£2.5m Manchester penthouse named after communist revolutionary

A luxury penthouse apartment has been named after one of history’s most famous communists.

The £2.5 million flat in Deansgate, Manchester, is called The Engels, in an apparent reference to Friedrich Engels, who, along with Karl Marx, wrote the Communist Manifesto.

A group of tenants said it was ridiculous to name an expensive flat after a man who once wrote extensively about poverty and squalor in Manchester.

The developer, Renaker, has been contacted for comment.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous,” said Isaac Rose, of the Greater Manchester Tenants’ Union.

He said people in Manchester and Salford, where the German-born philosopher and writer lived at one stage of his life, were suffering because of a lack of affordable accommodation.

Mr Rose added: “Engels wrote of a divided Manchester and it seems we are still there.”

The Engels are in a building not far from where he researched his influential 1845 work, The Condition of the Working Class In England.

He had met Karl Marx in 1844 and the two founded the Communist League.

While Engels wrote about poverty, he came from a wealthy family.

His father owned a textile factory in Barmen, Germany, and his father’s hope was that by sending him to work at the family textile factory in Weaste, Salford, Engels would withdraw his radical ideals.

But what he saw in the slums of Manchester led to his work The Condition of The Working Class in England.

Dr Dean Kirby, a Manchester journalist and historian who researched Engels’ journey through the Manchester slums for his PhD, said Engels was “a man of contradictions”.

“If he were around today, he could be enjoying the champagne lifestyle of the high life while writing about the deprivation still rife in British cities, including Manchester,” he said.

But, he added, there was an “irrepressible irony” in naming a penthouse after a man who said Manchester’s rich “systematically exclude themselves from the working class” and hide them in “cattle shelters for human beings “.

The other penthouse in the building is called The Turing, apparently as a tribute to Alan Turing, the computer pioneer and Enigma machine code breaker who worked at the University of Manchester from 1948.