Manchester street art – January/February 2023

Since the beginning of the year the street art scene around the city centre hasn’t produced very much new stuff – presumably various artists have been staying out of the cold wet weather – so again I’ve combined what I found over two months, plus a couple of paste-ups, into this one post.

Two of the gable end advertising walls have been blank for some weeks and the one which has been painted featured something I wasn’t interested in photographing so this collection kicks off with a long artwork by Sheffield-based Marcus Method and one of Jay Sharples’ distinctive ape faces in Thomas Street, while the window decoration at the nearby pet shop is something I don’t normally see as the shutter is usually down.

The artists of the next three works are all unknown though the collection of bees on a shutter, which I came across unexpectedly and is best viewed from a distance, were instantly recognisable as being by Qubek, while I loved the amusing ‘A’ board, done by another unknown artist, outside a bar.

The quirky paste-ups were on a corner wall not far from Stevenson Square and the monochrome drag queen, if that’s what it was supposed to be, was at the bottom of the main staircase in Afflecks – it was part of an advert for a series of artworks further up the stairs but when I got there I found the top floor and its staircase closed off so I couldn’t find any others. Another typewriter by Wrdsmith was a chance find as it was right down at the bottom of a corner wall and quite easy to miss.

Away from the Northern Quarter and somewhere off Deansgate yet another multi-storey multi-purpose office building was being constructed, with colourful pictures on the surrounding street-side hoardings of what it would (presumably) look like once finished. On Deansgate itself I came across the highly decorated window of a design and print shop – it looked so nice I thought it deserved more than one photo – then back in the NQ and down a narrow side street I found an artwork by Alex Cullen, only the second one of his/hers I’ve found so far.

The final artwork in this batch is a vibrant piece done by very talented London-based artist Katie Scott on a section of Afflecks wall in Church Street, although due to the number of nearby poles, street signs and passing cars photographing the whole thing wasn’t an easy task.

Well that just about wraps up my finds for January and last month. I’ve already got a few new finds for this month after my most recent visit to the city last weekend so I’m hoping that, weather permitting, I can add to them over the next two or three weeks for another post at the end of the month.