HIDDEN SECRETS OF CITY
A NEW BOOK UNCOVERS FASCINATING SNIPPETS OF HISTORY IN THE CITY CENTRE AND BEYOND,
WE live in a fascinating corner of the world, filled with history and culture and a lot of rain.
Greater Manchester was the hub of the industrial revolution, the suffragette movement, and birthplace to several of the world’s best musicians.
While the city’s streets are now a warren of restaurants and shops and galleries, Manchester’s brilliant history is all around.
You just have to know where to look
A new book written by two experts on all things Manchester has revealed some of the area’s most unmissable places – including some you might never have heard of.
111 Places in Manchester That You Shouldn’t Miss has been written by former Manchester Art Gallery curator Julian Treuherz and historic building conservationist Peter de Figueiredo.
It features fascinating historical facts as well as plenty of recommendations for bars, restaurants and other cultural hotspots in the city.
Here are six brilliant places to visit, selected from the book.
It’s available to buy now from all good book stores, priced at £12.99.
ANITA STREET
YOU’LL know it as the pretty row of terraced houses in the middle of Ancoats – ones that city centredwellers can only dream of one day owning.
The houses along Anita Street were first built in 1897, but you might be wondering who Anita actually was. The truth is – she never existed. The street was originally called Sanitary Street, after the Manchester and Salford Sanitary Association, but the residents on the street objected to the name.
Rather than going back to the drawing board, they just ditched the
‘s’ and the ‘ry’ from the name, and Anita Street was born.
THE BIG OLD BOULDER
Students at the University of Manchester might have spotted it – a huge grey boulder in the middle of the ivy-clad quadrangle.
Weighing in at about 20 tonnes and standing at around nine feet tall, the andestite boulder originated in the nearby Lake District.
But it wasn’t brought to Manchester by engine or by man, but by nature itself. Over the course of several hundred years.
The boulder was shifted gradually by glaciers and later found buried deep beneath the university, before being excavated and popped on display.
THE WRITING ON THE CEILING
If you look up at the Royal Exchange theatre, you’ll see a beautiful domed ceiling above the pale pink walls.
But you might also have noticed a black and white board covered in words and numbers. This is, in fact, the old trading screen from the building’s days as a cotton exchange and the numbers on the boards haven’t changed since trading ceased. It’s a little piece of history up there, which has survived the bombing of the Blitz and the building of the theatre inside.
Thutmose, who rests in the Cairo museum.
LITTLE EGYPT
Manchester can feel a long way from the sandy desserts and blazing heat of Egypt - but there’s a hefty chunk of ancient Egypt stored in Bolton.
The Bolton Museum is home to a staggering 12,000 objects, including a painted mummy case and a walk-in tomb.
The tomb is a replica of the burial chamber of Pharaoh Thutmose III, with historians adding in authentic chips and cracks by hand.
There’s even a real, shrivelled mummy inside – but it’s not
MORE THAN A WINE BAR
When many of us hear ‘Hanging Ditch’, we may think of the charming little wine bar that sits near Manchester Cathedral.
The bar, in fact, takes its name from a huge ditch that separated Manchester from what is now the cathedral in the middle ages.
The ditch filled up with rubbish, and it was only when it was cleared in the 1880s that an old, well-preserved bridge was uncovered.
Excavators found shoes, pottery and animal bones on the site.
The old bridge is now the Cathedral Visitor Centre, and some of the artefacts uncovered in the filthy old ditch are on display.
ARCHITECTURAL MADNESS Just outside Greater Manchester, Knutsford is one of the north west’s leafiest - and most expensive suburbs. It’s also home to the ‘craziest group of villas in England’.
Eight houses on Legh Road, all built by Richard Harding Watt, blend together his inspiration from extensive travels, as well as sections salvaged from demolished buildings in Manchester.
Treuherz and de Figueiredo writes: “Watt worked with a number of architects, but made it abundantly clear what he wanted from them, issuing them with his own sketches and sacking them if he didn’t like what they produced.”
The street is so out of keeping with the rest of England, Stephen Spielberg used it as a substitute for Singapore in his film Empire of the Sun. Watt died after falling from his carriage – he’d stood up to admire his own eclectic skyline.