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 […]
CAR PARK, DUCIE STREET, 6.33AM – This morning, the first after the Easter holidays, I was awoken not by my alarm but by an industrious bird sensing dawn at 4.55am. There was a thin but effective mist hovering above the streets, and anyone that was out seemed to have bent down their heads, as if the weight of the fog was too much on this first day back to work. The sun was due to have risen at 6.33am but […]
LEVER STREET, MANCHESTER 6.00AM – On the streets at dawn there is a relationship to the space which feels highly personal, a temporary sense of ownership even. Without the distraction of traffic and people and purifying daylight there exists an awareness of detail often absent without the collusion of shadow and streetlight. Also, and unbeknownst to them, I’ve begun to develop a relationship with the workers of the morning, the hidden heroes of our city, who have become familiar to […]