Motorhome travel: A short break in Manchester

We do like history; industrial and social history in particular. After a working life in engineering, figuring out how machines work keeps my husband, Robert, fairly quiet. Patterns, colours and textures will keep me amused for hours. So, Manchester turned out to be the perfect short break location for us.

For a start, we had a free stopover in a pub car park in Greater Manchester (Brit Stop number 616). Transport into the city is first rate and the city caters for all tastes and inclinations. An added bonus is that all of the city museums are free. Our first port of call was the splendid Victorian Town Hall. This masterpiece of Gothic architecture is full of extravagant rooms, painted murals of local events and star-studded vaulted ceilings.

Our walking tour made us familiar with the great mill warehouses, built in the Italianate fashion. They grace the streets of Manchester with an elegance that belies their industrial past. Usually seven storeys high, the upper ground floors were the most imposing, for these were where the great cotton merchants of Manchester had their showrooms, showing off the latest advances in cotton manufacture, weaving, dying and printing to the buyers flocking to the city. These buildings shout out the confidence of their owners in the future of Manchester or ‘Cottonopolis’ as it was known in its heyday.

More grandeur followed, in the shape of the Royal Exchange, extended between 1914 and 1931 to form the largest trading hall in England. With three domes, it was double the size of the current hall. On trading days, merchants and brokers struck deals, which supported the jobs of tens of thousands of textile workers in Manchester and the surrounding towns. The exchange took a direct hit from a German bomb in 1940 and was damaged in 1996 by an IRA bomb. The creative restoration allows a theatre to operate from a ‘pod’ within the hall without obscuring the original function. 

One morning was spent at the Museum of Science and Industry. As it is huge with so much to see, we had to be very selective. I wanted to visit the Textile Hall, whilst Robert went off to find the Power Hall. The machines involved in the cotton process – from raw cotton right through to woven cloth – are great monsters. They clank and crash as they draw and twist hundreds of threads at a time. In the Power Hall, Robert was fascinated by machinery used to power the cotton mills and other local industries.

Manchester's not all about industry. The city houses five important libraries, all open to the public. We visited the smallest, The Portico Library, opened in 1806 and still going today as a members’ library. The Greater Manchester Police Museum is a little off the beaten track, but worth the detour. We amused ourselves by sitting in the cells, standing in the dock in the Magistrates' Court and trying on the police helmets.

We wandered through the narrow, cobbled streets of the now-trendy Northern Quarter, following signs for the cathedral and found ourselves in a square overwhelmed by the huge curving glass front of the National Football Museum. For a minute, we wondered if it was a Manchester joke and this shrine to football was the destination; then we saw the very much smaller cathedral.

When the industrial boom hit, Manchester grew fast – but only had this one church. In 1835, over 3,300 couples were married here, sometimes 30 at a time lined up along the altar rail. Manchester Cathedral suffered serious damage in WWII and all the old glass was blown out. Modern stained glass can be very beautiful and I found the Fire Window in the Regiment Chapel, which marks where a bomb fell in 1940, very inspiring.

For all the grandeur and excellent museums, one of the joys of our trip was the friendliness of the Mancunians.