Instead, chancer edgeland plants took advantage of every gap and crack in the concrete remains of this patch of land and turned it into their scrappy, verdant, wasteland home. For ignorant years I paid it no heed - never truly even saw it there. I'm not sure when my moment of conversion arrived, but one day I wondered, and wandered, and was hooked.
What? Where? I'm talking about Middlewood Locks in Salford, at the erstwhile start of the Manchester Bolton Bury canal. It's across the road from Hot Bed Press, and has been a scrubby stretch of unkempt land ever since I joined the printmaking studio. Now it's fenced off and full of bulldozers, towering hills of soil, of bricks, and becoming after all what was originally intended.