The Songs The Morning Sang: Ian McMillan and Andrew Brooks
by Northern Life
A collaboration by between poet Ian McMillan and photographer Andrew Brooks
A new exhibition at Manchester’s Portico Library running 6th July – 27 September 2025 showcases a colourful collaboration between two Northern artistic powerhouses based on opposite sides of the Pennines.
Poet and broadcaster Ian McMillan and photographer Andrew Brooks took up a year-long creative correspondence, inspired by the daily whimsical tweets made by Ian on his early morning strolls.
The pair discovered a shared fascination with giving voice to imagined hidden narratives on their doorsteps; respectively using words and pictures to bring fantastical storytelling to the everyday mundanity of their pre-dawn neighbourhoods, capturing the beauty and strangeness of the places where we live.
The result, supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, is a series of 25 magical pieces, each the symbiosis of Andrew’s image and Ian’s lyrical response.
A phone box, a deflated red whoopee cushion and a circular security light against a brick wall transcend their tethered realities as Ian’s ultra-short form narrative gives life to stories that were never told. The phone box receives a call from a mystery singer, the red rubber toy is a fallen planet, and the light, a moon against a brick sky. Without each other, they are less than the sum of their parts, Ian’s sparsely beautiful language bringing surprising new answers to Andrew’s open visual questions.
Their process was one of collaboration at a distance, Brooks working from the Derbyshire town of New Mills and McMillan, known as the bard of Barnsley, from his South Yorkshire hometown. A mere 30 miles apart, the towns are connected by the infamous Woodhead Pass, which with its high altitudes and hairpin bends is frequently impassable in winter.
McMillan’s words began to shape the images Brooks created…
Inspired by the popular and poetic early morning tweets made by McMillan on his daily stroll, which he began during the first Covid lockdown, Brooks set out to make his own series of pre-dawn walks. Leaving his home at 5am each day with his camera, the photographer took hundreds of pictures within two miles of his front door.
After each walk, Brooks then shared his pictures with McMillan, who responded to the images of his choice, building narrative into each with an unexpected micro story.
A true call and response venture, McMillan’s words began to shape the images Brooks created, the pair working together in an unbroken feedback loop.
On Saturday 14 June 2025, McMillan and Brooks are inviting people to join them for the first World Early Stroll Day and kickstart their morning by documenting a mindful local walk. Creative responses in words, pictures, sound recordings, drawings and any other artform can be shared across X, Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook with the hashtag #WorldEarlyStrollDay.
A series of workshops connected to the exhibition will be run by poet Jo Bell with young people’s mental health charity 42nd Street in Manchester and ARC (Arts For Recovery in the Community) in Stockport. The resulting work will feature in a slideshow as part of the exhibition.
A second string to the collaboration saw Brooks and McMillan explore The Portico’s extensive collections of mostly 19th century books to create found poetry and collages. With over 25,000 to choose from, they focused on tomes relating to walking and light. With McMillan selecting the words, Brooks handpicked images from unrelated books that when put together, created new meanings and purpose for books that perhaps had remained unopened for decades.
Ian and Andrew in Portico Library
The exhibition is part of the Manchester City of Literature Festival of Libraries.
Brooks said: “Reading Ian’s early stroll tweets 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.
“This call and response project is 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 written snapshots as inspiration for how I photograph the streets near where I live in New Mills. 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.”
“My ‘early stroll’ language had to find a way into somewhere new at sunrise.”
McMillan said: “Every morning I get up at 5am and go for my early stroll, always taking the same route around Darfield, the village near Barnsley where I’ve always lived.
“For me, as for many people, this is the best time of the day. Nothing much has happened yet and it feels like almost anything might happen.
“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 Andrew and I started thinking about a collaboration in 2023, ‘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.”
The Songs The Morning Sang is at The Portico Library, 57 Mosley Street, Manchester M2 3HY from 6 June-27 September 2025. The library is closed on Sundays.
A public opening event takes place on Thursday 5 June at 6pm-7.30pm. Entry is free but please sign up here https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-songs-the-morning-sang-public-opening-tickets-1280757753919
