At some point in human history, the entire world wasn’t at your fingertips, much less on Flickr, so most people spent more time discovering the world closer at hand. ‘Closer at hand’ meant nearby communities, locally owned shops, homemade crafts, and, of course, neighbours. When we grow tired of the familiar and the mundane, we vacation to explore new things, inspire the creative spirit within, and experience difference. But doesn’t ‘New’ and ‘Different’ become harder and harder to find as communication, especially visual, becomes more international, more immediate, more mobile?

In July, Tom and I went on holiday to Manchester. As we only live in Bollington, this may seem like a bit of an odd choice for a long weekend. We stayed at the Hilton Deansgate, ate dinner at Gaucho Manchester, had an unimpressive cocktail at Cloud 23 bar, visited the Video Games exhibition at the Urbis, and discovered Castlefield.

In a spare hour after checking out, we took a blind walk away from central Manchester under and through a network of bridges and canals. The outdoor pub chairs were turned upside down on tables, roped off. The canalside ducks were still nestled, half-asleep, on the warming concrete. It was the morning after a big storm, and if people were staring longingly at the sky from the office blocks, we never knew. The streets were empty and quiet, just a block from Deansgate. Hardly the Manchester I thought I knew.

Definitely a Manchester I wanted to know more.