Manchester Night Wander

After a successful meeting we decided to go on a night walk around Manchester to look for spaces that we could use in our festival. We decided to go on the walk in the evening as we're focusing on night time events and spaces can become completely different in the dark. We needed to experience the city at night to truly understand the spaces that we would possibly be using. 

We walked through the city towards Salford and came across the regeneration of the area around Manchester Cathedral. It is an area along the river which is just on the border of Manchester and Salford. It has been rejuvenated with lights, sculpture and fountains however we noticed that it is not really being used as much as it should be by the public yet. We would love to facilitate the use of these kinds of areas around the borders of the two cities through our festival and get people to experience these new but unfound spaces. We also think it would be a brilliant opportunity to bridge the gap between the two cities alongside the regeneration plans for Salford and the outskirts of Manchester.

Whilst we were there we decided to play with bubbles and light (glow sticks) to experiment within the spaces. It was interesting to see how these things would work visually within the space and spark of further ideas for experimentation.

Photo by Lara Rhodes

We were searching for the darkest spaces we could possibly find around this area which was difficult as the light pollution levels in the city are huge, however this lead us to think about ways of creating dark spaces (could we get the shop lights and street lights turned of in the area for our festival?). The most interesting spaces we found were arches just across from the regenerated area and the desolate car parks further behind the arches.