Homecoming: Melanie Sykes in Manchester

For the opening of Cubitts Manchester, we spent a day travelling across the city with Melanie Sykes - artist and daughter of Greater Manchester - eventually returning to where it all began. There are some people whose identity becomes entangled with a place. For Melanie, that place is Manchester.

Born in Ashton-under-Lyne and raised in Mossley, she became familiar to much of the country through the Boddingtons campaigns of the 1990s - advertisements that played knowingly with Manchester itself: wit, glamour and a certain refusal to take either too seriously.

But Melanie's relationship with image-making has changed considerably since then. Having spent much of her career in front of cameras, she has turned her attention to making things herself - writing, photography, and particularly, painting. Her work includes studies of nature and design: intimate, personal work concerned less with being looked at than with looking.

We’ve turned one of Melanie’s artworks,Red Hot ’26, into a cleaning cloth in aid of Venture Arts, a Manchester charity that supports learning-disabled and neurodivergent artists to build careers in the arts.

It felt like the right moment to ask Melanie to step in front of the camera in her hometown. Not simply as a familiar face returning north, but as an artist returning to the landscape that helped form her eye. We began at our new home on Hilton Street, in the Northern Quarter. Set within the Smithfield Buildings, the shop is Cubitts' first in Manchester - a city we have wanted to join for rather a long time.

The Northern Quarter offers a useful introduction to Manchester because so much of the city's history remains legible in its buildings. Warehouses built for textiles and commerce have acquired new lives; loading bays have become shopfronts; old workshops sit beside bars, studios and apartment blocks. The city has rarely been precious about its fabric. Things are adapted, overlaid and put back to work. From Hilton Street, photographer Niall Hodson took us south-west through the city.

Manchester reveals itself particularly well on foot. Its streets are full of abrupt changes in scale and period: soot-darkened brick beside glazed offices, cast iron beneath railway arches, ceramic tiles glowing from the side of an otherwise ordinary street. The extraordinary wealth generated by nineteenth-century industry left behind not a single architectural language, but an accumulation of warehouses, civic buildings, canals, viaducts, mills and pubs.

Rather than searching for a grand Manchester backdrop, we wanted those fragments.

The Peveril of the Peak is one of the most striking. An extraordinary wedge of green and yellow glazed tile between Great Bridgewater Street and Chepstow Street, the pub dates from the early nineteenth century and was remodelled around 1900. Its tiled exterior belongs to a period when even relatively everyday buildings could be richly decorated - glazed ceramics being both ornamental and well suited to a city of smoke, rain and industry. A building of enormous character without being remotely grand: narrow, brightly tiled and slightly improbable, surviving while much of the city around it has changed beyond recognition.

From there, we continued towards Castlefield, one of the places where Manchester's history is easiest to read in sections. The Romans established a fort here almost two thousand years ago. Much later came the Bridgewater Canal, followed by warehouses, railway lines and immense brick and iron viaducts. Each new system was laid over the last. Water, road and rail occupy different levels; arches pass above canals; newer buildings occupy gaps left by older infrastructure. It is less an architectural composition than a record of how the city grew.

That density is important to Manchester. Its appearance was not produced primarily for effect. Much of what now gives the city its character began as infrastructure: buildings and structures made for manufacturing, storing, moving, and selling things. Utility came first; beauty arrived almost accidentally through material, repetition, and time.

Later, we travelled south to Fallowfield and a very different expression of the city's ambitions. The Toast Rack was designed by Manchester city architect Leonard Cecil Howitt and completed in 1960 as part of the Domestic and Trades College. Its great parabolic concrete ribs gave the building its inevitable nickname; beside it, the circular lecture theatre became, equally inevitably, the "Poached Egg". It belongs to another Manchester altogether. The mills and warehouses of the nineteenth century had given way to the optimism of post-war public architecture: concrete, education and the belief that even a municipal college could be an experiment in form. 

There is something rather charming about the contrast between the architectural seriousness of the building and the complete lack of ceremony with which Mancunians named it. Across the road, Platt Fields Park provided another shift in texture. Manchester's parks are an important part of the city's nineteenth-century inheritance too: green spaces created as the rapidly expanding industrial city confronted the consequences of its own density. Here, mature trees and open ground sit opposite Howitt's great concrete skeleton. Our final journey took us east, out of central Manchester and towards Ashton-under-Lyne. The centre gradually loosens as Manchester gives way to the towns that surround it - places with their own histories, industries and identities, but tied into the larger city by generations of work, transport and family. For Niall, who also comes from Ashton, it was familiar territory. For Melanie, it was something more fundamental: a return to the town where she was born, before Boddingtons, television and everything that followed. She later studied at Ashton Sixth Form College and, when she was younger, played the Baritone in the local brass brand, Ashtonian Brass alongside members of her family. It is a detail that feels wonderfully rooted in the place: another local tradition based on people assembling, practising and making something together.

There was something fitting about ending there.

We had started the day in our new Manchester shop, in a part of the city continually being remade, and finished in the town where Melanie's story began. Between the two were several versions of Manchester: Victorian commerce, tiled pubs, canals and railways; post-war concrete and municipal optimism; parks, suburbs and the towns beyond the centre. Not a backdrop so much as an accumulation. And, for Melanie, home.