Traces of city centre surgery. Steve Hanson.
Manchester citizens will know that the city centre floor has been ripped up and made anew. For a while, the very ground seemed to be unstable, as though the laws of physics had suddenly buckled. The city centre map altered every day. I took a dozen different detours into Victoria station over a few weeks.
Here, briefly, was a microcosm of the wider situation on the island of Great Britain, as the political maps were torn up again and again, with the coming to power of the Conservatives in May 2015, after the failure of the Scottish bid for independence turned into a rebellion, against Labour, against the neoconservative middle ground, against decades of suffocating voicelessness.
