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Hidden spaces: the Derbyshire Dales
Cave Dale, near Castleton, Derbyshire There’s probably no more dramatic contrast in the English landscape than that between the Dark and White Peak of the Peak District National Park; and all because...
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The industrial sublime: Castlefield, Manchester
1. The Castlefield basin and the Great Northern railway viaduct (1894). In a rather secluded quarter of Manchester’s city centre lies Castlefield, a dramatic urban landscape that has become synonymous...
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Meta-ornament: railway tracks
Tracks on the southern approach to Manchester from Stockport According to Walter Benjamin, railway tracks had a ‘peculiar and unmistakeable dream world’ attached to them, one that, for early railway...
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Study seminar on ruins, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester
Apocalypse Now: Thinking about Ruins and Radiation Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester Wednesday 28 November 2012, 2-5pm, free A study session organised by me (Dr Paul Dobraszczyk) exploring...
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Palaces of commerce: Manchester’s Victorian warehouses
Warehouse (c.1865), 1 Central Street, Manchester Manchester is a city known for its cotton mills, but it is its textile warehouses that remain the distinctive element in its street-scape and make it...
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Walking the girdle (part 1)
1. Nine-mile walk around inner Manchester and Salford (shown in green) 2. 1844 map of Manchester and Salford included in Engels’s ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ In 1844, Engels...
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Walking the girdle (part 2)
Second part of the nine-mile walk around inner Manchester and Salford (shown in blue) 1. Strangeways prison from the east side 2. Broken picture found at the base of Strangeways prison wall Part 2 of...
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Dreaming spires: Victorian chimneys
1. Robert Rawlinson’s fantastical array of industrial chimneys, The Builder, 25 April 1857, p. 23. ‘A tower is the creation of another century. Without a past it is nothing’ (Gaston Bachelard, The...
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Cottonopolis
1. Paul Dobraszczyk, Cottonopolis, 2013, charcoal on watercolour and chalk and ink, 50x70cm In this painting (1), I wanted to represent my recently-adopted home city: Manchester. Like all cities...
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108 arches to Ardwick: the view from below
Arches under the viaduct near Piccadilly station. Trundling into Manchester Piccadilly on the train from Stockport is my normal way into the city: a mundane ride along the top of one of Manchester’s...
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Love at last sight: Mayfield railway station, Manchester
Barely a stone’s throw from Manchester’s bustling transport hub that is Piccadilly station lies the latter’s ghostly doppleganger: the disused Mayfield railway station. Opened in 1910 by the London...
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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