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Put it in your diary: Walking Offa's Dyke -The Photographer and the Mason, Landscape and Perception: September 2026
I'll be walking a significant part of Offa's Dyke with a companion in September.
Coming soon: Photographing St. Oswald's, Ashbourne
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From my Bluesky account.
Finally, I'm done with the phone calls and everything else
and when I switch on the radio it feels like lying in salt water -
all I need to do is breathe: Bach will keep me afloat.
Listening to Bach's B Minor Mass in the kitchen. Elizabeth Burns.
A Palace of the Heart.
It’s early and, it seems, Bradford hasn’t woken up yet. The streets are empty apart from a brightly dressed woman with a can in her hand pirouetting towards Little Germany. The scene carries a touch of pathetic fallacy as she drifts past a Gothic arcade that dances beside her in rhythmic procession. For a moment the facade seems less like static architecture than choreography - the ornament keeping time with her movement.
I’m here to visit the dancing arcades. They hold within their syncopation a destination often lauded as one of the most remarkable bookshops in Britain. Formerly the Bradford Wool Exchange, it now houses, in its Flemish inspired splendour, a Waterstones bookshop which is fronted by a multi-story glass facade.
Entering the building feels like passing through a looking glass - from the hard reflections of modernity into the deep, storied wonder of Venetian Gothic. It’s a style that was inspired by John Ruskin’s travels to Venice and his documentation of its architecture through watercolour and daguerreotype. Ruskin took the very first photographs of Venice and, in the UK especially, I’ve seen Ruskinian Venetian Gothic in most towns and cities I visit. But this building is set apart from the others - in its scale, scope and impact upon the emotions.
As an ordinary bloke - my chances of experiencing the exorbitant and the palatial are pretty slim - but I can come to Bradford’s former wool exchange and tap into the wonder of what it might feel like.
It was Ruskin who said that “Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices…that the sight of them may contribute to [our] mental health, power, and pleasure.”
Through Ruskin’s lens I am carried towards Italian climes and swept along with a sense of exultation. As I walk into the hall, I catch another’s eye beneath the rose window and she sees the wonder on my face and smiles as if to say: it’s your first time here, isn’t it?
I’m taken amongst the shelving’s diminishing perspective and carried into the realms of cadence and refrain in both building and book. This place feels synaptic, a conduit to the books beneath.
I imagine all those characters, words and sentences made coherent, ordered into patterns that move the soul, create a mystery, or reveal a hidden truth. I think of the time span that they all encompass - from the first burst of the universe to the first man on the moon.
I think of it all, the building and the bookshop: the glorious all encompassing whole of it. Consonance bleeding into the capitals, hyperbole evaporating from the hammer-beam, volta’s melting into the volutes and tercets dissolving the tracery.
It is from ENGLISH LITERATURE where this building takes me next - back along the arcade through NON-FICTION and into the poesy of a shelf that leads to the words on the spine of a poetry book: STAYING HUMAN.
It takes just a couple of turns of the pages to confirm my purchase, for within a few seconds of reading a single poem, I’m taken from the gaze of Cobden and the majesty of this incredible Gothic enterprise into the hidden chambers of the self.
I’m led from the frozen music and dancing arcades into the mundanity of a woman’s kitchen where she talks of making rolls for her daughter’s birthday whilst listening to Bach, who she says is ‘like a mountain covered in wildflowers.’
I read the final stanza of Elizabeth’s poem that feels like the key to all of this embracing me, a holy grail in verse:
“..and I’m wondering, as all those voices fill my kitchen with the Mass, if this is what he means: the sense of time and place dissolving, so what divides us from the past and elsewhere, and from each other, falls away, and everything’s connected and we are all drops of water in this enormous breaking wave.” Elizabeth Burns
I look up from the pages. The arcade dips and rises like a sonnet.
The vastness of the hall collapses into a handful of halftone characters arranged upon a page - tiny printed marks carrying within them entire emotional architectures. The arcade, the vaulting, the rhythm of the stone - all of it somehow enfolded within the microcosm of a poem that has made a palace of my heart.
My journeys often start in the material, but they always lead back towards people. I’m trying, through words and images, to keep alive certain ways of seeing - ones rooted in wonder, continuity, tenderness and human connection. I believe words still matter. They can be used to gloss the world. They can help us hold ground, enlarge us, and push back against the noise, haste and hardness of the world we live in.
Can you help support me as a writer?
Hexham Library
And they did it with a municipal library - they recognised its worth to the community - beyond what can be measured in financial terms. For these places are palaces for people like you and me - data centres for human beings. Why can't we all have access to places like this?
✨ John Rylands Library - A Special Member's Supplement.
Rising from the soot and industry of Victorian Manchester, the John Rylands Library feels less like a library and more like a cathedral devoted to learning and knowledge. Designed by Basil Champneys and opened in 1900, its vaulted reading room, stained glass and carved stonework remain among the great interiors of England.
My visit to the John Rylands Library in Manchester is now in a Member's Supplement - sign in to see it here:
Andy Marshall
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Melanie Bryan
When it comes to my books I operate a kind of Wary Kondo. A state of avoiding stripping back my books because of the latest trend.
Read on:
Andy Marshall
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I'm offering a copy of Luke Sherlock's book 'Forgotten Churches' to the next person that signs up as a Tier Member. The book is signed by Luke and has a thank you message from me.
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Photographs and words by Andy Marshall (unless otherwise stated). Most photographs are taken with iPhone 17 Pro and DJI Mini 5 Pro.
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