A damp, soggy evening, and when we potential passengers were told that the bus I was waiting for was to be half an hour late, I gave up and made other arrangements for the evening. So be it — this was my last day of work in Manchester of 2018, and frankly, for now, I’m just glad to see the back of the place. I need some downtime…
The corner of Charles Street and Princess Street in Manchester: a significant place in rock music history. I’m declaring a moratorium — no more photos of building sites here for a while. But there’s nothing wrong with putting up photos of a Factory. (The old Factory Records HQ, that is.)
The transformation of Manchester into a city of tower blocks continues apace. Over the last few years, how many shots from here have featured some giant construction project, completed or (mostly) otherwise? The end of Canal Street, at the New Union hotel, is now literally overshadowed by this concrete lattice, which just keeps going up, and up, and up.
My walking route from Manchester Victoria station to my office has been finely worked out down the years. Chancery Lane is another one of my alleys, passed while I negotiate a way round the Town Hall district that, as far as possible, doesn’t involve other people, whether in vehicles or on foot. Normally I would despair of bins appearing in a shot, as they would normally spoil it, but here I’m trying to embrace them.
The last couple of days have been sunnier but today was as gloomy and grey a day as it is possible to envision south of the Arctic Circle. Wet, too. My two-mile walk to work in Manchester was done in a constant drizzle. Like me, the guy on the right here stood under the Mancunian Way overpass for a few minutes to take a break from it all. How low the light was here can be judged by the blur on the second figure, left of centre, who was just walking at ordinary speed as I pressed the shutter.
At least the sun came out this afternoon, its last rays of the day illuminating the skyscrapers that have grown up recently in the Deansgate area of the city. Old timers would not recognise some parts of Manchester now the years-long construction boom is starting to top out.
On the outside, not one of the campus’s more attractive buildings, but it was looking OK this afternoon, and inside it’s actually quite pleasant, with lots of dark wood panelling etc. Mind you I still get lost in this building sometimes as it has a very confusing room layout, despite (or perhaps because of) hosting the schools of Planning and Architecture.
This burst of wan and vapid sunlight is about as much as we got today. Not long after this, foul grey rain set in and did not let up all day. Winter is coming… we are in the late November doldrums of the year and as usual, I just hope to get to the end of the semester (mid-December) without any major grief.
It’s becoming harder to crank myself up in the mornings to get the 06:32 — best train it might be, when I need to pull an early start at work, but it’s now still dark even when it deposits me in Manchester city centre, a state of affairs which will last until into February. Some places have the lights on at that time, but by no means all. This should be the last of a run of a couple of months spent only in England, but I’m off somewhere else for a few days tomorrow.
Fridays are my teaching days at the moment, not every week (hence my ability to bugger off to the Lakes last Friday) but most of them. And it’s an all day thing. So visual variety is not a characteristic of my average Friday, my apologies. Things kick of at 10: the pre-lecture cup of tea from the cafe in the Bridgeford Street building is an essential preliminary.
Being 42 