29 October 2009

Manchester weekend break

Arrived in Manchester to find hundreds of police officers lining the streets through the centre of town. Turned out there was going to be a couple of rival groups staging protests that day - some lefty outfit vs the usual bunch of racists. Some of the shops had even been boarded up in preparation, so it clearly wasn't going to be a place for us to hang around. Instead we found our hotel, which was nice and close, and spent a few minutes acquainting ourselves with a map.

Wandered about for a while, past Chinatown and St Peter's square, then killed a couple of hours in the superb art gallery. This had a very eclectic collection, but everything was either very beautiful, or very interesting. There was a little display of etchings by Goya, which were suitably frightful and grotesque. I was especially impressed with their pre-Raphaelite collection, which had another luminescent pastoral scene by William Holman Hunt, and by the grand staircase with its frieze reproduced from the Elgin marbles.

Afterwards we took a guided tour, which was useful, but too slow-paced for our taste. We saw the lovely Midland Hotel, where Mr Rolls first met Mr Royce (and the rest, they say, is history), the old stock exchange (now the Theatre Royale), a flower garden dedicated to Princess Diana, a statue of Abraham Lincoln thanking the city for its anti-slavery stance, the magnificent old library with its carved wooden interior, and finally the site of a massive IRA bombing (a post box was the only surviving structure).

Afterwards we hopped on the shabby little Manchester Eye, that although giddying, gave great views of the city.

The next morning we took the electric train out to the Docklands, which have undergone substantial regentrification, and now provide a variety of interesting architecture to admire. First stop, the Imperial War Museum North, which has been designed to serve as an anti-war memorial. We caught a terrific exhibition on Prisoners of War, which had the actual hobby horse from Stalag Luft III, and took an elevator up to the observation tower.

I then tracked down some moth-eaten old Roman ruins, before entering the Museum of Science & Industry complex for a nosey.

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