The painted image is essentially a panoramic montage of the scenes around the Deansgate and Castlefield areas of Manchester UK that I have pulled together into a single convincing and realistic image.
Beginning with experimental sketches, I played around with the topography, perspective, and distances (shortening the platform for instance to bring the trams closer). I removed some nondescript features and constructions that were obscuring the distant view.
This area of the city developed rapidly in the 19th century, but its history goes back to the Romans’ colonisation of much of Britain. There are ruins of a Roman fort in Castlefield.
The title ‘Rain and Cotton’ sums up the city of Manchester: its notoriously wet climate and the cotton industry that brought Manchester, and ultimately much of the world, into Industrial Revolution. Manchester was nicknamed ‘Cottonopolis’ in the 19th century, a time of phenomenal industrial growth but also extreme pollution and harsh living and working conditions for the average worker.
Today Manchester remains a significant exporter of cotton goods, although substantially less than at its industrial peak. The young commuters wearing cotton jeans add to the living-history narrative of the painting.
The four new tower blocks on the left – ‘Deansgate Square’– of the painting are luxury apartments. The recent proliferation of tall buildings in Manchester has attracted the nickname Manc-hattan. I like the juxtaposition in the painting (that could not have been achieved with photography) of the old and the new. We see the history of the evolution of transport since the Industrial Revolution: canal, rail, road, and – my favourite means of getting into Manchester city centre from my home in south Manchester – tram, or ‘Metrolink’. The tram has transformed Manchester and surrounding regions since its introduction in the 1990s, and its subsequent ongoing expansion.