I’ve just published a new photograph on the website. Click here to visit the page
NEWS
I’ve just published a new photograph on the website. Click here to visit the page
I actually began in Macclesfield Forest, on the night of the full moon for my project ‘Our Future is Ancient’. After sitting in the car for several hours, watching the trees defend themselves by twisting and twirling in the gusting air as rain fell hard and consistently, I decided to return to the city. The day was just emerging as I was passing through the Piccadilly area, so I stopped to photograph. It’s an area still awaiting its fate as […]
My second recent visit out at dawn took me to the area around Manchester Piccadilly Station. It’s a difficult area to photograph, being slightly chaotic in its layout. Looking at the departure board in a time when our travel is restricted I felt such a strong urge to visit places I’d not normally consider spending a day in. You can read the text, see images and listen to audio recorded whilst there by clicking this link
PICCADILLY STATION 04.22AM April 2020 LISTEN TO DAWN AUDIO FROM PICCADILLY Manchester Piccadilly comes into view not long after the London Road has bent under the Mancunian Way, on the way in from Ardwick. This terminus station was built high off the ground, the trains arriving and leaving by tracks laid on viaducts of tainted, red brick. The surrounding area sets the standard for Mancs, being a place of compromised promise, of bold ambitions impaired by the nagging ghosts of […]
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. […]
MANGLE STREET, NORTHERN QUARTER 7.04AM Back Piccadilly forms the city centre boundary to this current project. It’s a curious street, like a redundant spine, that more or less runs the length of the Northern Quarter. Around its liason with Oldham Street people perform a peculiar dance as they avoid bumping into one another on the narrow pavement, and vans and lorries block it whilst grumpy men unload goods into the bars, supermarkets and shops that face out onto Piccadilly. Away […]
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 […]
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 […]
DUCIE HOUSE, LAYSTALL STREET, 6AM – Ducie House used to be where the legendary Home nightclub banged out its tunes, and where I was once refused entry for not wearing “VIP” shoes. It was the early 90s hub for creative talent in the city and housed numerous designers, magazines and other young, unruly Mancs plotting to rule the world from their Manchester base. Its ground floor is now occupied by Urban Splash, planners of New Islington, a work in progress, […]