EDWARD STREET INDUSTRIAL ESTATE, 2.31AM During the summer, when first light occurs during the early hours of a new day, I’m often alone. And this solitude allows my mind to wander, to imagine the city as it might have been before humans began to change and shape it, when there was nothing but grass, woodland and rock. I like to look down to the tarmac, and consider what lies beneath, before boundaries and territories were enforced on land that once […]

MIDDLEWOOD LOCKS, WASTELAND 5.26AM I’m content to confess that I’ve spent much of the last decade, maybe longer, hoping to find a portal to pass through. In my head, the city is full of them, and I simply need to turn around the correct corner and I will be gone, into another dimension, an alternative version of Manchester and Salford, of shadow lives and other outcomes. Given the unlikely nature of this happening, I’ve accepted a compromise, where I travel […]

HYDRA CLOSE, 5.18am There is an estate in Lower Broughton of social housing, with streets named after constellations. Auriga, Cygnus, Lacerata, names to transport you deep into other worlds. But when I looked up on this morning the stars were covered with drifting cloud, and the world below felt encased in darkness, separated from the distant universe above. I was on Hydra Close, a short cul-de-sac. A single blackbird began to sing loudly from the upper branches of a tall […]

CAMBRIDGE INDUSTRIAL ESTATE, SALFORD, 5.58AM Yesterday morning, I left my studio at 5.30am, and made my way up to the Cambridge industrial estate, which lies just beyond the banks of the River Irwell in Broughton. Above me was a glum sky, which only grudgingly allowed smears of cleaner blue through just before sunrise. The birds were up early, forcefully calling their information songs out to each other through the rough branches of trees, left to hang wild over derelict land […]

HIGHER BROUGHTON, SALFORD, SPRING EQUINOX 5.49AM The previous evening had been spent with a close friend, wandering the haunts of his past life as a student living in the area quite some years ago, him scampering childlike up and down the street where he had once shared a house. He marvelled at the changes, minimal to my eyes, but to him an era now lost and forever altered by passing time. The area’s residents are now often Orthodox Jews, and […]

MIDDLEWOOD LOCKS 7.27AM Walking towards Middlewood Locks, down Oldfield Road in Salford at around 6.40am, I was passed by a young man carrying on his back a case containing a tuba, or maybe a euphonium. His head was down, lost in thought as he made his way, I assumed, to some orchestral practice somewhere. I’m not sure why I found this slightly absurd, but I did. I wondered, should he practise at home, what it must be like living next […]