‘Abbey Gardens, Hattersley’, is the widely reported address where two Greater Manchester policewomen, Nicola Hughes (pretty and ‘bubbly’) and Fiona Bone (her photo has a cheeky look like Pauline Quirke’s), were killed on Tuesday 18th September. It’s got previous: Moors murderer Ian Brady lived on the estate in the 1960s, not longer after it was built. But the postal address of the crime scene is ‘Mottram’, where there are ‘stunning views’ of the Peak District and the stone-built old police station is currently on sale for £300,000. In Abbey Gardens, on the edge of the Hattersley estate, proletarian Manchester protrudes into the outlying middle classes. Bet they don’t like it up ‘em. Meanwhile, spurning Mrs Bouquet and all her works, Manchester is half-proud to have been known as ‘Gunchester’ in the 1990s; ‘Gun-’ being half-a-decade on from off-yer-face ‘Madchester’ (Happy Mondays, Hacienda, smiley meets scally), with firearms. There’s even a gym on the south side of the city (in Wythenshawe, the biggest housing estate in Britain) which issued a promotional video purporting to be CCTV of a gangland shooting: silent movie, Chav-style; the underclassy club people are dying to get into (but no one was armed in making this film). Watching it on YouTube, you could almost mistake these premises for the Cotton Tree pub (built 1905) in dreary Droylsden (another part of the Greater Manchester sprawl) where in May one-eyed, Irish-born Dale Cregan is thought to have killed amateur boxer Mark Short in a punishment shooting gone wrong, before going on to murder Mark’s father, David Short, three months later, followed a month after that by the two policewomen. Perhaps the murdered officers thought the call-out was to leafy Mottram instead of ‘Gun-Mad-Manchester’, where the sensibility is Shaun Ryder meets Baudrillard’s Postmodern but pockets of gang war are really taking place. read more