A Day In Manchester: Manchester isn’t everyone’s idea of a holiday destination, but it is a place with many largely happy memories for my wife and myself. We met there and lived there on the upper floor of a small house in a working-class area for the first two years of our marriage. Since then we had passed through it a few times but had hardly been back for almost 50 years when we decided to book a hotel and revisit the city in for a few days in August 2018,
All of these pictures were taken on one day – Thursday 2nd August 2018 – and show a little of what we found – and you can see many more pictures from the day and a couple of others we were there on My London Diary. As you can see it was a very full day.
Manchester: City Centre
New Islington, Whitworth St, Castlefield
After breakfast we walked into the City Centre aiming to view the memorial to Alan Turing and then go on to the the Manchester Museum of Science and Technology. Our route took us past Piccadilly Village, Manchester’s tallest building Beetham Tower and a number of interesting late Victorian buildings.
This memorial to Alan Turing is in Sackville park, Fairfield St, close to where I worked for several years. He committed suicide in 1954 with an apple containing cyanide after being hounded for being gay. His work in Cambridge and later from 1948 to his death at Manchester University made him recognised as the father of modern computing and artificial intelligence.
Manchester is still full of interesting older buildings. Medlock Mill was built in 1801 as a cotton warehouse. From 1982-2011 it housed Percy Brothers – The Hotspur Press
The Great Northern Warehouse connected the railway, roads and the Manchester and Salford Junction Canal which ran underneath it.
But there is also a great deal of modern architecture, including Manchester’s tallest building, Beetham Tower.
More examples in the pictures on My London Diary at Manchester: City Centre – Thursday.
Manchester: Science & Industry Museum
Liverpool Rd
Manchester Liverpool Road station opened as the terminus of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in September 1830 and it only finally closed in 1975, although passenger services had ended in 1844 with the opening of Manchester Victoria station. It was still connected to the main line until 2015, and a few heritage services ran into it until then.
After it was sold by British Rail the station and its goods yard were used for a short time by Granada Television, who filmed some scenes of Coronation Street there, but in 1978 it became a museum. It is now part of the Science Museum, with the space to display some of the exhibits which could not be shown in its old building in South Kensington, and is a model of what a science museum should be.
We had come to see a special exhibition of the world’s first stored program computer, ‘Baby’, built at Manchester University, which ran its first program on 21 June 1948. We did finally see it, but only after we had walked past the area it was in and explored much of the rest of the museum – which was photographically more interesting. But we had to leave before we had time to really go around the museum – to which we returned later.
More at Science & Industry Museum.
To Stockport & Bramhall Hall
Bramhall Hall
We had only intended a short visit to the museum as we had planned to visit Bramhall Hall, a fine old building now owned by Stockport Council. Somehow we had spent years in Manchester seeing buses going past with the destination Bramhall but had never gone there to visit it.
I’m not a huge fan of visiting stately homes though I’ve been to plenty, but this one turned out to be rather more interesting than most and I recommended a visit if you’ve never been. But we made a bit of a mess of the bus trip – the buses were then sorely in need of a Greater Manchester mayor to lick them into shape.
Many more pictures at To Stockport & Bramhall Hall.
Manchester: Canal walk
We returned to Manchester and our hotel for a short rest and then went out for another walk by some of the canals, hoping to find a pub where we could have an evening meal.
The walk was fine, but we didn’t like the look (or perhaps it was the menu) of the first pub we tried; the second bar looked interesting but then we found it didn’t serve real meals; another pub looked promising, offering ‘home cooking’ but when I went in to ask I was told they only served food at lunchtimes.
Eventually we gave up and made for one of central Manchester’s Wetherspoons on Deansgate. It’s in a splendid former cinema, worth a visit to view its interior, and the food, if not exciting is dependable and certainly cheap.
After relaxing with food and drink we enjoyed a leisurely walk – more canals – and made our way back to the hotel.
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