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By Root 361 0

Society eagerly took on ‘Vegetable’ Wright. Court cases galore ensued, many of Wright’s witnesses being bribed or plied with drink to get them to attend. He tried to raise the spectre that enemies of footpaths always fall back on, namely that the Bottoms path was a hotbed of immorality. To that end he persuaded the governor of Flixton workhouse, William Eccles, to give evidence, which proved perhaps less than helpful to his cause. ‘I think use of the Bottoms encourages vice,’ simpered Eccles in court. ‘I only see disorderly ones going that way.’ He paused, and continued: ‘I once saw Mr Stephenson the clergyman going that way to church.’

After huge legal costs had been racked up on both sides, the ultimate result was defeat for Wright. A delighted party broke into his parkland and walked the paths that had been off-limits for two years. Archibald Prentice, proprietor of the Manchester Gazette and a committee member of the Society, arrived to witness the end of the celebrations. Although he wrote that he had been sad to miss the moment when the fences were smashed through and the paths walked once again, he was moved to say that ‘I experienced a higher pleasure in observing the fresh marks of the saw, the little two-feet wide opening, and the newly made track through the tall grass, than such sights might be thought capable of giving.’ So intoxicated was Prentice by the result that he published a 60-page victory pamphlet on the Flixton Footpath Battle, and gave it away with copies of the Gazette.

Wright had reaped a tailwind of trouble, but perhaps not quite all of it of his own making. The industrial towns of the north-west had ballooned in size in recent decades (Manchester’s population had risen sevenfold to 150,000 in just 50 years), but the endless boom and expansion had hit its first set of buffers, and times were fearsomely tough. The Napoleonic Wars were fresh in every mind, especially those of the nervous authorities. Manchester was still simmering from the brutal attack of August 1819 that became known as the Peterloo Massacre. A massive crowd, estimated to be around 70,000 people, had gathered in St Peter’s Field in the city centre to hear radical firebrand Henry Hunt speak in favour of sweeping political reform. A jittery set of city magistrates – Ralph Wright amongst them – unleashed the militia on the unarmed demonstrators, whom they scythed through mercilessly. Between ten and twenty people were slain, and hundreds injured. It was a defining moment in British history and, overlain with the lacy snobbery of Flixton society, made for a toxic cocktail.

Despite being blessed with an advanced sense of the melodramatic, even I couldn’t whip up much emotion from the Flixton footpaths as they stand today, however historic their significance. In my head, I imagined a Soviet-style monument to the victory of common access, but instead there’s a very modest little plaque, placed by the PNFS, half-way up a lamp-post, halfway along the Bottoms path. This is the track that caused the kerfuffle in the first place, although the building of the railway from Manchester to Warrington in the early 1870s necessitated its slight straightening. The railway, and the golf course on the other side, have hemmed the path right in. Each side is policed by a massive fence, with the footpath low between them, just wide enough for two people to pass if they angle themselves correctly (if they don’t, Mr Eccles at the workhouse might just have had a point). Walking it, you feel as if you’re in the perimeter noman’s-land of a high-security prison.

Monotonous as it may be, there is something strangely comforting in walking it too. The only views you get are those through the bars (on the railway side) or the mesh (on the golf course side), but it’s all very familiar, ubiquitous even. There are a million paths just like it all over the land, those that duck along the bottom of people’s gardens, run atop rubbish-strewn railway banks, squeeze down alleyways between 1960s houses, get caked in the footprints and fag ends of persons unknown. The