Manchester Short Break: We arrived in Manchester on Wednesday August 1st 2018 for a short break. Manchester was the city where I had met Linda and where we had spent the first penniless two years of our married life, and most of our honeymoon – apart from a day trip to the Lake District – but had only paid a few brief visits together since we left in 1970.
A ten minute walk from Manchester Piccadilly took us to our hotel. It was cheap and basic but had a good view from our sixth floor room overlooking the Ashton Canal – with the short New Islington Branch going under the bridge in the centre of the picture.
We dropped our bags and went out for a long walk around the hotel and into the centre of the city. Ours was a modern building but many of the old mills had been converted into hotels.
We walked past the main entrance to what had been the University of Manchester Institute of Technology where I often shared a large goods lift with the Principal, Lord Bowden on my way into work. A year or so earlier he had been Harold Wilson’s Minister for Education and Science and this was then very much part of the ‘white heat of technology‘.
After a year of work in a lab there I then moved to the brand new Chemistry tower a short distance away, a hazardous move carrying fragile glass equipment – much of which I had spent months building myself – and highly toxic chemicals. It was a health and safety nightmare, but we survived.
We walked on to take a look in a couple of places at the River Medlock. and on Oxford Road I photographed the splendid Refuge Assurance Building, 1891 by Alfred Waterhouse, extended in 1910 and 1912 by his son Paul Waterhouse, and further extended in 1930s.
Since 1987 it has been a hotel and was renamed ‘The Principal Manchester’ in November 2016.
Further down Oxford Road we came to the main university buildings, soot-blackened when I studied there but now cleaned up. I preferred them blackened with soot, particularly main building and Holy Name; Victorian Gothic really needs to be subdued not to be far too fussy. I wrote “It looks too toytown for my taste now, the soot stains gave it gravitas.“
My first year physics lessons were deadly boring and were conducted in a laboratory; the end of the bench where I sat was a small plaque with the message ‘Rutherford first split the atom here‘. An article in The Guardian in 2008 revealed that I and other students and staff were being exposed to radioactive materials left over from the work by his groups and later researchers in the building until the Physics department left it in 1970. But most of the contamination – including significant amounts of polonium – the material used to kill Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko – probably dated from the early years as before the death of the discoverer of polonium Marie Curie in 1934 were not fully appreciated. Her notebooks “in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, are still so radioactive that it is not considered safe to handle them.” I suspect the bench at which I sat and made notes will also have been highly radioactive.
At least two Manchester University lecturers who worked in these rooms after they were taken over by the psychology department are presumed to have died because of the radiation. The building has now been decontaminated and is in use as university offices. I don’t know what happened to that small I think brass plaque when the Physics department moved out – I suspect it may have been lost – and it may also have been dangerously radioactive. But a safe blue plaque was put on the outside of the building in 1986 and states “Ernest Rutherford (1871 – 1937) Nobel Laureate led this laboratory 1907 – 1919 herein discovered the nuclear atom, split the atom, and initiated the field of nuclear physics” and in 2016 the university renamed the building the Rutherford Building.
We walked a little through the campus to see the Arts Faculty Building where Linda studied and briefly taught in 1971-2 and then continued down Oxford Road to take a brief look at the outside of our first home in a upper floor flat on a side-street off Platt Lane – the house had a new doorm but otherwise was much the same. If it is still flats I suspect the rent may be a little more than the £2 18s 6d a week we paid. The alley at the back of the houses, always clean and tidy when we lived there, was now overgrown.
We wandered a bit around Rusholme and then went further south on Wilmslow Rd, as far as Owens Park where Linda spent three years and I lived for one on the 10th floor of the tower in a room with great views over the city, often obscured by smoke. Security around the site, parts of which were being redeveloped meant I could only view it over the wall, and we walked back up the road to the “Curry Mile” where we had one of the most disappointing Indian meals ever – which made me quite ill the following day.
You can see more pictures from this walk on My London Diary – and also pictures from the next few days when we visited some of the more interesting parts in and around the city.
Manchester Visit
Ancoats – Saturday
Central Manchester – Friday
St Johns Quarter
Oxford Road to Castlefields
Mersey Walk &, Fletcher Moss
Manchester to Didsbury
Manchester: Canal walk
To Stockport & Bramhall Hall
Science & Industry Museum
Manchester: City Centre – Thursday
Manchester: Oxford Road
Manchester: City Centre – Wednesday
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