HOME By Neil Dimelow - The Grand View Of The City

Confidentials 16 March 2012

HOME is a city.

You might like to swoop like a roosting starling, in amongst the rooftop air conditioning and Victorian glass domes. There’s the Town Hall clock, and out there, way out there, the TV transmitter on Winter Hill, and Scout Moor Wind Farm, over Rochdale.

For artist-architect Neil Dimelow the city is Manchester. Neil is from North Wales. He’s been in Manchester for 17 years and lives in Crumpsall with his wife and two boys.

He’s taken a rest from architecture, and has been a part-time primary school teacher for seven years. He draws on days off. Neil’s work is as meticulous as it is intriguing. It is arrestingly contemporary. Many people draw the city, but no one quite like him.

For Neil, drawing what’s in front of him is a way of seeing. It is both forensic and imaginary. He records and creates. The drawings, always made in front of the subject, are just the start.

Michael Oglesby and Bruntwood staff on the twenty-fourth floor of City Tower generously enabled Neil to draw more Bruntwood buildings than you can count. In careful collaboration with printer William Chitham drawings are scanned, digitised, scaled-up and coloured, as they make the journey from drawing pad to artist’s print.

HOME comes in different sizes. What you are looking at in The Mall is the biggest that Neil’s work has grown to date. If you can’t find your own building here, the place where you work, your favourite pub, club or shop, it’s because they are not there, not visible, not in the line of sight. Perhaps this is a fundamental thing about cities; so much of them is obscured, tucked away in shadow, like Harry Lime in a Vienna doorway, in The Third Man.

We both like back streets and murky windows, acid-leached concrete, the array of kitchen extractors in Chinatown, skyline like torn paper. We like what Manchester is.

The city we love so much was famously unplanned. Two hundred years ago Manchester men taught the world the ungentlemanly art of building without consequences. Manchester bent to their will; bent and contorted around polluted rivers, fast-cut canals, cross-knitted railway lines and scything viaducts.

Many of the buildings Neil has drawn from his crow’s-nest in City Tower did not exist two or three decades ago. There’s No 1 Piccadilly Gardens, No 1 Deansgate, No 1 New York Street, No 1 First Street. More No 1’s than Take That. Chase George Street through Chinatown, past the City Art Gallery and Bridgewater Hall.

You might like to swoop like a roosting starling, in amongst the rooftop air conditioning and Victorian glass domes. There’s the Town Hall clock, and out there, way out there, the TV transmitter on Winter Hill, and Scout Moor Wind Farm, over Rochdale.

Since HOME Neil Dimelow has made more drawings that tie other bits of Manchester down, netting them in pencil. It is a compulsion. Not many artists have brought such a concentrated, focused eye to the city on this scale. None has done so with such line and life.

This panoramic view of Manchester will be on display in the Mall under City Tower from 23 March. There will be prints for sale.

HOME. Manchester panorama