Greater Manchester) history and will provide the quickest route into the city for years to come.

The author draws the “key players” in the rebirth of modern Manchester with a vividness that might have eluded a conventional historian. Manchester unspun sorts the truth from the spin of the city’s stories to reveal a remarkable journey, describing the hubris, scandal, money and politics which played out during its remarkable reinvention.

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Against those who would deny, downplay or attempt to forget Britain's imperial legacy, these contributions expose and explore how the British Empire and the consequences of its end continue to shape Britain at the local, national and international level. But as an impeccably connected and longstanding adopted Mancunian, Spinoza is uniquely well-placed to prosecute it.By renting out the whole of 1st and 2nd floors of Affleck’s arcade, he learned about letting space to other businesses, and a property entrepreneur was born. Ethical systems characterised by detailed rules – Islamic sharia and Christian casuistry are notable examples – have often been dismissed as empty formalism or as the instrument of social control.