The Greater Manchester City Deal was agreed with central government in March, and is now being rolled out.  What does this mean in practice, and what role will a university like ours play?

The economic case for the combined ten local authorities of our city region as a driver of national economic growth is compelling.  Greater Manchester has a record of matching London and the South-East in generating economic value, and in 2008 represented 5 per cent of the national economy.  Seven million people live within an hour’s drive of Manchester city centre, and the city region provides about 20 per cent of all economic activity in the North-West.  We have the largest concentration of students in Europe – with 100,000 university students at any one time – and Greater Manchester’s universities bring about £1.4bn income into the city each year.  As is the case with all urban concentrations of universities, a significant proportion of graduates stay in the region, while our networks of research collaborations, professional links, business and industry partnerships and graduate associations reach into every major city and almost every country in the world.

Major science innovations taking place at Manchester Universities have huge economic implications

More specifically, the City Deal has eight major strands.  Four aim to accelerate investment; a revolving infrastructure fund, an investment framework, a new housing investment fund and an emphasis on attracting inward investment.  There are specific proposals for improving transport (which those of us who struggle with overpriced and inefficient bus routes will welcome) and an emphasis on business growth (the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce is already one of the largest and most active in the country).  There is a particular focus on the low carbon economy and a brave commitment to reduce carbon emissions by 48 per cent in the next eight years.  And there is a stress on skills development to widen participation in the economy, create the workforce that will be needed to make economic ambitions feasible and to make better use of the £500m or so that central government currently spends on skills development and associated projects across the city region.

A Salford pupil attends a science event at the University as part of our widening participation programme

There’s a lot here for our universities.  Major science innovations such as the discovery and development of graphine at the University of Manchester, and breakthroughs in the biosciences and health provision, have huge economic implications.  The regeneration and investment in Salford Quays has already brought in the Lowry Theatre complex, the BBC, ITV and a host of others in the creative and IT industries, providing a massive shot of adrenaline for the full range of creative disciplines.  And there will be no hope for the low carbon economy, or of achieving targets for emissions reduction, without the combination of nuclear physics, the development of renewable energy and the work on building retrofit that we are pioneering in our Energy Hub.

There is a particular role for universities like ours in skills development and in opening up employment opportunities for people across Greater Manchester.  This is why I accepted an invitation to join the Skills and Employability Partnership, which brings together the combined authority of Greater Manchester, business and the further education sector to deliver on this aspect of the City Deal.  We have a strong and proud record in widening participation, and well over 40 per cent of our students are from families that have had limited – or no – opportunities at university before.  Our local students live in all ten regions that comprise Greater Manchester, roughly in proportion to the number of people living in each region.  And we have worked hard and successfully over the past couple of years in building up strong, utilitarian partnerships with Further Education Colleges across the city region – partners such as Tameside College, The Manchester College, Oldham College and, of course, Salford City College.  As with the City of Salford, our university, and its future and success, is intricately bound up with the present and future of Manchester as a whole.

"Our university, and its future and success, is intricately bound up with the present and future of Manchester as a whole"

What this means is that we can now work to overcome the tendency, particularly strong in British Higher Education at present, to build ever higher barriers between universities, on the one hand, and further education and skills development, on the other.  Instead, we can think in terms of “learning pathways” that map out clear routes that follow from compulsory education, whether for people who will move directly from school through an appropriate combination of further education, apprenticeship, sixth-form college or university, or for those who will – or have – moved directly into employment and now need to obtain new or additional qualifications for a world of work that is ever changing, ever more challenging.

Playing a role in developing opportunities such as these, based on coherent and appropriate pathways, logical sets of qualifications and valued partnerships between educational institutions is a big opportunity for us. It’s also part of the University of Salford’s DNA, with our roots in the Salford Working Men’s College and the industrial revolution, our standing until 1987 as a College of Advanced Technology, our merger with local colleges in 1996 and our core ethic of “excellence in application”.

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“Greater Manchester hails city deal announcement “ (with link to documentation): http://www.agma.gov.uk/gmca/city-deal-announcement/index.html

“Manchester city deal brings 6000 jobs boost”:  http://www.communities.gov.uk/news/corporate/2110432

In a memorable scene from the 1989 movie, Dead Poets’ Society, John Keating (played by Robin Williams) evokes the imagined whispers from a photograph of those long-dead: “if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it ….?”.  This came to mind when I read the report of excavations of a nineteenth century slave burial ground on Saint Helena, a remote speck of an island in the middle of the South Atlantic, midway between Africa, the slave plantations of Brazil and Cuba and the British colonies in the Caribbean.

Excavating graves on St Helena - photo provided courtesy of Andrew Pearson, University of Bristol

Saint Helena’s graveyards date from the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and were a consequence of Britain’s attempts to counter the transatlantic slave trade.  Between 1840 and 1872, the Vice-Admiralty Court at St Helena adjudicated the cases of slave ships captured by the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron.  As part of this process, “recaptive” slaves were brought ashore at Saint Helena.  Some were dead and many died soon after landing. A large burial ground was marked out in Rupert’s Valley, a desolate gully away from the island’s main settlement.

The Rupert’s Valley graveyard was excavated between 2007 and 2008, ahead of the planned construction of a haulage road to service the building of St Helena’s first airport.  As an archaeological site, Rupert’s Valley is unique: no other known burial ground contains only the bodies of first generation Africans who died as a direct result of their transportation.

The condition of recaptive slaves on their arrival at the island is best expressed in the words of those who saw for themselves.  Here are the recollections of George McHenry, Surgeon and Superintendent. On boarding a captured slaver, McHenry would find “a crowd of slaves … many are completely naked, the males almost always so, but some few women are sometimes provided with a cloth tied around the loins, and a favoured one or two with a calico gown, and a gaudy kerchief…. Some exhibit huge scabs, the result of blows, over different parts of the body; or thick crusts, formed from the drying of the humours of the craw-craw, a loathsome cutaneous eruption.  A few, still able to crawl, may be marked with the incipient pustules of the smallpox; while others are conspicuous by the size of the scorbutic tumours with which they are afflicted, or hideous from the extent of the gangrenous sores eating into their flesh. Among the throng are to be found a few unable to move, from the rack of rheumatism, the stab of pleurisy, or the tortures of a broken bone; or in the last stages of emaciation, oozing out their lives with the constant flux of dysentery; or perhaps just dead”.

The Africans of the slave bark "Wildfire"

Life at the camp was miserable.  Designed for a maximum of 600 inmates, Rupert’s Valley at times housed more than 3,000 people.  We still know little of daily conditions, but snippets in the historical documents give us a good idea.  An 1849 report by the Colonial Surgeon comments that “the ferocity of the rats in a few instances which I traced, attacking the dying and almost universally the dead, was a subject of frequent communication on my part to the Collector of Customs”.  Poison could not be used to deal with the rat problem because the people in the camp were capturing and eating the rats.

There was little respect for the dead.  The archaeological team excavated a total of 325 skeletons, along with ten charnel pits of disarticulated human remains.  There were 178 graves, less than half of which contained a single body. The rest contained between two and seven bodies, some lying on their backs and sides, others pushed into the grave head-to-toe and others stacked vertically to get as many bodies as possible into a single grave.  Only five were in coffins. A third of those buried were children up to the age of twelve, and there were also significant numbers of young, and young adult, men.  As with the transatlantic trade in general, those enslaved, recaptured and brought to Saint Helena were for the most part children and young adults.

Some of those who did survive remained on Saint Helena, but most were rapidly relocated to other British colonies, mostly in the Caribbean. Onward emigration from St Helena started in December 1841, when the Mary Hartley sailed for British Guiana with 140 passengers.  Within the year, some 2675 recaptives had been taken to the Cape Colony, Demerara, Jamaica, and Trinidad, as well as British Guiana.  By the early 1870s, about 18,000 former slaves had been moved to other British colonies. As Andrew Pearson writes in the report on the excavations,  “emigration was no panacea.  The St Helenian recaptives fell prey to the same ambiguities and muddled concepts of freedom experienced by earlier liberated slaves, for example those brought to Sierra Leone in the years after 1807.  Their freedom was of the most limited type, as apprenticeship, army service or emigration to other colonies as indentured labourers all entailed a lengthy period of compulsory service, and one which they were not guaranteed to survive … for many Africans their initial capture, transport on the slave ship, incarceration on St Helena, and onward transport to the colonies formed part of a single linear experience” .

The Rupert’s Valley graveyard was excavated between 2007 and 2008 - photo provided courtesy of Andrew Pearson, University of Bristol

The report of the Saint Helena excavations, Infernal Traffic, was launched in March. The artefacts from the excavations are currently at the University of Bristol and will be transferred to Liverpool for an exhibition at the International Slavery Museum in 2013 before being returned to Saint Helena. The human remains will shortly be re-interred on St Helena.

Charlotte Harper, probably the last survivor of Saint Helena’s recaptive slaves, died on 26 August 1929 at the age of about 100.  Today, there seem to be no known descendants of slaves on the island.  The airport is still not built, but will probably open in 2015, allowing a tourist industry to an island that most people associate with Napoleon’s exile and death.  It seems unlikely that whispers from these graves will be heard on Saint Helena’s future tourist trails, anymore than they are heard around the grounds and in the corridors of Britain’s historic mansions that were built from the profits of slavery and the proceeds of Caribbean plantations.   And that is why we need our critical and ever-probing historical disciplines, rather than the sycophantic celebrations of nation and past glory that some wish for.

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Pearson, Jeffs, Witkin and MacQuarrie, 2011, Infernal Traffic. Excavation of a Liberated African Graveyard in Rupert’s Valley, St Helena. CBA Research Report 169.

“Bristol archaeologists unearth slave burial ground on St Helena”. http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2012/8294.html

“Archaeologists Unearth Slave Burial Ground On the Island of St. Helena”.  Science Daily: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120308101621.htm

The Salford Sonic Fusion Festival, which ran across our MediaCityUK and Peel Park campuses in the last week of April, was an explosion of creativity.

Mirrors - Jan Kopinski. Projection by The Joy of Box

Jan Kopinski and Jim Boxall collaborated to stretch the technology of the Digital Performance Lab in Mirrors, with a jazz and video track inspired by Poland’s composers, folk and religious music and landscapes. Peter Mechtler interpreted the soundscape of Manchester from Stephenson’s Rocket to the Metroliner M5000: “from the sound of ‘Puffing Bill’ (one of the first thermodynamic locomotives) or the hiss of electronically controlled AC motors of today’s rail vehicles, one can sense an obvious change in the quality of sounds emitted by transportation systems, as a result of the advance of technology over the last 180 years.” And an evening concert, also in the Digital Performance Lab, brought Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise, a visual and musical narrative inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy that seeks to release classical musicians from received traditions and habits on the principle that “the sound should be a picture of the score.”

A work of wide collaboration, the Salford Sonic Fusion Festival was supported by the European Union and the Arts Council and brought together artists from Britain, the USA, Italy, Greece, France and Austria. Excerpts from performances will be posted online shortly.

Salford Sinfonietta - a new ensemble of University of Salford students and members of the BBC Philharmonic, Opera North and RNCM

Salford Sonic Fusion was curated by Steve Davismoon, Head of our Music Directorate, and follows on from the extraordinary and evocative work orchestrated by Paul Sermon from the School of Art & Design, which marked the Duke of Edinburgh’s visit to MediaCityUK in March. In this combination of music, dance and digital projection, movement and sound were used to animate the legacy of Alan Turing in building the foundations of our digital world.

These events, compositions and creations are showing the energy and imagination that follows when the conventional walls between disciplines are breached. It’s the same order of creativity that enabled the Industrial Revolution and the achievements of the 19th Century, where our roots as a university lie – a lineage acknowledged and interrogated through the urban soundscapes theme of the Festival. Bringing together the best in music and performance with digital engineers, who can structure and shape new sensory environments anticipates the future in a myriad of tantalising ways. It is surely what a university should be about.

For many areas of research, taking a long view is essential in unraveling cause and effect relationships as well as significant trends and their consequences.  I know this as an archaeologist – a discipline in which a slip of the trowel can wipe out a thousand years.  But at least archaeologists can hope to establish a time line of a few millennia in a couple of field seasons.  Practitioners of other disciplines have to be more patient.

Students take part in the Alpine Glacier Project

A great example of scientific persistence is the Alpine Glacier Project, now almost forty years on.  Professor David Collins, of our School of Environment and Life Sciences, has been part of this project since its inception, and has been leading University of Salford expeditions into the Swiss Alps for the past thirteen summers. Along with its central research objectives, this project provides the opportunity for field experience for students taking part in field courses and for sustained periods of individual fieldwork for undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations.

Monitoring the health of glaciers is an important part of understanding the detail and dynamics of climate change, since variations in weather patterns strongly influence the hydrology of these high mountain areas.  Over the last century, the mass of glaciers declined, resulting in greatly increased river flows.  Looking to the future, river flows will steadily decline as Alpine glaciers continue to diminish and, eventually, disappear altogether.  Some of the immediate consequences of these changes are serious floods and changing water quality.

At the heart of the Alpine Glacier Project is the detailed measurement of meltwater characteristics in the rivers that drain from the Findelen and Gorner glaciers in Switzerland. This information contributes to model the overall balance between climate, glacier mass and the meltwater system.  In turn, increased understanding of Alpine conditions is being used to better understand this system in other parts of the world such as the Himalaya, where meltwater availability is critical for hydropower production, irrigation and water resources development, and where floods have devastating impacts on humanity.

Findelengletscher, Swiss Alps, has receded dramatically since the Little Ice Age

Considered more generally, it is important that the ability to carry out long-term projects such as this is maintained during a time of rapid and sometimes traumatic change in research arrangements at our universities.  Along with studies of climate change – and archaeology – a wide range of disciplines need long time series in order to make key research breakthroughs.  For example, health disciplines are only now deriving the benefits of lifetime cohort studies, that can show key relationships between lifestyle and vulnerability to disease.  And, despite the amount that is written and assumed about social mobility and education, there are remarkably few studies that have tracked representative groups of people from schooling and through their subsequent careers.

In some aspects of what we do in universities, glacial rates of change are no bad thing.

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David Collins, “Climatic warming, glacier recession and runoff from Alpine basins after the Little Ice Age maximum”. Annals of Glaciology 48 2008, pages 119-124

A recent review of Salford’s economic prospects has highlighted the significance of MediaCityUK, noting that “few parts of Britain, let alone Greater Manchester, can boast the regeneration experienced by Salford over the past decade.”

“few parts of Britain, let alone Greater Manchester, can boast the regeneration experienced by Salford over the past decade”

When the docks at Salford Quays closed in 1982, three thousand people were working there.  Today, the Office for National Statistics reports that just over 25,000 are employed at Salford Quays, and this will rise by a further 15,000 once MediaCityUK is at full capacity – a thirteen-fold increase in three decades. More broadly, there are about 7,500 businesses in Salford, and this total is increasing by just over 800 a year, despite the recession. Much of this growth is in the digital and creative sectors.  The most recent regional review of Salford by the Manchester Evening News noted that “Salford is supporting Greater Manchester’s growth into becoming one of Europe’s most important digital and creative media hubs, with the sector’s core at MediaCityUK. This development is the base for BBC North, the University of Salford and a host of commercial occupiers”.

Our investment in our MediaCityUK campus puts us at the core of this regional and national growth point, that will continue to drive regeneration across Central Salford.  It will enable us to offer our students the experience of being close to new directions in the creative arts, media and digital futures.  And it will give us significant opportunities to build partnerships with a wide range of new businesses.

Primary school children from Salford take part in a technology challenge on campus as part of our widening participation programme

One of the challenges for Salford is to ensure that good jobs in these new sectors go to Salford residents.  This requires access to educational opportunity, reversing the decades of economic marginalisation that followed from the collapse of the traditional industries of the North West some fifty years ago.  This is why we have also concentrated on access partnerships with all our major feeder schools in the city, on working closely with Salford City Council on the provision of education, and forming strong and effective partnerships with Salford City College and The Manchester College to open up clear, post-16 pathways towards appropriate sets of qualifications.

The Manchester Evening News report concludes that “the development, supported by an expanding ICT and digital communications sector, is quickly manifesting itself as one of the jewels in the crown of Salford’s economy. All the indications are that MediaCityUK is inspiring investors and developers as one of Britain’s most ambitious, innovative and creative business destinations”.

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Regional Review, Salford.  Manchester Evening News, 1 March 2012:

http://menmedia.co.uk/manchestereveningnews/news/business/s/1488042_regional-review—salford