breakfast Archives - notquitelight.com

05 Jan 2016

OLDHAM STREET 7.35AM

OLDHAM STREET 7.35AM The previous night I’d begun to read The Manchester Man, written by Mrs Linnaeus Banks and published in 1876. It details the life of Jabez Clegg, who was rescued in his cradle from the flooding River Irk, and adopted by the kind and hard working Simon Clegg, and Bess, his saintly daughter. This act of absolute altruism is set against the conditions of work and life that Mancunians had to exist in during the early 19th Century. […]

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06 Oct 2015

RUSTICA, TIB STREET, 7.03AM

RUSTICA, TIB STREET, 7.03AM The day before had started chaotically, as my alarm didn’t go off, and a non-committal drizzle had doused the weekend warmth in streets that now seemed disjointed. An old fella in a tweed flat cap, walking slowly and unsteadily with a stick, had stood in the middle of the road and loudly denounced a driver going in the wrong direction up a one way street. There’d also been a small altercation with a young lad in […]

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04 Oct 2015

LITTLE LEVER STREET, 6.50 AM

LITTLE LEVER STREET, 6.50 AM The buildings clustered around Little Lever Street allow very little of the dawn light to touch their walls. The street lamps stay on longer here, straining to fill shadowed doorways with some kind of light, and it feels as if the ghosts of old Mancunia blend with the scent of rubbish that drifts along back streets not yet deemed worthy by the gentrifiers of the Northern Quarter. Above could be seen the Travelodge on Great […]

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15 Mar 2015

HONEY STREET, MANCHESTER, 6.13AM

I’d seen the abandoned pub on Honey Street the previous evening, whilst eating a falafel wrap, bought from a take-away on Cheetham Hill Road. Many of the pubs in this area have been closed down, and often demolished. I sometimes hear my flatmate talk wistfully about nights out in them. He calls them “boozers” still. Around the Northern Quarter and the city centre there seems to be a new bar or restaurant opening every week, with London businesses now beginning […]