This paper endeavours to track some of the numerous absences conjured up by the building stone of Manchester. As a vital, ever-changing materiality entangled within a host of relations, stone can evoke the now absent human and non-human agencies of the city. Absence is revealed through an affective, sensual and imaginative engagement with stony materiality, so that the absences of other places, networks and connections, distant lives and events, human remains, cultural practices and tastes, environmental conditions and its material effects, historical recognition and matter itself are made present and acknowledged. In honouring the numerous humans and non-humans that have been integral to the ongoing production of the city, I show that stone is one element in dynamic, ongoing urban re-composition and emergence, constituting part of the city’s ever-changing temporal collage.