St Petersburg pedestrians versus Manchester meanderers #CityDailyPhoto

 

Down in a St Petersburg Metro station last week and on a Manchester square this week, people in thought and ancient men on pedestals for both. I cannot deny that St Petersburg with its imperial wealth from 18C and 19C and Soviet-built 20C monuments is the more beautiful city by a long way. 

Manchester has its charms though and both cities share the following: Northern outposts where 20C money was lavished on the capitals while the north was left to rot (the Leningrad World War II siege and the decimation of industrial post-World War II Manchester, although I hesitate to compare these two). 

Both cities were built on the sweat, blood and bones of an exploited workforce- the serfs in 18 and 19 C St Petersburg and the impoverished factory workers of 19C industrial Manchester. The conditions of the latter led to Frederick Engels, whose family owned a factory in nearby Weaste in Salford, to write the Making of the English Working classes in 1844, and also to work with Karl Marx in Manchester on theories such as the Communist Manifesto which, of course, was put into practice a few decades later in 1917 as Lenin arrived in St Petersburg...