Stories
Garden Delights, The Prolific Cook and The Dissolute Husband
Arley Hall Gardens sit on the Cheshire plain eight miles south of Warrington, less than twenty miles from Manchester as the crow flies. It lays claim to one of the best gardens in the UK and the oldest herbaceous border in the UK from the 1840s. It also hosted one of the most interesting eighteenth…
Read MoreDoctors, lawyers and the world turned upside down
The glorious medieval woodwork of Manchester Cathedral is from the late-1400s and is full of playful wit and satire as well as deeper messages. The quire in Manchester Cathedral is particularly special and starts with a gloriously ornate screen. Beyond this you are surrounded by the exquisite stalls, or seats, of the choir. These are…
Read MoreManchester suffers a set
In 1945 Manchester made a plan to more or less demolish the whole city centre and start again. Only a few buildings would remain: the Cathedral, Chetham’s, Central Library and the Midland Hotel. The rest, including the Town Hall, would have to go. They were too old-fashioned, too tarnished by an industrial and imperial past…
Read MoreStargazing over Whitworth Street
The former Municipal School of Technology between Whitworth Street and Granby Row is now part of the University of Manchester and is a terracotta and brick structure with superb stained glass. It’s from 1895-1902 and is by Spalding and Cross. While impressive the building is not unusual in itself, but look up to the roof…
Read MoreReading a building and how an elegant man in flannel trousers fits in
The decoration on buildings tells a tale of how the people who paid for that building thought about themselves. The former Refuge Assurance Building is a case in point. Although we can’t enter the Kimpton Clocktower Hotel that presently occupies the site the exterior sums up the Refuge’s aspirations. Bit of background first. A handful…
Read MoreTales of the Market Place. The Fountain that ran with Wine and the Mad King.
Where New Cathedral Street presently cuts from Market Street to Exchange Square was once Manchester’s small and cute market place with its occasionally bloody history. Increasingly by-passed in the nineteenth century, it was effectively finished off by the Luftwaffe in December 1940 and built over in the 1970s. Here in the Market Place the conduit…
Read MoreManchester all over the globe
There’s a whole network of cities, towns, homesteads and landscape features named after this city. In North America there are more places named after Manchester than after any other British city, with more that fifty locations in the USA sharing the moniker. There are also Manchesters in Canada, Jamaica, Australia, South Africa, Suriname and most…
Read MoreThe Manchester Ophelia sleeping in central Manchester
St John’s Gardens in the city centre off Byrom Street was formerly the site of St John’s church, finished 1769, demolished 1931. The cross says that this small site contains the remains of 22,000 people, new research places the figure at an extraordinary 24,113. The dead includes curious characters such as 67-year-old Thomas Raspo of…
Read MoreWhy Manchester United play at Old Trafford…oh and drunken women
Manchester United’s second ground at Bank Street, a short distance east of the present-day stadium of Manchester City, was a nightmare. It combined a terrible playing surface with an atmosphere poisoned by nearby chemical works. To quote: ‘On one occasion during the 1894-95 season, Walsall Town Swifts turned up at the ground and were greeted…
Read MoreBob Dylan, Judas, The Buzzcocks and Take That
Many guests to the city are crazy about the music history. If they want mad range of music stories then the Free Trade Hall (now the Edwardian Hotel) and its neighbour, the Theatre Royal are good value. The Free Trade Hall was the only building of its time in the UK named after a principle.…
Read More