There may be a few people, other than me, working in the Ellen Wilkinson Building at this time. There are occasional noises, dimly perceived, as if made by spirits. Shadowy presences in stairwells. But seeing as even in normal times I was usually the only one who ventured out into the hidden courtyard, the annual cherry blossom display is even more personal than usual, this year. We both greeted a warm, early spring day — alone.
Going into Manchester gives my step count a boost and makes me feel like I’m doing something for the students, many of whom have travelled a very long way to be there and still been imprisoned for months on end in halls like the George Kenyon Building (a row of its windows forming the top of this image). But it’s depressing, all the same. In places, the rot has firmly set in. “How will you change the world?” this billboard asks. The question is an ever more pertinent one.
Went into Manchester, which has busied slightly, though this ‘rejoining the world’ thing is such a long and painful process. Anyway, no political point intended with this shot today, I just like the image, though once again I have focused on the background rather than the subject, with a very long zoom, hence the graininess.
Misty and cold at home, but sunny and mild in Manchester all day, sun which filled the public spaces of campus with students, at least compared to how it’s been for the last two months. ‘Without making a political point out of it, the idea of ‘lockdown’ is just no longer being confirmed by observation. Small businesses are still being shafted, but otherwise, many people have obviously just returned to living their lives.
This is the exterior of the Alliance Manchester Business School, built for a vast amount of money and now going completely to waste, along with the rest of the campus; monuments to a time past, now standing in a city of the dead. If you think I’m being over-dramatic, have you been to Manchester lately? Nothing has happened there since October. A sense of rot is setting in, and if you (like the publicly cheery city council) think that ‘recovery’ is all just a matter of a wave of the legislative wand, I say that’s optimistic, at best.
Cheap this may be, but ths squirrel was virtually posing for the camera, if a little nervously. It was one of the few signs of life on campus today, or even in the whole of Manchester.
My penultimate day in Manchester, 2020. A year which has had fewer such days than expected. How often does the place display its appalling street drainage? I think this is a big contributor to the city’s reputation for wetness.
For the first time since the 6th March, face-to-face contact with actual University of Manchester students. And even then I should apparently not have been doing this. However, I’ve kinda stopped caring. I like this picture because it was just the shot I wanted to take when I pressed the shutter, and I got it on the first attempt. Mug, mask, maze of wires and all.
The vast MECD, or Manchester Engineering Campus Development, is pretty much finished. In embryonic form it was first depicted way back in early January 2018. It now dwarfs the old Oddfellows Hall, which it has part-swallowed, yet what you see rising here is only a small part of the whole.
Thing is — and I am very sure that, having spent hundreds of millions of pounds on this new plaything, the senior management of UoM are keenly aware of this point — is this now the whitest and most mammoth of white elephants? And what of all the blocks of new student accommodation, and hotels, and office blocks, and all the other city-centre property developments that global capital has been poured into over the last decade or so? If you think the economy’s taken a Covid hit thus far, wait for the whole global commercial property market to go tits-up. This piece of economic elastic does not have infinite tolerance. I predict we’ll be coaxed back out into our offices soon enough: if not, they’ll hear the crash on Pluto.
The fact that I am still going to campus, and intend to go two or three days a week through November, suggests that ‘lockdown’ as a concept is an even bigger con this time round than it was in March. The students in this hall have paid great sums of money and — in many cases — travelled thousands of miles to be in Manchester, but we can’t even see them from across a twenty-foot room. What do we do about it? I dunno, disobey somehow. At least the leaves are still just about hanging on.
Being 42 