Hey ho, it’s September already, so I suppose I’d better go into Manchester, for the first time in four weeks. I guess the health of the city centre retail has held up there better than some other places I’ve been lately, but the huge Debenhams department store on Market Street hasn’t made it, the shutters closed and graffitied, the windows gathering dust.
The Huddersfield Astronomical Society must have once experienced better days, but perhaps these days is in need of some recovery work. Without getting too metaphorical about it, I’d say that’s true of a lot of things in 2022.
Perhaps this shot is unfair on a place that I’d never visited before today (thus, it becomes place number 364 to feature on the blog), as Leigh seemed lively enough, but I just liked the decrepitude of these two buildings. Maybe these businesses are rocking on a weekday evening, but not on this warm and bright Saturday afternoon. But if you want to find out, well, the phone numbers are there.
Manchester once again plays host to the Conservative Party’s annual Conference, and today was the day that the Party and its state police force graciously permitted the parallel annual Protest March. This was safely kettled somewhere to the right of Deansgate, as we look down it here. The whole city centre was cordoned off to cars, and eerily quiet, apart from the distant drums of the protestors. Ahead are Beetham Tower and the West Tower of Deansgate Square, the tallest habitable buildings in the UK outside London: monuments to a particular kind of property-driven capitalism that the Conservative Party fully epitomise. No one can be publicly seen to question it, to ask whether this is really the way that we want to structure the world. The waiting police vans make sure of that.
9am on a Thursday morning is probably not the best time to catch any building at its best, but one certainly feels that this place has seen better days. Even the Bingo has died, if the boarded-up doors are any indication. Is it another place that has died ‘for the good of our health’? Who knows, any more?
Will the last business standing please turn off the economy? Thanks…
This is a factual statement. The road past our house has been closed for weeks while some vague ‘improvements’ take place on the moors. But perhaps this shot is also metaphorical.
Either way I really hope the phallically-challenged moron who roared past this sign later at 60mph in his Porsche was actually heading for Keighley. To have seen his face.
One could say it’s a paradox that we have chosen to help sustain the good health of the public by closing pretty much all the facilities which exist to help one stay healthy. But it’s not a paradox — it’s simply evidence of how bollixed up everything is at the moment.
Another photowhack — they are coming (relatively) thick and fast under lockdown. I like the random arrangement of rectangles, but perhaps I am reaching.
As predicted yesterday, the weather did change, into cold, damp greyeness. All very depressing, especially at the moment. It’d be nice to think this shop can open soon and restart its sale, but it ain’t gonna be next week or anything, is it. Meanwhile, the ducks get on with life and wonder what the jackdaw wants out of them: an alliance against the pigeons maybe?
I haven’t been producing many photos lately for understandable reasons but this is the first time since lockdown began (March 17th basically) that I have managed a photowhack — meaning, this was the only photo taken today.
Social commentary? Irony? Or just a decrepit but visually interesting corner of the urban world? Interpret it how you will. I was just passing.
Being 42 