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Five lockdown paintings
Ever since the UK government imposed a nationwide lockdown on 23 March, I’ve been using the time to do more painting, something which I’ve only practised very intermittently since 2004. It’s...
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Extinction Rebellion: remaking the city
The pink boat moored in Oxford Circus, 19 April 2019 With the alarming warning from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in late-2018 that we have only 12 years in which to act to avoid...
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Magic portals into dreaming: Manchester’s public libraries
Stockport central library, funded by Andrew Carnegie, built from 1913-14 and designed by Bolton-based architects Bradshaw, Gass & Hope Of the numerous public libraries in Greater Manchester, no...
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Rainy city stories
From Northenden to Partington, it’s rain From Altrincham to Chadderton, it’s rain From Cheetham Hill to Wythenshawe, it’s rain Gorton, Salford, Sale, pretty much the same What makes Britain great...
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The Stones of Manchester
This month, I’ve finally published a website I’ve been building since February called The Stones of Manchester. It’s a photographic record I’ve created mainly over the last year of the metropolitan...
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Stronger together: the Manchester bee
Bee mural painted by Peter Barber in September 2017, Warwick Street, Northern Quarter For over 150 years, the bee has been a symbol of Manchester. The city’s coat of arms was given royal approval in...
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Skyscraper deluxe: Manchester’s towers
Towers under construction near the Mancunian Way, Hulme Manchester, like many other cities today, has a fetish for tall buildings. Perhaps this is a result of the topography of the city centre,...
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Back to black: Manchester smoke
Photograph of Ancoats in the 1890s On 16 October 2017, the sun turned a peculiar pinky shade of red, a product of Storm Ophelia whipping up Saharan sands as she approached the UK. The...
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Cracks in the city: Manchester alleyways
They go by a variety of names; in common English parlance, they are alleyways, passages, lanes or paths; in regional variations, they are, to name but a few, jitties (West Midlands), jiggers...
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The rows of Manchester
Paul Dobraszczyk, Manchester Terraces, 2017. Ink, watercolour, chalk, pencil, pen and gouache on paper. The opening title sequence of Coronation Street, Britain’s longest running soap opera, hasn’t...
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Mills: a Manchester metonym
‘Manchester, getting up the steam’, The Builder, October 1853. In October 1853, the British architectural journal The Builder pictured Manchester ‘getting up the steam’, an image of the city’s forest...
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Urban folklore: Boggart Hole Clough
Clough is a northern English word for a steep valley or ravine cut into a hillside by fast-flowing water. The slopes of the Pennines between Manchester and Sheffield are perhaps the most obvious...
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Tudor Manchester: wrecks and relics
Worsley Old Hall Perhaps the most common building type over the last hundred years or so in Britain is the Tudor style house: the dream of any self-respecting middle-class aspirant; the waking...
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The Dead City
My new book, The Dead City: Urban Ruins and the Spectacle of Decay will be published at the end of this month with IB Tauris. Here’s what it’s about: ‘Cities are imagined not just as utopias, but also...
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Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within
This month sees the publication by Reaktion Books of Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within, an edited collection I’ve worked on for the past couple of years with Carlos Lopez Galviz and Bradley...
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Ghost streets
I-94 Industrial Park, Detroit Even as cities die they leave traces, remaining inscribed upon the landscape as patterns of streets long after the buildings have disappeared. Like diverted rivers that...
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The Ancoats Dispensary: the politics of ruins
The Ancoats Dispensary building before scaffolding was put up by Urban Splash in 2010 A small group of local activists had been keeping a vigil for over 3 years outside one of Ancoats’s most iconic...
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Remnants as ruins: the Irk culvert, Manchester
The Irk culvert under Victoria Station, Manchester At the corner of Hunt’s Bank and Victoria Street near Victoria Station in Manchester is a stone wall (2) that betrays the otherwise invisible presence...
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Red river shore: exploring the Medlock culvert
In common with many other urban watercourses across the world, Manchester’s smaller rivers are today all but buried beneath the city centre. As Manchester rapidly expanded and industrialised in the...
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Accelerated ruins: the aesthetics of demolition
Demolition of New Broadcasting House, Manchester, October 2012 When the BBC’s New Broadcasting House (1976) was demolished on Oxford Street in Manchester in October 2012, thousands of passers-by...
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