Cross Street, Manchester. Some of us are on our way to work, past the guys opening up the Christmas market. I’ve talked myself into liking this shot even though it’s out of focus. It was how I felt this morning.
This will be a long run of pictures from only Hebden Bridge and Manchester. These will continue to be rich seams for photography as long as the light is right, which it certainly was today. And the other astonishing, perhaps even unrepeatable feature of this shot is that there is NO TRAFFIC. Just for a moment.
The half-timbered structure in the rear is Sinclair’s Oyster Bar, probably the oldest extant pub in the city of Manchester, even if it has moved a couple of times. The lights in the foreground are reflected in the perspex fencing that keeps the Mitre Bar — where we were — from its more venerable and also cheaper rival.
Coat and thermos flask notwithstanding, the fact one can be doing this in Manchester in mid-November is a sign that we continue to have plenty of mild weather. The more insane newspapers in the UK seem convinced that the storm that has hit the Philippines will somehow leap two oceans and half a world and, specifically, hit middle-class districts of the UK in the next few days, but there’s no evidence of this. (There never is very much evidence for anything included in the insane newspapers.)
Manchester’s Chinatown district is the third biggest in Europe, apparently. This arch, completed in 1987, crosses Faulkner Street (in the middle of which I was stood while taking this) at its junction with Nicholas Street. A wet day today, unpleasant weather.
Taken firstly because I liked the light (it’s been a damn good month for it) and secondly for the novelty factor of actually being able to see across Oxford Road without a bus being in the way. The tower block in the background has appeared on the blog before, by the way.
My perambulations through the centre of Manchester do seem to get later and later, don’t they. If the city has a symbolic centre, Piccadilly Gardens is probably it — no, not Old Trafford (which isn’t actually in Manchester anyway). This shot makes it look vaguely pastoral, which is why I like it: actually the place is a concrete jungle. A pretty intense rain shower stopped a couple of minutes beforehand.
Although there are other eminent candidates, Alan Turing is probably the most famous single scientist ever to have worked at the University of Manchester. If it wasn’t for his work on the philosophical-technological basis of computing – the idea that a machine did not have to be built to perform one task, but could perform many, if it were given the right instructions – we might not be sitting here doing all these things we do with ICT. On the other hand, if he hadn’t been persecuted for his sexuality, and committed suicide as a result, who knows how much further the technology could have advanced. This memorial to him sits (literally) in Sackville Gardens, at the corner of Whitworth and Sackville Streets, Manchester.
John Owens made his fortune in the early 1800s, it seems in two ways — first through cotton trading, and secondly by “keeping no company whatsoever” and spending every evening in, reading books (according to contemporary accounts). On his death, with no children — unsurprising, with those habits — he left a substantial sum of money towards the foundation of Owens College, now a part of the University of Manchester, and also made it a condition of his will that no student nor member of the faculty in that institution would ever have to “pass a religious test” to achieve their status. He might not have been much of a party animal, but at least he had a sensible lack of zealotry along with it.
This marquee sits outside my building at uni, where thousands of people currently wander around looking half-lost and half-excited. Whatever was going on in here yesterday, though, it’s moved on, though no one has yet thought to clear up the balloons.
Being 42 