Money to burn? Not in Salford

As a new bar opens in Salford offering a cocktail finished with a flaming £20 note, our writer considers the history of burning money and the symbolism of this particular act against a backdrop of growing inequality

Billed as an immersive modern-art-meets-dining space, a new Spinningfields restaurant that opened at the weekend is less Berlin’s Zagreus Project and more pre-French Revolution, reportedly featuring cocktails that come with burning imitation twenty pound notes and chandeliers from which women will swing and pour Champagne into the glasses of, one imagines, wealthy middle-aged men. Truly, it is the end of days.

The venue is decorated in gold leaf with a statue reminiscent of Hermes (that’s the god of commerce, amongst other things), and as the usherer of souls into the afterlife he will presumably feel at home in this late-capitalist Hunger Games nightmare we’re currently muddling through. 

There is a varied history of burning money; whether as protest, symbolic act or performance art. In Graham Greene’s seminal short story The Destructors, the Wormsley Common gang burn money stolen from Mr. Tom (Old Misery, as they call him) symbolising their nihilism, their rejection of the world as it is. Swedish feminists burned money in 2010 in a protest about unequal pay. Serge Gainsbourg burned a five-hundred franc note as a protest against heavy taxation. And while it is not a real twenty pound note being burned here (it is an imitation 'garnish'), this is decadence for the sake of it; an already tasteless gesture made more gross by the fact that Manchester is in the throes of a homelessness crisis, with groups of people sleeping rough moved from site to site in a series of low-level social cleansings.

Last year Manchester City Council noted the number of homeless people had doubled in the city. The Manchester Evening News has reported on the growing economic gap between the poorer and richer areas of the city (in 2015, people living in Trafford earned over a quarter more than those living in Oldham). The Salford Star observed that more than 25% of young people (under 16) in Salford are living in poverty. The Manchester Central Foodbank has seen record numbers using its resource. And while it would be reductive to point the finger squarely at what is essentially a tacky and poorly thought out theme bar, a touch of social conscience would surely inspire a consideration that there are people for whom poverty is not an abstraction but a felt reality; that sequestering a lavish space for rich adult babies to pretend-burn money is some kind of hell.

These things don’t happen in a vacuum and the presence of such a bar is surely indicative of the widening income gap and class divide in the city. The 'Northern Powerhouse' that Manchester is seemingly intent on being is something good in theory – it dispels the 'grim up North' stereotype and devolves power away from Westminster. But the large-scale development in Manchester and Salford is money being directed towards the wrong places.

The city doesn’t need more luxury flats, it needs affordable homes; and the appearance of investment into the city is trickle-down economics at its worst. It not only further obscures the very prescient issues of homelessness, poverty and addiction; it exacerbates them, pricing more and more people out of the city, making more and more people feel that the investors and the council are indifferent to their circumstances. 

John Harris, as part of his Anywhere but Westminster series in the run-up to the EU referendum, visited Collyhurst and interviewed residents despairing of not having even a playground or park, where just ten minutes away Manchester city centre is seeing massive regeneration. But it’s not regeneration, it’s gentrification. Once-affordable regions in the city such as Ancoats and parts of Salford are being systematically invested in and redeveloped, but it’s not for the benefit of existing residents; it’s for buy-to-let landlords, developers and, eventually, those who can afford to live there.

The new bar sits in the One New Bailey development, across the river from the People’s History Museum, sending up the exclusion and inequality found in the immediate perimeter of the site. Its signature cocktail is named 'Mine Tastes Better Than Yours'. Those familiar with the concept of accelerationism will know the maxim: the worse the better. In which case, vive la revolution.