See the exhibition at the Portico Library in Manchester, Thursday 5 June to Saturday 27 September 2025 (closed sundays), book a free place at the preview night on the 5th of June.
This exhibition is about the streets where we live in the early hours of the morning as the world wakes up. Poet Ian McMillan and photographer Andrew Brooks have collaborated to capture the beauty and strangeness of the everyday world as first light arrives. The twenty-five photographs were taken on morning walks from Andrew’s front door, capturing the streets of New Mills in Derbyshire, each paired with new poetry written in response by Ian.
Working together, they’ve also reimagined elements from the Portico Library’s 19th-century collection, creating cut-and-paste artworks that reflect some of the themes and ideas of their morning walks.
The Songs The Morning Sang was supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Ian McMillan "Every morning I get up at 5am, leave the house at 5.20am, and go for my early stroll. For me, as for many people, this is the best time of the day. It feels sublime, transcendent, almost sacred. Nothing much has happened yet and it feels like almost anything might happen. My stroll is always the same route around the village near Barnsley where I’ve always lived: I walk down the street and I turn right. I cross the main road near where my brother lives. I walk past the bakery and I walk down the hill. I walk back up the other side of the hill through an estate of bungalows. I pass the paper shop. I walk into the house at 6.10am.
Then I tweet about what I’ve seen; five sentences, five observations, five new ways of seeing and thinking. Always the same stroll, always new ways to describe it. The tweets are like tiny poems or stories or essays on life in the 21st century in an unremarkable part of the world.
So when the brilliant photographer Andrew Brooks and I started thinking about a collaboration in 2023, the Early Strolls seemed like an obvious and shining choice. Andrew would go on his own strolls and I would make tiny poems from his images; it meant that I would have to think harder because I was outside the A to Z that I’ve known since childhood. My Early Stroll language had to find a way into somewhere new at sunrise. I hope you enjoy the results.”
Andrew Brooks "Reading Ian’s early stroll poetry has become part of my morning routine and is an inspiring start to the day. Knowing someone’s already been out there responding to the world and creating shows to us that a day is full of possibilities and new ideas. During the pandemic, when daily walks were limited, Ian’s shared strolls were really important to me and many other people. This project is an extension of that time of creative exchanging and sharing of our worlds.
I’m really pleased to be collaborating with Ian on this call and response project based on the morning walk around each of our local streets. The glimpsed details in Ian’s writing share a sense of strangeness in the everyday and feel like snapshots of the world. I use these snapshots as inspiration for how I photograph the streets near where I live in New Mills, Derbyshire. Then it’s fascinating to see how Ian responds in his writing, what he pulls out of these photographs, building on the half seen ideas and images I couldn’t quite put into words.
As a photographer I’m always looking for times and spaces where light does unusual and striking things. Those two hours as the day arrives, from the slight glow of light just seen on the horizon to the sun in the sky is a time of interesting transition, with light effects that are so unexpected and fleeting.
Photographing at this early hour is fascinating, the brain is in a strange place, an unusual mix of focus in the chilly morning air and fuzziness before the first cup of coffee. It seems like elements of dreams slightly make it out into the real world as the early morning imagination augments the everyday world.”
Collection collages
Ian and Andrew spent more than five months delving into the Portico Library’s rich collection of over 25,000 books. As a result of their research, they have created a further collaboration in response to the books in the Portico Library’s collection by extracting and captivating illustrations and printed words. These fragments were broken up and repurposed to create the cut-and-paste collages.
These artworks explore themes that echo the exhibition - light, weather, dreams and memory. They sit alongside the original books from which they were created, revealing the source material alongside the new compositions to show the new associations and connections in the collages.
The poems, photographs and the artworks you see in this exhibition act as a reminder for us all to take the time to slow down your everyday routine and see beauty and wonder.
