Standing Room Only

I have very fond memories of Longsight, maybe it’s because I was born and brought up there, and this painting depicts a late afternoon in February nineteen fourteen, long before I was born I might add.
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Like the previous painting the era chosen was when Longsight was fresh and exciting, the shops were full of wonderful new products. Electric lighting was now becoming a more popular way of illumination in the shops, the horse drawn trams from Manchester were now but a memory as modern electric ones were faster and more frequent, so Longsight was a hive of activity.
Longsight attracted numerous small businesses into the area, the side effect of all this unchecked industrial activity was that Longsight was continuously bathed in a murky fog, that in winter would make you wheeze, and having a busy mainline loco depot very close by certainly didn’t help.
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Longsight had its very own affluent area that blurred into Whalley Range, so Longsight had a number of grandiose banks, one can be seen in the background on the corner of the junction.
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Very little changed in Longsight with the exception of the fashions and the obvious trams, until the mid-sixties, then total carnage, the council in its wisdom decided to compulsory purchase the area and flatten it for Council housing, or in this particular case, council concrete slums that were in their turn flattened a few years later.
Longsight has lost its identity now and in my opinion is just part of a greater multicultural metropolis. So this picture is two things it’s dedicated to my parents who just lived around the corner and were both born in nineteen fourteen and the nostalgia we all have for our youth.
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The painting is acrylic on board, mostly brush painted but with airbrush highlights and atmospheric fog.