10 Comments

Lovely writing to read on my holiday :)

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Aug 25, 2022Liked by Sophie Atkinson

Enjoyed this a lot

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Thanks for reading and commenting Poppy! Glad you liked it.

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Aug 22, 2022Liked by Sophie Atkinson

I really enjoyed this - thanks very much. That Italian style church on Cutting Room Square seems to make a little more sense now, given the Italian connection to Ancoats.

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Yeah, I hear this! This said - while I don't know the specifics of this church - we published an interesting piece about Manchester's Italian architecture a while back (see: https://manchestermill.co.uk/p/palazzo-manchester-how-the-princes) and the gist of it was that a lot of the people commissioning the buildings and the architects weren't Italian themselves, they were just wildly impressed by Italy (fair). To quote the piece: ""These architects had been on the Grand Tour. They’d seen all these buildings in Italy, and they were operating in Manchester at the time when warehouses were needed,” he says."

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PS. And thank you for the kind words on the essay!

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What have I paid for? One of the reasons for subscribing was because The Mill did not show advertising!

What utter drivel in a publication stated to be offering high quality local news. Any more like this and…

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Hey No, sorry to read that you were so disappointed by this piece. However, printing extracts of books is common practice across a wide range of newspapers and magazines and isn't usually considered advertising. We didn't receive any payment for this, we published an extract because we thought it was fabulous writing! We also thought Thea's intro - specially penned for us - provided an interesting extension of the book, and insights into the Italian community here. I hope we publish something you enjoy more soon.

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A bit lazy; i joined for interesting journalism around the gm area. i know its summer but still life goes on.

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Hey Steve! Thanks for the feedback and sorry to hear you didn’t enjoy this — obviously public-interest journalism is extremely important to us (and we’ve done a lot of quite research-intensive investigative work recently: have you read this: https://manchestermill.co.uk/p/manchester-homeless-crisis-special-investigation or this: https://manchestermill.co.uk/p/exclusive-council-investigating-serious ?) but we like to publish a mix of features, including work that’s at the more literary end of the equation. We don’t often publish extracts — we only publish extracts of work that we think is really special, which I’d argue this is! I felt that this and the intro Thea penned for us gave a lovely insight into something I personally didn’t know much about — the Italian community here in the 50s. Hope we publish something more to your tastes soon.

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