Victorian Pub Row and Premier Inn Tower, Manchester City Centre

3 October 2019 · Manchester

The Crown and Anchor anchors a terrace of Victorian brick pubs along a Manchester city-centre pedestrian zone, their ornate facades and hanging baskets pressed flat against an overcast sky. Behind them, construction cranes and the Premier Inn tower block push into the same frame — a century of building ambition stacked in a single street view. The old and the new don't resolve here; they simply coexist, the brick doing nothing to hide its age and the concrete doing nothing to soften its scale.