It was a particularly dull day at home in Manchester on Saturday morning a couple of weeks ago, the drizzle and cloud looked set to stay put. Such an unpromising start to the day prompted our plan to head to the seaside, especially after hearing on Radio 4 that there was a kite festival at Morecambe and on checking the weather forecast the prospect was for a sunny, warm and dry day. And who doesn’t like a trip to the seaside?
Morecambe’s one of those strange resorts with a little sprinkling of past glamour in the form of the Midland Hotel and the rest of the place having a decidedly down at heel feel. We pottered around more than we usually do in the backstreets and found an interesting community art space, The Exchange Creative Community where kids were making screen prints of some Morecambe inspired designs by local people which were destined to be turned into postcards and sold. We bought a whole sheet of them before they postcard backs had been printed – some nice work.
The kite festival was great fun, beautiful blue skies and a fabulous array of kites of all shapes and sizes and as someone who has yet to fly a kite, I was very impressed! We wandered all along the prom, right down to the Midland and succumbed to a couple of tasty wild game burgers (venison and boar) which tasted better by the sea than they would have elsewhere.
We walked for what seemed liked miles to search out a mural in a backstreet which was in the end a bit of a non-event, but we enjoyed our walk in the sun. The photos I shot look rather more down-beat than I had intended, I know it’s a depressed town, but I didn’t take the pictures to emphasise that fact, it’s just that my eye is always drawn to shutters, doors and blocks of colour and I particularly liked the bored looking lady outside the wool shop!
The photographic highlight of the day for me was taking picture of ‘posers’ as I call them, at the famous Eric Morecambe statue – another for my collection which you can see in full here on my website.
