Manchester’s creative destruction is an ongoing, continuous thing. The pagoda in Chinatown has been boarded up for a couple of years now. Attractive murals were painted on the bare boards — or stencilled on them, as this shot from September 2023 depicts. At some point since then, Michelle Yeoh’s not-unattractive features were added. Time passes. And then everything gets ripped down again, board by board. Nothing behind the screens is any different, and we wait for it to all cycle round again.
Going on somewhere between me and these two was a Sunday morning football match — the guy on the left started out as the goalkeeper but after about 15 minutes, having conceded two, he decided his shoulder wasn’t up to it so pulled out. First game of the season, too. At least his girlfriend was in attendance: which might have influenced the assessment of the injury’s seriousness. Behind them both — a bit of Leeds. August finally comes to an end; it seems a long time since I was in Orkney.
In 1960 the population of Dubai was 40,000. As of today it is more than 3.7 million, and continuing to rise at around 5% a year (all figures from Wikipedia). In order to accommodate them, the city is also growing physically. What you see here is not ‘desert’, it is large amounts of sand that have been poured into the Persian Gulf — land ‘reclaimed’ because the sea is not a form of terrain that can be bought and sold. Go to Google Maps and search for “Dubai Island Villas”; you’ll find it just offshore from the Al Hamriya Port, and you’re looking at a photograph of it, as of 24th February 2025.
Captured, perhaps obviously, a minute or so after take-off from DXB this afternoon. I was sat right over a wing again and only got this because of the plane’s considerable roll to the right for a few moments, so this was the last I saw of anything except clouds for the next seven hours. That’s the end of this trip, then, but it seems reasonably likely I will be back in Dubai at some point over the next 2-3 years. It will be interesting (but perhaps also a little depressing) to see what this view might look like in 2028, say.
In 2025, Bradford will become the UK’s City of Culture, and the sign proclaims this: from the rear, the slope on the left is one of the 2s, with the zero to the other side. Behind, a small part of the gigantic, desperate building site that constitutes most of its city centre at the present time. The bus station is entirely closed, having been declared unsafe a while back. You can’t get a taxi from anywhere particularly near the railway station. And all this with exactly eleven weeks to go until 1st January. City of Culture? Perhaps this chaos and neglect is, indeed, representative of the UK in this epoch.
There are some days when I really can’t think of any caption or explanation for posting a photo beyond the fact that I just quite like it. Daisy Hill is a place (in the Wigan-Bolton hinterland) with a cute rustic name, but its railway station doesn’t follow this lead — at least, not while some renovations are going on.
Toronto, like all cities, is unable to stop building and rebuilding itself. This particular site resides on Yonge Street. It’s nice to get the perpendiculars straight; something more achievable with an elevated vantage point, viz, my hotel room balcony, twenty floors up. And it does look like a big Lego set.
Scaffolding: it’s everywhere. Just as you think it might be diminishing its spread, you look away for a moment and then it’s right on top of you. Literally, for us this morning, and for however long it takes some guys to use it to fix our leaky roof.
Until last week this seemed to be a perfectly functional car park — and Hebden Bridge town centre certainly needs such amenities. Christ knows what it’s going to turn into from this point. And yes, it’s still cold.
There seems some kind of irresistible compulsion to construct more and more tall buildings in Manchester city centre, pretty much regardless of other considerations. There were a number of blocks built around one end of Canal Street and finished just before all that lockdown rubbish kicked off in 2020, which still appear to be mostly empty; certainly none of the commercial spaces on the ground floor has ever been occupied. And yet the city has plenty of homeless people and families who I’m sure would be able to make good use of such accommodation. In the meantime, let’s just build some more: it keeps certain political interests happy, doesn’t it.
I apologise, as much to myself as anyone else, for the uneventfulness of life at this time. The scaffolders are busy in Hebden however; there were already at least four major scaffolding installations visible from home (including next door), and this fifth went up during the day. A growth industry it seems.
Being 42 