What’s Rainy City Stories?

This site gathers up a wide experience of living in, remembering and imagining the great city of Manchester. It uses a map of the city to organise stories linked to particular places. If you click on a place marked by the little cloud icon, you will be able to read a piece of writing associated with that spot. Anyone can submit writing to the site.

Everyone’s secret map of Manchester is different, with each street bearing its own real or imagined history. This is a slightly mad attempt to plot and cross-reference these interior topographies. Our map contains within its depths an unwieldy and kaleidoscopic collection of documents that is constantly growing and changing, much like the city itself.

These stories come in different shapes and sizes. Some people give us a scrap of personal history, writing about something that actually happened. Other stories are completely made up. Others take the form of a poem that aims to capture the elusive quality of a place, or alight on a location as its starting point. PLEASE NOTE: We only accept new work that has not been published elsewhere.

Who’s responsible for this?

Project Editor Kate Feld arrived in Manchester from New York five years ago. She’s never homesick, but she’s still looking for a real cup of coffee.

She writes The Manchizzle, a blog about Manchester life that The Guardian called “the pick of online writing and hub of cultural goodness.” She is also the director of the Manchester Blog Awards, which celebrate the best of the city’s DIY online writing.

She was founding editor of Manchester arts and culture magazine eightytwenty, and has written for newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic including Art World, The Independent, and Newsday.

If you have any questions about this project, or just want to shoot the breeze, you can reach her at editor AT rainycitystories.com.

Site Designer Chris Horkan is the creator of Mancubist, another blog about Manchester. He blogs about events happening in the city, cultural developments and sometimes even the city’s history – basically whatever Mancunian miscellany catches his attention.

He’s a full-time journalist, specialising in music, technology and the arts, and a part-time web developer, building websites of local and national scope. He occasionally runs blogging workshops with Kate too.

Chris also promotes Americana, folk and alternative gigs around the city in his other spare time. Contact him at designer AT rainycitystories.com.

Rainy City Stories is part of the Manchester Literature Festival’s Freeplay programme, which straddles the intersection of literature and technology. Visit the festival website for information about events and ongoing projects.

It is supported by a grant from Arts Council England.