My Manchester must be built by David Crausby

My Manchester must be built; a construct of my imagination; sampled from regular return visits to my homeland. The city continues to mutate; my photographs are traces and fragments of a different place that is almost unrecognisable and difficult to locate.

The Party started to unravel in 1990. I left to live in Tuscany, Italy. But I couldn’t keep away. Two years later, I was back and the party raged on; living there during Euro’96 when the pigeons rained down onto the pavements. The sonic boom of the explosion giving them instant heart attacks as they attempted to swerve and soar away from the blast.  The bomb ripped the heart out of the City centre and the expensive and efficient rebuild changed it forever. The old gold was growing thin. The music was stuttering and the party was drawing to a close.

By the start of the new century I had relocated to a village on the Northern border of England, six miles from Hadrian’s wall; the antithesis and antidote to Manchester and not an unpleasant shock to the system. Three years later in 2004, my next step expelled me from the UK altogether, to a new party, a new life, in Germany.

Although estranged from the city that helped shape me, the separation has never been complete. I often return to be with loved ones and to attend the matches of Manchester City Football Club. And when I’m back, I become furniture; a table, a bar stool. I fit right in, like I’ve never been away; just an unobvious tourist who loves being home..

Many of my recent images betray other emotions of disassociation, alienation and gradual disintegration. New developments such as Spinningfields hold no attachment for me and deep down I feel a glow of satisfaction that I spent so many good, good times in this city because my Manchester no longer exists…