The Massacre of Peterloo or Britons Strike Home by George Cruikshank. Photograph: Spencer Arnold/Getty
This Thursday promises to be an interesting day in Manchester, with passions aroused once again by the city's meagre apology for a monument to one of the most significant hours in its history - the 1819 Peterloo Massacre.
We may have lost the great Tony Wilson, but all sorts of other bright sparks have plans to mark the 188th anniversary, both on August 16 and by proposing more fitting monuments in the longer term than the feebly-worded plaque on the Radisson hotel.
Everyone seems open-minded and it's a really good issue for a thoughtful debate, now that Manchester is self-confident enough to honour the 19th-century past, which, for many years, has been seen as a brake on progress. Current talk is of a sculpture - a very large one. Even bigger than The B of the Bang, the enormous sea urchin by Thomas Heatherwick which stands outside Man City's new ground.
That isn't a terribly original idea but it will attract plenty of support. Central Manchester is rich in fine statuary, including a fine Abraham Lincoln that is an interesting earlier example of political art. It honours the city's principled support of the US president's blockade of the Confederacy against its own interests as the world's greatest cotton importer. But it didn't come easy.
Gladstone and Bright also cast their bronze radical stares around Albert Square; and in terms of modern sculpture, Birmingham's Spirit of the River, Iron Man and their neighbours show how an old issue can be given a new artistic twist. But Manchester is likely to want more than this.
One idea is for the abundant open spaces around the Radisson and the neighbouring Town Hall to become the scene for an annual gathering. It might connect the sites of similar defining moments: Tiananmen, Amritsar, St Petersburg; places where democracy was painfully germinated when authority lost its rag and fired on unarmed crowds.
There could be a Peterloo prize, a Nobel for democratic work. Or a Peterloo book competition to rival the Mann Booker, Whitbread et al. Manchester has a terrific supporting cast in the People's History museum and two Working Class museums in neighbouring Salford. On a simpler level, the city could crack on now with naming lots of Peterloo, Orator and Chartist streets, or tower blocks, nightclubs or lofts.
For me, the key thing is talking up the "Peterloo effect". It is too easy and cosy to wallow in the tragic side - the self-indulgent victim school of history. Read Fame is the Spur by Howard Spring (once a Guardian reporter) and see to what excellent use the hero puts a Peterloo yeomanry sabre. That's the Manchester spirit. But what do you think?
