This is the place – Tony Walsh (2012)

There's been a lot of talk about the North and "Manchesterism" recently, (and I promise you there's more coming!), so Raise Your Eyes this week is a Mancuniam poem. If you've never seen it performed, stop what you're doing and watch it now.

Most people know it from the vigil after the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017. I was there, in the square in front of the town hall, the day after the attack. What I remember is a city that had every reason to hide indoors turning up for itself instead. People from all over Greater Manchester. A local Sikh temple giving out curry. Strangers handing out water. Grief everywhere, and underneath it this stubborn, unmistakable sense of hope, because everyone had come to stand together.

Then Tony Walsh got up and recited this poem, and it said everything.

There was a lot of talk that week about whether the Great Manchester Run should still go ahead. It did. Andy Burnham ran it, and Walsh recited the poem again at the start line. The city just kept going.

But here's the bit fewer people know: the poem wasn't written for the vigil. It was commissioned five years earlier by Forever Manchester, a local place-based charity that funds community activity across Greater Manchester. Read it closely and you'll spot what it actually is: a charity fundraising poem.

And we've got this as the place where a team with a dream

Can get funding and something to help with their scheme

We do charity differently, that Mancunian Way

A small local charity commissioned a poem, and that poem ended up carrying an entire city through its darkest week. That's what happens when communities are empowered to work together. When someone funds the local dreamers. It doesn't just deliver projects, it builds the thing a city reaches for when everything falls apart.

It's been a pretty bleak couple of decades in this country. But things can be better. Communities coming together is how. Keep going.