Hulme

Hulme is presented through the cooperative block where Tyler and the narrator live: a place of shared green space and self-conscious ecological aspirations, but also of informal domestic arrangements, foxes, and under-the-table ham. The neighborhood’s communal ideals are part of everyday life rather than a distant backdrop, and the narrator’s account finds both affection and comedy in the gap between those ideals and how its residents actually behave.

Setting and Domestic Arrangement

The flat is in a wood-and-chrome cooperative built in Hulme, south of the city centre, in the late 1990s. Tyler owns it because her father provided the money for the purchase—not merely the deposit—soon after she moved there. The narrator is supposed to pay Tyler a hundred a month for a small box-room, but never manages to pay, and Tyler never asks. The arrangement gives the home an informality that extends beyond its shared architecture: the narrator lives there without the expected exchange of rent being enforced.

Courtyard and Neighbors

The block shares a central courtyard with a patch of grass and raised beds where residents grow vegetables if they have the time and organizational skills. Someone once tried to keep chickens in a small sustainable-wood hutch, but foxes ended the experiment. The courtyard thus holds both the cooperative’s practical environmental aspirations and their limits: growing vegetables continues, while keeping livestock proves less durable.

Zuzu, Tyler’s cat, makes that failed venture part of the household’s history. She has dragged four hens through the cat flap, leaving them limp-necked and punctured in the middle of the kitchen floor. The incident turns the courtyard’s attempted chicken-keeping into a domestic consequence, with Zuzu’s predatory success intruding into the flat.

Café and Everyday Contradictions

The surrounding flats are home mostly to residents the narrator describes as hippie types, whom Tyler calls “hippysters,” a label that joins eco-friendly toilet cleaner to designer clothes. The ground-floor shop is a vegan café where Tyler and the narrator eat when they have forgotten to buy food, which happens often. They bring their own ham and honey and add them to the café’s food beneath the table, making their participation in the neighborhood’s ecological culture deliberately imperfect.

The honey episode sharpens the contrast. Tyler once asked the café staff whether they had honey, assuming it would be acceptable because it is a natural product made by bees; the staff reprimanded her. Their response, and Tyler’s indignation, make the café a small stage for competing assumptions about what ethical eating means. In the novel’s view of Hulme, communal living and environmental commitments coexist with everyday appetite, practical compromise, and humor.