Placemaking photography Manchester

I’ve worked in photography in Manchester for over 25 years now and seen a staggering amount of change across the city. Castlefield and Canal Street were really the only corners of the city that were regenerated. There were just a handful of residential developments and few people were seen mooching about the city after 7pm. The place did genuinely just empty and there were only a handful of us same kids hanging around the same bars in the city centre and away from the students scene on Oxford Rd. In fact I noticed that Night & Day was celebrating its 35th birthday recently and I’ve fond memories of that being one of the few bars in the Northern Quarter  at the time – contemporaries, TeN Bar and Dry Bar never got as far as 35 years old, unfortunately.

Manchester’s urban change

Anyway, before I grow too misty-eyed, it is delightful to see how Manchester has changed and reflect on the various regeneration projects I’ve covered in my time; from Ancoats and New Islington to the Angel Meadow area, MediaCity, New Bailey, Spinningfields and the swathes of land around Manchester City’s stadium, which is just down the road from where I grew up. Crikey, when I think about it this was where all the change began when Manchester City Council launched a bid to host the 1996 Olympics in 1986 – and I was at the launch event. It was a somewhat preposterous bid even to my then 10year old eyes, but it was the catalyst that led to the Commonwealth Games being in the city in 2002 and did more to shape the city’s success than the much heralded (in terms of sparking regeneration) IRA bomb of 1996. Bizarrely, I now note that Manchester is talking about another bid for the Olympics…and it shows how far we’ve come that this one won’t be laughed out of contention.

 

Placemaking and urban regeneration 

All this occurred to me as I spent a day covering some placemaking photography in Manchester and watching the city’s regeneration head ever further away from the city centre and into the far flung corners of Stretford. Once famed only for its rather tired and dismal Stretford Arndale Centre, the town is booming again and I’ve had the great pleasure of working with Bruntwood to document some of the changes. I love covering the social side of these changes and watching the demographics shift as life is breathed back into the areas. It’s lovely to cover this social stuff. I never knew until a few years ago that they call this process ‘placemaking’ nowadays. Another client brought me in for a chat about ‘placemaking’ and I have to admit I thought’s what the hell are they on about at first. It was known simply as ‘urban regeneration’ when it first began and I was starting out as a young photographer. How times change indeed! Either way I’m still here and still doing and enjoying the same thing…and getting to watch my city change for the better.

Anyway, here’s a little ‘reel’ (again, it used to be a slideshow when I started out!) showing some of the recent activity at Stretford in the form of #StretFest

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