Until about a month ago there was a 130-year-old cast-iron bridge across the canal at the junction of Sackville Street and Canal Street, in the gay village. Now it has been removed and replaced by a concrete replica.

I took these photographs on Sunday, but I held off posting about this until I had checked the facts. But yes it’s true. It has all gone and what you see now, in the pictures shown here, is moulded concrete that will be painted.

The really pathetic thing is that they have screwed the original makers plate onto the concrete.

The existing bridge didn’t meet traffic regulations. Heaven forbid that they might stop enormous buses hurtling along this street and route them another way, so the original bridge could have been preserved. Far easier to destroy another part of Manchester’s heritage…

People may think ‘it’s only a bridge’. The trouble is, bits here and there disappear and, before you know it, an area has lost everything that made it ’special’ in the first place.

I know Manchester has to be a working city. But we’re told that, in the future, Britain will have to rely on its cultural heritage to compete with emerging nations such as China and India. The trouble is, we’re throwing our cultural heritage down the drain through neglect and unsympathetic development.

In Manchester, the planners seem to have no overall picture in their heads. Everything is turning into an ugly ‘mish-mash’.

In recent years there has been a tremendous amount of building going on in Manchester. It’s all around, all the time, and as I walk into the city centre for lunch with Peter several times each week we get to see the new buildings appear step-by-step.

Yesterday we saw this curious structure in Spring Gardens, near the Post Office. We couldn’t quite visualise how it may end up. Peter thought it looked like something from the backlot of a Hollywood studio.

Building techniques seem to change all the time too. The latest thing seems to be huge white polystyrene sheets that are sandwiched inside walls. Many buldings seem to grow from the inside out these days.

This morning, both The Independent and The Times have stories about profits being down in Manchester’s gay village. Income has fallen by 20-25% they say.

This is not a surprise to me. Recently I found figures that suggest, since they began charging for entry, attendance at Manchester Pride has fallen to one quarter of what it was in 2002. And contrary to the ‘best-ever event’ hype that we see in the media each year afterwards.

Aw what a shame. Now, after ten years during which time the businesses abandoned their traditional loyal customer base in search of the biggest possible profits, finally the chickens are coming home to roost.

Neither article mentions that gay bars and clubs used to be a safe space that could be enjoyed by gay men and women of all ages. The pubs may have had curtains at the windows but, once inside, they were friendly and rather civilised. You never saw a fight and it was rare to see anyone really drunk and misbehaving.

Anyway, the ‘gay village’ has always been a commercial manufactured thing. Years ago, the bars and clubs were spread across the city centre — from Deansgate and Spring Gardens to Sackville Street. Despite what it says in The Independent, there were no gay bars actually on Canal Street until the early 1990’s (the entrance to the Rembrandt is on Sackville Street and the New Union is on Princess Street).

These days the area is threatening, unpleasant, cynical and aimed exclusively at the 18-30 age group who have a high disposable income and drink a lot. Everyone else has been driven out. There is no ‘community’ anymore and they should stop pretending this now-awful area is anything of the sort.

Even the bricks and mortar have been destroyed in the quest for profit. Old shop fronts have been ripped out to make way for takeaways or bigger bars, stonework has been removed from the front of the old warehouse buildings and the original cobbles are long gone. Controversial and tacky waste-of-money memorials have been put up in Sackville Park, when the cost could have been better spent actually helping people.

It’s not just the fact that we are now more-accepted at other places around Manchester and have other ways to meet people — such as the Internet. It is that we don’t like what the so-called gay village has been turned into by money-grabbing businesses and Manchester City Council.

Now The Rembrandt (which used to be a men-only bar) is to take the drastic step of banning hen parties. Unfortunately, the time to do that was ten years ago. Not now, just because your profits are down.

So what is the future? I think the outlook is bleak for the businesses down there. Gay men and women are going to continue voting with their feet and the over-30’s who, in the past, would have been customers for life, won’t ever return. As the area becomes increasingly ‘less gay’, there won’t be the novelty value, so the ‘non-gay’ customers won’t bother with that part of town anymore.

I went up to Microdirect — the computer shop — with Miss Noodle and her man. Opposite, this hideous multi-storey car-park has appeared on the corner of Upper Brook Street and Hathersage Road, as part of the ongoing development of the Manchester Royal Infirmary.

It looks like a giant electric fan-heater and feels too tall and too wide for this spot.

Twenty years ago, I lived near here on Daisy Bank Road (gotta love that name). The area used to have a ’suburban’ feel. But now, multi-storey buildings line the road all the way from the city centre to Hathersage Road. It feels as if the city is expanding out here.

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NOTE: a New Year and a slightly new look to the Journal which will now be known as the Photo & Video Blog. From today I’m using the software Wordpress. Which should save me a lot of time.

I was awake early and so was my neighbour. So we went shopping. It was drizzling and the first day back at work for many people after New Year. Some of them were trooping along almost like robots.

I wanted to try and capture the awfulness of a grey and wet winter morning in Manchester. But, with the blue sky, street lights, reflections in the wet roads and the vivid way my Canon Powershot A70 camera handles this kind of scene, it actually looks quite colourful.

It was good to know we would be heading straight back home afterwards and would be able to dry out and enjoy some reduced-price Sainsbury’s mince pies and cream. Unlike the poor damp office workers.