JUNE 21st, THE LONGEST DAY, 2015 The Longest Day began with me dancing on a table with my flatmate’s girlfriend. He’d been out with her to some do, and they’d come in full of wine and had woken me up, demanding that I get my shoes on and go out with them. We compromised by dancing in the flat and so, when I left to photograph at just after 2.30am, my spirits were as high as a buzzard circling a […]
JERSEY STREET, ANCOATS 6.33AM – There’s a sense of growing affection for Ancoats. No longer do people scurry from doorway to cab, fearful of being mugged, or “taxed” as I recently heard a Glaswegian refer to it. Ancoats is maybe the best of Manchester’s efforts to reinvent itself. The area used to pulse with endeavour, power and anger but now, whilst it still gives sanctuary to its ghosts, it increasingly neutralises their presence. Soon the streets around the dark brick […]
OLD MILL STREET, NEW ISLINGTON, ANCOATS 4.16AM – I’ve recently returned from North Carolina where people were astonished to hear, over an honest glass of Moonshine, that Manchester’s economic fortunes were so badly affected by the American Civil war. I told them about the statue of Abraham Lincoln, and the principled boycott of southern cotton that led to real hardship in the city. I also met a man who’d been part of the team that developed GPS mapping, who now […]
CHATLEY STREET, CHEETHAM HILL 5.26AM – I’ve always wondered what was in the minds of the Victorian men that designed, and then constructed, the strange phallic tower that rises up from the centre of Strangeways Prison. Maybe the architect, Alfred Waterhouse, was obsessed with reminding the incarcerated criminals within of their weakness and powerlessness. Today, the surrounding streets see men slope past in their shiny cars, looking for women that will gratify their needs at a price that can never […]
HILTON STREET, MANCHESTER 4.31AM – It had rained in the early hours of the new day, and the roads were glistening with colour as fresh as a newly woven magic carpet. Any birdsong was drowned out by the raucous calls of girls and boys dressed in their finery, still away with the fairytale world of escape afforded them by the Manchester potion of music and drink. Dreamy eyed couples kissed at bus stops, desperate boys leapt in front of my […]