Hidden Manchester
Glynis Cooper
Manchester has suffered from being identified with
images of ‘dark Satanic mills’; of being
a wet and dirty city which spawned the saying ‘where
there’s muck there’s brass’. It
may still be a city of mills, but it is also a city
of surprises, a city of the unexpected, and of hidden
treasures.
Curiosities include a hidden grave under a busy city-centre
shopping precinct, with instructions on how to reach
it written on the walls of a nearby church; the Roman
fort under a ‘spaghetti junction’ of waterways;
a Victorian restaurant in an 18th-century graveyard;
the Jewish museum in a Spanish synagogue; and Manchester’s
own ‘Taj Mahal’; while beneath them all
lies a strange subterranean world of lost rivers and
canals flowing silently through the darkness.
Today the mills are full of luxury air-conditioned
apartments to rent, while the old cotton warehouses
are home to chic restaurants and ‘cool’
nightspots surrounding the 17th-century library (where
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels worked together), built
on the site of a 14th-century manor house. Close to
the old Ship Canal stands a glass and chrome theatre
in memory of the artist L.S. Lowry, who gave the world
‘matchstick men’, and a war museum built
to ‘represent shards of air, earth and water’.
This book tells the story of a city that is discovered
only by the more discerning, a city of the unusual
and unexpected, a city that is completely different
from the grim millscapes of the past.
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