Eight go strolling round Manchester
Hands up if you feel you don’t get enough time to get to know your colleagues across the region. Work – to paraphrase Oscar Wilde – being the curse of the talking classes it was great to catch up with seven of them (you’ll have to ask them if they enjoyed catching up with me) on the LIHNN social walk in Manchester on the 28th of February. The walk was led by Mary Hill – formerly librarian at Stockport and the Christie, now retired – who had a big sheaf of notes to keep us all informed and entertained and had even done a trial run to check for landslides, impassable morasses, and muggers.
The walk started at Manchester Victoria station. Outside the Victorian frontage was a series of destinations picked out in stained glass: Hull, Leeds, Huddersfield, Goole, and, somewhat implausibly, Belgium – reachable via Hull, one presumes. Let’s hope that after Goole Ghent wasn’t too much of a come down for the Victorian day trippers. From there we moved to what might be termed the Co-op quarter. The magnificent old Victorian building had a carved list of Co-op branches at intervals on the outside and at the front stood a statue of Robert Owen early pioneer of the cooperative movement and advocate for educating children rather than sending them down coal mines. A rather distressed looking child was depicted at Owen’s feet looking less than impressed to be helped by him; perhaps she was having premonitions of Year Six SATS in decades to come and was pining for the colliery.
From there we moved on to a small green space formerly occupied by St Michael’s and All Angel’s church. The site near Angel Meadow was notorious in the C19th as a massive pauper burial ground with an estimated 40,000 people being buried there between 1788 and 1816. At one corner stood the Charter Street Mission, a “working girls’ home, ragged school, and mission hall,” built between 1892 and 1900. A short stretch along the Bridgewater Canal followed. By now the surroundings were very tranquil; aside from the odd jogger and canal boater we pretty much had the place to ourselves. We stopped briefly outside Murray’s Mills formerly of the dark Satanic variety now very much of the light expensive sort. Murray’s were one of the more enlightened of the Manchester mills insofar as they didn’t employ any children under nine. The idea of small children crawling around the machinery was an appalling prospect; apart from anything else think how much beating you’d have to do to get a decent day’s work out of them. Over another bridge and we were into a rather more chi-chi stretch of canal, tenanted, one imagines by Media City types. Even the swans looked a bit classier. Off to one side was a very neat row of low terraced house formerly rejoicing in the name Sanitary Street in celebration of the fact that all the houses had bathroom and inside toilets. Thriftily the council had rebranded by lopping a few letters off either end to make it Anita Street wisely resisting the anagrammatic temptations offered by Nasty, Rainy and Ranty.
A short stretch of road after the canal we found ourselves alongside the banks of the River Medlock. White blossom and the odd green shoot fought a valiant battle against Coke bottles, burger wrappers and other items best left unexplored; something of a contrast to the idealism of the cooperative movement. Still, even Adam and Eve screwed up and they didn’t have to spend all day stopping nine-year-olds getting their arms caught up in machinery. After wending our way along the river for a bit we found ourselves at the edge of Manchester ring road where a building – whose architects had pulled off the impressive feat of making it simultaneously nondescript and hideous – fulfilled the unlikely function of being an epicentre of haberdashery. But we finished on our more optimistic note beside Mayfield Park, a six-acre children’s play area carved out from wasteland where the Medlock had been unearthed from its culverts, it’s burbling mingling with the high-pitched squeals of enjoyment coming from the impressively-tall children’s slides.
We’d worked up quite a thirst by then, so it was lovely to finish up at The Bull opposite Piccadilly Station. From the outside it looked like an establishment Dirty Den – the Kray Twins even – might have found a touch forbidding but, like a victualling Tardis, it turned out to be surprisingly pleasant and spacious inside. And had London Pride on for a fiver. I stopped long enough to discuss Mary’s next adventure – her third cycle ride from Land’s End to John O’Groats. I’m not sure what Mary’s on to have that much energy in her 70s. But whatever it is I’d really like some!
Stay tuned for the next LIHNN social. I can’t guarantee the local history but we’ll have a great time.
John Gale Trust Librarian
JET Library, Mid Cheshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
