Hound of Hecate

Do you see the cobbles on the streets? Everywhere you look, stone & rock. Can you imagine what it feels like to reach down with your bones & feel the living stones? The city is built on itself, all the cities that came before. Can you imagine how it feels to lie down on an ancient flagstone & feel the power of the rock buoying you up against the tug of the world? And that's where witchcraft begins. The stones have life, & I'm part of it. - adapted from Terry Pratchett

Tuesday, July 14, 2020

Spirit of Place: A Happy Memory

I came across the picture which illustrates this post on somebody's Twitter and it brought back a flood of happy memories. When I was a young puppy (not in a fetish way, I hasten to add) there were many empty sites around the city centre. I think this one has been cleared preparatory to building Brindley Place but a lot of them dated back as far as the second world war and were of course the result of bombing. This meant that when the Inner Ring Road was intact you had the very small city centre proper, and a circle of post-industrial or just plain empty land before the inner city started. Of course this circle was incomplete or patchy but it was very strange to have just nothing near the centre of the city.