LITTLE LEVER STREET 6.51AM A SLOW MOMENT FILM The area around Little Lever Street, just off Great Ancoats Street is still awaiting gentrification. The buildings are struggling to remain and the small, dark streets are pock marked by rubbish. At dawn most of us are in that state of sleep that allows dreams to fill our minds, and in these half lit streets can sense the ghosts of old Mancunia as the area awaits its rescue. This film contains flickering. […]
VICTORIA STATION, MANCHESTER 6.47AM Two nights before there had been the Autumn Equinox, when summer ends and the days tip towards winter. The moon had shone like a torch and was perfectly round, as if it had been drawn by an eager to please schoolboy with a compass. This morning, partly covered by cloud, it had the deflated look of an old leather football that had just been clogged towards touch by an uncultured centre half. Outside Victoria Station there’s […]
CORNELL STREET, ANCOATS, 6.24AM It felt, on this early Autumn morning, that there was a boldness to the birds singing their dawn songs, and the night sky was showing early pools of blue. Clouds shrugged and melted away, leaving a definite zing in the air. Soon there was a simple, unspoilt patch of sapphire colour above me and the day promised to be clear. I arrived at the bottom of the terraced streets that lie behind the Express building, an […]
PASSIONS, DUCIE STREET, 5.36AM This morning there was the musk scent of early Autumn. I breathed in deeply, and the air rasped the inside of my nose, causing my nostrils to flare. A softening mist embroiled the warm, enticing lights that illuminated streets as old as the professions that once lined them. An open doorway at the side of Passions massage parlour, open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, revealed stairs leading up to a first floor that […]
RADIUM STREET, ANCOATS 5.43AM My alarm went off at 4am, and a couple of early birds were already chirruping as I turned on the light, causing me to hurry onto the street around 20 minutes later. In the the sky above me, though, there was not even a hint of daylight. For some reason, they’d begun their songs of hope a full hour before the dawn actually arrived, and I felt deceived. I pulled up my hood against the thumping […]
STORE STREET, PICCADILLY 4.43AM When I can see that the dawn will be clear and rain free, I try to look East, where, behind Ancoats, the sky begins its daytime shift soft and golden. As this morning began there was a stillness in the area, at odds with its past and its future intentions. Here, amongst tatty trees and unruly undergrowth, living is slowly encroaching upon working as factory units begin to quietly retreat, and flats trespass further into what […]
A PATCH OF GREEN, SWAN STREET 4.29AM I wasn’t intending to get up on this morning, but I was awoken by a panic dream, in which I was photographing in Manchester, but it was unrecognisable, and the dawn was taking away the darkness too quickly for me. So, unable to rest my mind, I left my bed and made my way down towards Victoria station. Along Swan Street two male friends were crossing towards the car park beneath the glowing […]
BELOW NEW UNION STREET, ANCOATS, 4.21AM When I awoke I had that moment a lot of us experience, of not being quite sure where I was. I wasn’t really free of sleep an hour later when I was staring at the sky, and waiting on the cusp of Redhill and New Union Street in Ancoats for a reluctant night to finally leave. A large, square board opposite me proclaimed the potential joy of the New Islington development, depicting a couple […]
JUTLAND STREET, MANCHESTER 3.48AM – Jutland Street is perhaps the oddest street in Manchester. There seems to be no hill for it to have emerged from and yet there it is, steep as a Pennine and cobbled just like streets in the black and white memories of our grandparents. I was perched at Jutland’s summit under a Bible bright moon, that was defiantly refusing to leave the dawn sky above Piccadilly’s modern structures. To my right two men scuttled down […]
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 […]