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Haunt Manchester

Millions of tourists visit Manchester each year, from the UK and beyond. The city has everything you would expect from a major international destination: world-class sports stadiums, art galleries, theatres, shopping and more. But, as former Factory records boss Tony Wilson said: ”This is Manchester. We do things differently here.”

That’s why a group of Manchester Met academics has set up Haunt Manchester, a trailblazing, public-facing initiative to promote the city’s Gothic heritage as a unique tourist attraction, hosting a series of public events for all ages.

Since its inception in 2018, Haunt Manchester has contributed to the cultural life of the city, inspiring new work and bringing together a community of academics, artists, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts. In the COVID-19 recovery period, the team hopes to promote further economic growth and activity, even acting as a beacon to inspire similar projects in other cities.

Hosted on the tourism website Visit Manchester, and growing out of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies (MCGS) and the annual Gothic Manchester Festival, Haunt Manchester’s aim is to celebrate and promote the atmospheric, weird and wonderful side of Greater Manchester through in-person and digital events.

Led by researchers Prof Dale Townshend and Dr Matt Foley, alongside research impact manager Helen Darby and other members of staff in MCGS, the project has helped to bring together a network of people and organisations around the region. Building the network would not have been possible without the dedication and commitment of former Haunt editor Emily Oldfield.

For Dale, the goal of Haunt Manchester is “to generate and foster new cultural production – for example Helen and Matt inspired the BBC Philharmonic to produce a concert of scores from horror films as part of the Gothic Manchester Festival in 2018, which was broadcast on Radio 3.

“We’ve also worked with Manchester Gothic Arts Group (MGAG) on events, and the Dancehouse Theatre and Dance Company to put on a show called Monster Mash, linked to the festival themes. It’s all about supporting and inspiring local artists and generating new productions.

“Each of these events has been underpinned by research undertaken in MCGS, too, and Haunt Manchester is one of the ways in which we are able to share and communicate our own research interests with the broader community.”

A series of fortunate events

Other events organised by the team include walking tours and a fashion show with local young designers, and their collaborators include HOME arts centre, Selfridge’s, the John Rylands Library, alternative shopping hub Afflecks Palace and the annual Halloween in the City celebration.

Matt adds that Haunt Manchester has also built up links between businesses and artists in the city and beyond: “Through Haunt we’ve also engaged small business and put on fairs and events with a range of artists and producers who are Gothically-themed. We’ve organised networking fairs, including an online Gothic market during lockdown with Bristol Goth and Alternative Market, which was attended by around 500 people. Expanding the Haunt brand beyond Manchester, we launched our second Haunt site with Destination Bristol in 2020.”

The Haunt initiative, in itself, serves as “a very powerful model to connect academic work to the tourism industry within a city or space – showing that research can be an economic driver for tourism.”

Academics from Manchester Met at a Gothic Manchester event
Kolyn Amor of the Manchester Gothic Arts Group with Dr Linnie Blake and Dr Richard Gough Thomas from the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies.
Rosie Garland performing in front of audience at John Rylands Library
Novelist Rosie Garland presents her work at The John Rylands Library

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While the dark romanticism of the Gothic might seem like the antithesis of the celebratory tones of the city of Manchester’s confident public face, the Haunt team believe that the Gothic legacy is a vital part of the city’s history.

As local historian Jonathan Schofield argues, “Manchester is Gothic physically – in its Gothic buildings such as the Town Hall and Chetham’s and John Ryland’s libraries – but also in a deeper, philosophical, undercurrent.

“Manchester was the famously dark and smoky ‘shock city’ of the industrial age, and it persists in having a Gothic philosophical identity as a place that is brooding, wild and moody.’

This dark industrial miasma, famously depicted by Friedrich Engels in ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ (1845) was an integral aspect of Manchester’s rise to global prominence as ‘Cottonopolis’ during the nineteenth century.

Laughing in the face of death

The team’s work also shows that there is more to the Gothic than vampires and graveyards. The researchers have often been dubbed ‘spooky’, and an early tabloid report on The Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies was illustrated with an image from the film ‘Twilight’.

For Dale, though, “notions of spookiness actually belie the important cultural functions that the Gothic performs. Gothic is much more than a spooky aesthetic.

“It’s easy to dismiss scholars who spend their lives researching old graves, exhumations, ghosts and haunted castles as ‘spooky’ or ‘macabre’ – but that word trivialises the important cultural functions that the Gothic fulfils in contemporary culture, and which it has done since its inception in the eighteenth century.”

A sense of playfulness and fun is important to the work that Haunt Manchester does, further busting the Goth stereotype. As Helen says, “people like to laugh in the face of death, it’s a natural reaction”. 

Matt reinforces that view, adding that “there’s always a bit of fun in studying and working on the Gothic, which is part of the appeal for students and researchers”. In demonstration of this, the team has worked with drag artistes and fashion students, and has organised events for children, including  a special black-and-white ball based around a screening of Tim Burton’s film Frankenweenie.

Death, in many ways, has become my speciality.
Helen Darby

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The team’s stories also show that there are many pathways into the Gothic. Helen’s interest in the subject, for instance, stems from her teenage years: “I was a Goth, so I was part of the subculture. I used to go to the original Goth club in Manchester, Banshee. As a result, Haunt Manchester has been one of my all-time favourite things to have worked on, and I’ve been able to bring my subcultural understanding to bear on the subject. I also worked on a project called Encountering Corpses – so death, in many ways, has become my speciality!”

Matt, meanwhile, was initially inspired by Gothic literature: “I’ve always been drawn to stories of hauntings, and the sheer range of themes that the trope of haunting can engage with – from mourning to the transformative potential of spectres.”

The team has been keen to work closely with Manchester’s Goth community. As Helen explains, “the key thing is that Haunt Manchester is a collaborative venture – we’re taking stuff that already exists, and providing a focus for people to congregate around. We help people to share knowledge, and also inform it with our academic expertise. That way we can enrich the aesthetic sense of the activity that is already happening. We’re not making it happen, we’re bringing people together.”

She describes goths as “a very self-assured group, one that’s very knowledgeable about its history and values”.

It’s been quite eye-opening to see the audience that we’ve built up over the years.
Prof Dale Townshend
A woman reading in a library wearing a balaclava with tentacles across her mouth
Helen Darby in disguise during a Lovecraft-themed festival
A skull with bony tentacles protuding from its mouth, placed atop a gothic book
A gothic celebration cake by Conjurer’s Kitchen

Community

Haunt Manchester, and the Gothic Manchester Festival, have helped to strengthen the community by providing a focused, annual event in Manchester.

“People look forward to it,” Helen says “It has become a point of assembly, something people have in their calendars.” 

These events have also helped to strengthen links between academics and the wider public: “Lots of people come along who had never been to academic events before. We aim to be specialist but accessible, providing opportunities for life-long learning in an area that really interests them.”

Dale echoes these sentiments, saying, “It’s been quite eye-opening to see the audience that we’ve built up over the years.

“The Manchester Gothic Festival, in particular, enjoys a loyal following, and it’s been truly inspiring to witness the anticipation around our events each year.

“At the heart of each festival there’s been an academic symposium, led by the founder and head of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, Dr Linnie Blake, but the emphasis is on breaking down distinctions between the scholarly and non-scholarly communities.” 

He feels that Haunt Manchester’s events, and the network that has formed around them, have helped to develop “a form of identity, a kind of consolidated group of activities, purveyors and lifestyles, and bought people together. It’s also allowed a kind of two-way traffic between a sometimes very rarefied academic discourse and public groups.”

Being guided by a vision

So, what is the long-term vision for Haunt Manchester? There is still much to explore in relation to the city’s Gothic legacy, but the team also intends to widen its geographic reach. They have already built links with Destination Bristol, which has replicated the Haunt Manchester webpage for its own site and collaborated on events such as an online Goth and Alternative Market.

Matt says that the team would love to add an international dimension to their work: “We’ve only just started exploring the boroughs of Manchester, and Greater Manchester, so we can do more work there. But we also want to show that research can be transformed into something that can be a cultural and economic driver for cities. We’d love to become a benchmark for similar projects in other cities.” 

As Helen puts it: “We hope we can help cities to add some colour to their future activities –  even if it is mostly black!”

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We do things differently here

Watch Helen Darby explain how the Gothic Manchester Festival and The Centre for Gothic Studies are benefiting the city and its gothic subculture.

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Research team