I S S U E
ONE
No bars. No venues. Just places to sit. Things to see. Facts you'll want to share with others. OXFORD ROAD
As W H Whyte said "the human backside is a dimension architects seem to have forgotten", & you won't find many social spaces along this end of Oxford Road until you get to All Saints Park, aside from the steps outside the railway station which are adequate enough although you are effectively sitting on a roundabout ringed in by taxi drivers that are dropping people off at the station.
A plus point of sitting here is that the station employs cats to keep the rats under control; only one of them is still alive & he's seldom seen but sit here long enough & you might spot him.
If you're looking for somewhere sheltered from the rain, or a bit more secluded then head to the third floor of the Palace Hotel to your own private picnic area - a balcony area for patrons that's woefully underused.
I normally bring some wine & my headphones & sit here of an evening staring at the weird band stand/observatory-looking structure on the roof. I mean really, what is that thing? Please go & check this place out so you can at least tell me what it is & 
why there's a door in the roof of it.
The balcony itself doesn't capture the sun as is under an awning but you can sit directly beneath the clock tower, & if you visit at dusk you'll see tiny bats looping circles around the central atrium catching bugs. Look for the bees on the clock face above you - the symbol of Manchester. If you want to go all meta on your bad self then watch the end scenes of the 1959 film noir Hell is a City whilst you're up there, in which Stanley Baker is pursued along the rooftops as Oxford Road station & its glorious wooden sail roof is in the process of being built below him.
Whilst you're in the area take a look at the street art on New Wakefield Street, a rotating selection of paintings curated by Eurocultured & some of the largest scale street art in the city. There's also the chance here to see the River Medlock - don't get too excited mind you, but the impenetrable bridge on the Palace Hotel side has had two sheets of metal replaced with perspex as part of an arts project from the 90s attempting to uncover the river we've hidden for over a century.
There's a great doorway along here too - the former entrance of the J&J Shaw furniture warehouse from 1924 - blue & green ceramic tiles & bunches of fruit on each corner. Also in the area is a Space Invader mosaic on the bridge, & one of the few remaining streets on this side of the railway tracks of the Victorian slum
area known as Little Ireland. The street has some interesting features you'll find an old subway sign & staircase that leads you down this cobbled street that seems a lovely relic of a subway passage to the station; but it's actually a sign for a nightclub that no longer exists; it's pointless now but it's a good sign. At the back of rockers pub Grand Central there's an old rotting windowsill which protrudes from a brick wall despite there no longer being a window above it:
"So you want us to rip out the whole window mate?", "Nah, leave the windowsill sticking out will you?"
There's some iron rings attached to the floor outside; some kind of horse vs coal trap docking device I assume (the building dates from at least 1849 & was briefly housing), as well as a wonderful 'No Loitering' sign where I encourage you to loiter to your hearts content, especially since this part of town is in danger of being redeveloped within the next five years.
When David Bowie sang "We've got five years, my brain hurts a lot. We've got five years, that's all we got", well that sadness you can hear in his voice? That's because he's gutted he's only got five years left of loitering around the back of the Grand Central. Engels said something about this part of town too; it's not as important.
Lingering on in Little Ireland for a moment, can we just take a minute to
think about what the neighbouring Salisbury pub was known as back then...Tulloghgorum Vaults. Has there ever been a better pub name? Although the renaming of the Grand Central over the years has had its highlights too, from The Shady Lady to the Beef & Barley: A Schooner Inn. I ask you, what other pub has a name formatted like a modern horror movie sequel? If you want to see a really old relic of Little Ireland then hunt out Frank Street a few minutes from here, an original wooden street sign remains is just about still readable. You can come back via the glorious technicolour Hotspur House where you'll not only be treated to another view of the Medlock, a particularly ugly part of it, & pass the Macintosh Mills (home of the rain mac) but you will be in ye old street sign heaven as you'll pass one denoting the 'Border of the towneship of Manchester'.
I rather enjoy the blur of street names around here.
Oxford Street & Oxford Road - where does one start & the other begin?
Does Oxford Road station ACTUALLY lie entirely on Oxford Street? Yes, yes it does. Oxford Street Station is how I'll refer to it henceforth, or maybe even 'Drive' - Oxford Drive Cul-de-Sac No Through Road Station.
I might even put up a new sign, why not - everyone else around here has.
LOCK 98
It's around this part of the city where you can visit the dirtiest least desirable part of the canal, for a good while at least. Whilst there might not seem any reason to want to do such a thing you may just be treated to a chance encounter with the meanest looking heron you've ever seen sometimes he strolls around back of The Ritz with a kind of James Dean swagger about him, other times he sits in the grimiest corner he can find & acts as Guardian of the Underworld. If he's not in residence when you visit then it's still worthwhile checking out this part of the canal anyway - take a look at the facade of St James's Building on Oxford Street before you do, then head beneath it. The canal will lead you right under the road & St James's where it becomes clear that the rear of the structure is the no knickers equivalent to the fur coat facade. This is the case with many Manchester structures from a time when we not only needed to flood the buildings with natural light to help factory workers see what they were doing but from when we collectively decided to con people into thinking we were richer than we were - much like modern day Dubai.
The back of St James's is still great though & it's clear from this position that it's built on a steel frame - one of the first in the country to do so. It was built the same year as Liverpool's Royal Liver Building & I'm not definitely saying the architect peeked at his mate's designs but he probably did
When it opened a great hoo-hah was made about the fact it had 1,000 rooms & a mile of corridors. In the 60s people who worked here who didn't want to bother queuing to get into Jimmy Saville's lunch time disco at the Plaza used to roller skate on the roof instead.
If you find yourself in the area & in urgent need of stashing a stolen work of art or sending your amnesiac future self a secure message there's an old safety deposit box secure room still operating on the ground floor. "But what about all the bits of broken pipes?" Ah yes. There's a couple of relics on this stretch of the canal that hark back to Victorian Manchester there's the lagging which held in place the pipes used to carry steam across the city to the venues using hydraulic power to power lifts; early forms of air conditioning; & to raise theatre curtains.
On the opposite tow path, standing proud against the backdrop of St James's, there's a faded old post painted in seaside blue & green. The pipe could well be a lamp post, but the top's missing & I've convinced myself over the years that it is in fact a Victorian Stink Pipe.
The pipes vented the sewers to burn off the smell & they were often overly ornate, with some other examples I've found painted the same blue & green. The stink pipe of Lock 98: it's not mentioned in many guides; we don't like to brag.
IT’S THE MANCUNIAN WAY
If you head out of town towards the universities you can check out the Mancunian Way slip road to nowhere - it's some 20 feet in the air where this unfinished part of the city centre motorway abruptly comes to a halt. If they had finished the route it would have connected the wrong way on a one way street; it was confusingly constructed at the same time & at the same height as a network of pedestrian highways in the sky aimed to keep people & traffic on different levels from each other; its series of subways on the edge of town have a total lack of signs or directions, & it sits almost perfectly on top of a fault line (spot the rulers high up on the pillars that measure movement)-but let's not judge the road because the road never judges us, & after all it DID win the 1968 Concrete Society award.
If you've made it this far then you'd be literally bonkers, LITERALLY, to not go & check out the most dystopian looking Christ you'll ever see. St Augustine's church has the same kind of vibe going on as that stark futuristic crematorium from Scrooged. The 1968 'Christ in Glory' ceramic relief is by Robert Brumby & there's some modernist stained glass by Pierre Fourmaintraux - both of whom are kind of a big deal.
There's also some art that's made from the melted chalices of the former church when it was destroyed by a bomb in 1941. This church is rarely busy so is a great place to come to privately rehearse the Scrooged scene where Bill Murray batters his fists & kicks & screams for help as he's wheeled into the furnace, or just to sit down & admire one of the coolest bits of art in the city.
ST ANN’S SQUARE
The top activities in any one social space are sitting down & people watching, & not only is The Royal Exchange a great place to do both of those things but it's probably home to the theatre most resembling a UFO.
There's a cafe & a bar area, & seating scattered around the entrance to the theatre where you'll likely notice a slightly uneasy looking flow of people who come in here to sit down without buying drinks & wonder if they're actually allowed to be in there or not. If you've been unfortunate enough to get caught up in the slipstream along Market Street then you can find immediate relief in the giant, quiet hug that is the Royal Exchange.
High up on one wall you can check out the frozen trade prices still on display from the last day of trading in what was once the largest trade room in the world.
Although you probably should buy a drink you can choose instead to recreate some of the rush of urban exploration by not doing so, & joining the perpetually unsure non-patrons who come here to have a nice sit down, or to shelter from the elements, & in the past have included the likes of comedian Frank Sidebottom who once said that the Royal Exchange was his "favourite umbrella".
St Ann's Square is littered with obstacles in the form of street furniture.
Either they're to prevent you pulling handbrake turns outside McDonalds in your stolen car, or they're encouraging impromptu hurdling but whichever, you'll probably want to stand still when checking out the sights around here or you'll be tripped up by countless concrete booby traps.
Ignoring the cotton bud fountain in the centre of the square, unless you're big on rubbish public art or celebrating riches made from slavery, look for the most garish building in Manchester - the pink & gold facade of Barclay's Bank. It's gross. It will give your migraine a migraine. It's like a period drama set - peer inside & you'll probably spot the staff adjusting their powdered wigs & reapplying their beauty spots. Now look at the white building this joins on to & for the carving of an evil ram looking down on you from above the entrance.
The company who originally used the offices were a shipping firm operating between between here & New Orleans at pretty much the height of vampiric rule (according to Interview with a Vampire) so don't try & tell me he's not the devil incarnate, or that Interview with a Vampire isn't a documentary. You could try & tell me it symbolises the cattle that they traded in but I'd just assume you were one of his minions. The sculptor having perhaps looked at a fish once also included two 'dolphins' at the base of the boat upon which the ram's head
acts as a mast. A critic once called this sculpture “an elegant lady-like strip�. Nope. No comment.
Now if you walk past the evil ram you'll pass Half Moon Street which is second only in great moon related street names of Manchester to Moon Grove in Rusholme (which is like the time my Spanish friend told me I was her best, & only, English friend. It still counts. I'm still the best one).
Continue over Cross Street & you'll find yourself in a meandering alleyway. There's not much to see on Back Pool Fold, except a load of bins & chefs sitting on the stoop smoking, however walk down it anyway. This ginnel/alley/entry/bap/barmcake/roll is the same drunken route it always was since it was a little road around a pond that appeared on maps over 300 years ago.
Le Corbusier calls these winding old layouts "the way of the pack-donkey" as man would never purposefully plan a road so convoluted. A tour guide once told me that Back Pool Fold was prime devil-spotting territory back when the devil used to spend his weekends off pranking Victorians by appearing in the guise of a goat that could walk vertically up walls (& that's close enough to a ram for me, thank you).
Now back in St Ann's Square there's some more Manchester bees, some of the biggest you'll find, & next to them is Barton Arcade. The arcade's
front is on Deansgate yet it's this view where you really get to appreciate it the first & only remaining glass arcade in the city. It's mega. Important History Lesson: In 1871 when it first opened there used to be a shop unit that exclusively sold Bakewell tarts.
Whilst doing the ordinary tourist stuff like checking out the (De) Quincey family grave - you can pop inside the church & ask to see what's in the safe. They might not show you. You might not find anyone to ask. If you're in luck though they'll bring out the little wooden box that houses an unexploded bomb found on the roof in the 60s.
Outside on a corner stone there's a geographical marker showing height above sea level, & you're actually now stood at the geographical heart of the city. At least it used to be. From here you can get as far as Peter Street using a series of alleyways, the warp to the city's weft, this is a fine way to get from A to B without encountering other people.
One such alleyway is Boardman's Entry & is lined with metal umbrellas. (I'm not sure if anyone's ever told you guys but sometimes it rains in Manchester).
Before you hit Boardman's Entry you'll briefly emerge, from the passageway behind St Ann's Church, on to King Street. King Street's great, especially the part of the street rising up
to your left. Look at all those bloody great buildings. Don't look at that black one on the left there, ignore that one, we made a mistake, we're sorry. (We really did. The architect designed the permanently black building to blend in with its smoggy neighbours, not imagining that they would ever be cleaned up & restored to their shiny white selves. Of course, they were. I mean come on now, OF COURSE THEY WERE!). Look specifically for the gold beehive above the doorway near Diesel & the wolf climbing the reform club. There's some really nice sculptures & gargoyles all along this street. On the roof of Ship Canal House there used to be a little house where the caretaker lived with his wife. ALBERT SQUARE & BRAZENNOSE STREET
If you're sticking with the alleyways then you'll pass through Boardman's & Dalton before emerging onto a lovely quirk of a street called Tasle Alley. Now you're directly behind a beautifully curved building that looks like a turret, if you approach it from the right direction - the Liverpool, London & Globe Insurance Building.
No one really seems to talk about this flatiron-styled building, but from directly opposite it you'll see how much of a babe he is (it has to be a he; it's kind of phallic), & aside from the former Martin's Banks dotted around the city this is one of the few buildings to
sport a Liver bird.
Like the Bat Signal to Batman this Liver bird draws visiting Scousers mindlessly towards it; many's the time staff working in the building have been Scoused In - unable to leave their offices due to the build up of Liverpudlians crowding the entrance & climbing the walls eager to rub the bird's beak & level up. You can't see the building or the bird from Tasle Alley so you'll have to take a detour to Albert Square to be able to get the best viewpoint. You'll know when you hit Albert Square because of the great gothic Town Hall - jeepers, that's a bit of alright, isn't it? Outside on Albert Square you'll mostly find people sitting down & looking at the statues thinking "Who the fuck are all these guys?", & the questionable statues don't stop here. But we'll get to that shortly.
Head back down Tasle Alley & take a look at the iron curbs. These were to bear the load of the cotton carts that made ordinary curbs collapse. I'm under the impression we're the only city to have them, or at least to still have them. The curbs aren't the only anomaly on Tasle Alley, oh no.
There's some kind of sub station to your left, half way down, & the roof of it is jam packed with reeds. No one seems to know if they were planted or appeared naturally but high & dry on the little rooftop are some very
confused plants. There's an old ghost sign opposite, & then you can take a left down Mulberry Passage.
When you emerge the 'Hidden Gem' church is on your right, inside are a series of paintings of the stations of the cross by Norman Adams - former professor of painting at the Royal Academy Schools.
Now you're almost on Brazennose Street. Here you'll likely emerge opposite the Lincoln statue which is in fact on Lincoln Square, which is in fact on Brazennose Street, which is in fact on Lincoln Square...you get the idea. It's seemingly both places at once. The statue is rumoured to have been stolen in transit to London, although officially we have him be-
cause of our links with slavery abolition.
You might have noticed this pedestrianised street-cum-square has a total absence of joy, it's really brown & foreboding & there's a tiny car park jutting out onto the pedestrianised area. I don't think you're grasping how brown it is though. It's 80s brown. It's a bit like Brookside Close without any of the green grassy bits, or black tarmac bits, or mostly beige human bits. Look at the Chinese restaurant - there's a covered over area running alongside it that's clearly built in tribute to Brookside Parade. I think there's probably a statue of Sinbad somewhere around here too. As much as this square gives me bad nostalgia vibes there's trees &
there's seating which is an achievement greater than many others in the city. Now you're here take a look at that Princess Diana memorial...that's ok, I'll give you half an hour to find it.
Basically, Brazennose Street is where bad plaques & sculptures line up to enter purgatory, if you don't believe me walk as far as Chopin at the Deansgate end. Hmm, let me just take a look at that figure there....oh that's...it's...I don't....WHAT THE HELL IS THAT THING? WHAT'S WRONG WITH HIS FINGERS?! MY EYES! CHINA TOWN
The car park in China Town is a missed opportunity for a multilayered, interesting park like those of Porto, San Sebastian & 'insert any other European city here', but this one at least makes an effort to beautify the tarmaced scrap of land by way of a border made up of trees & a Chinese pagado on two of the four corners.
Is this the prettiest seating area in the city? Is that a depressing thing to admit to in a guide to the greatest we have to offer? Maybe, on both counts.
Although you'll face out away from the carpark if you take a seat here it is worth turning around & taking a look at the expanse of cars before you because there's a great brick mural of a Chinese junk ship laid into
the wall of a neighbouring building at the back of the car park. Whilst here take a look around the Chinese supermarkets & gift shops, & pick up either a sweet honey or a savoury pork bun from Ho's Bakery. What's particularly nice about the relatively small area is that it's a town for living in & there's a retirement home here, right in the middle of the city. There's also some of the best doorways in Manchester if size is your thing.
Notice the peculiar lack of Chinese street signs - during major investment into Manchester’s China Town in the 1980s it was mooted that the streets were renamed in honour of the area’s new residents but as this was the oldest part of the city centre that remained unchanged it was, somewhat ignorantly, decided against.
However if you're in the market for signs there's a huge amount of ghost signs around these parts including old business names on doorways & those marvellously confident carvings bored into the stone of doorways that scream in their permanence that yes, our business will be here forever. Keep your eyes peeled & wander down the greasy back streets & see how many names from a forgotten Manchester you can discover.
If, after your explorations of the area, you emerge onto Princess Street look out for the little floor-level cubby holes, a few still have the original iron bar intact. They look like tiny door-
ways & are a legacy of a muckier city, a city before motor engines & instead one of horses. The recesses & the iron bars are there to scrape the horse manure off your shoes before you enter one of the warehouses. Now that buildings don't come complete with these little recesses it's safe to assume that you can walk horse manure into any building you like without fear of retribution - go forth & spread muck.
If bunkers & government secrets are your bag then wander down George Street, a side street close by, & check out the Guardian bunker. It's no longer secret, it hasn't been for some time, but people like to treat it as such & inject some excitement into an otherwise dull part of the city. BT own it these days & it's used for internet cables & whatnot, but if you find the right conspiracy theorist they'll tell you a far more interesting story. PICCADILLY
The Mercure cantilevered hotel is unique in that it was built exclusively for people with cars because that was the utopian vision of a future city - all the isolated ground floor foyer stuff is a relatively recent addition - the only way in to the hotel originally was via the car ramp. Despite the architect's dream of people arriving exclusively by car people of course did still arrive on foot, those Luddite pedestrian idiots were forced to walk up the concrete car ramp with their suitcases in tow, no doubt all the while being beeped & leered at, & given the occa-
asional bumper up the backside by the fashionable, future-embracing, car overlords driving behind them.
The hotel is a precursor to The Jetsons age, a snapshot of how the imminent future was catered for in the 60s. It's a time capsule & as such it's a remarkable building. But what of the art? Ah yes, go up to the top floor in the lift, then walk all the way back down...spanning four floors is a huge mural by post-war icon William Mitchell, made of broken bits of pianos, table legs, pencil shavings & bottle tops. The same artist created the patterned relief on the neighbouring facade of City Tower - that design being influenced by the circuit boards of a computer & in tribute to the invention of the world's first programmable computer here in the city.
Next door is Bank Chambers, a kind of Sticklebricks looking building that has walls so thick it's one of the city's safest buildings. The most appealing feature of the building isn't actually visible but behind that thick outer wall is a gap just wide enough to fit an Alsatian dog before the next interior wall begins. This is a legacy of when the building was home to the Bank of England, & patrol dogs would secretly pace the perimeter walls. Like the Great Wall of China, I like to imagine that most of the structural support of this building is made up of the skeletons of workers, or in this case, dogs who lived out their days in the wall cavities hoping for just one bank robber to bring some meaning to their otherwise futile existence.
THE ARNDALE CENTRE
If you find yourself sucked into the vortex that is Market Street & or the abyss that is the Arndale Centre, resist! Or at least venture over to the Withy Grove side & look up. Nothing there? Correct!
But if you could time travel a decade or more then on top of the car park you find yourself gawping at right now you'd see something altogether more exciting. Houses. Houses on the roof of the Arndale shopping centre. Cromford Court, known to tenants as ‘the podium’, was a housing association venture by Manchester City Council. In all there were 60 flats on the rooftops of the Arndale Centre & they were inhabited on & off from 1981 until 2003, when they were demolished soon after as part of a redevelopment brought on by an IRA bomb in 1996.
If Soviet bloc prison architecture is your thing, & let me tell you it's mine, then take a walk over towards Primark, past the Shakespeare pub (check out those little painted figures merrily dicking about above the doorways) & get down on your knees & worship Lowry House. Would Lowry be happy about this eponymous building? Maybe. He was into bleak shit.
I look at it, seemingly always on a cloudless sunny day, brown against blues, soaking up the sun & I think how much it's like a block of cinder toffee.
I often stand with my back pushed against the wall of the opposite building, trying to squeeze the whole view of Lowry "Crunchie" House into the frame of my camera and I drool over the cinder tower and I start to plot the illegal raves on the top floor, the squalor of a 70s squat but with the glamour of Bowie's Berlin; multicoloured lights pulsate from the top floor windows and narcotic smoke billows from the lips of those lying supine in the corners of the rooms discussing Patti Smith. I don't want you to tell me the offices inside are top notch refurb jobs. I want junkies and techno, and a Crunchie. If you want more of this sort of thing but on a bigger scale head to Stockport to see Stopford House (the police HQ from Life on Mars).
Opposite here is a street by the name of Milk Street - it's a pretty mundane street, in fact it's little more than an alleyway and it's not even the original Milk Street - that being Kelvin Street in the Northern Quarter. Several years ago and for many years thereafter there was a drawing of a cow's face on that street sign. The simple black and white outline of a Friesian cow against the black and white street sign never failed to make me smile, and it looked almost official.
For that sort of street sign and image banter these days you need to head over to Deansgate for the Post No Bills: Bill Murray/Billy Idol/Bill Cosby montage.
That's it, now leave this area at once.
This guide is aimed at those who like to explore, take photos, learn a little about their surroundings, & for visitors who want to see places not on the tourist trail.
This is about the real city & some of that might be dirty; it might sound disparaging in parts; it might make you wonder what the hell kind of awful person would write a guide to the 'dirtiest bits of the canals', but be assured this is all because I love the city & encourage you to explore beyond the shopping districts & bars maybe then some of those areas will improve, in time. Maybe not.
But along the way you'll see things that might interest you - an old gas lamp post, an old fire alarm bell, a plug socket on a bridge. If, that is, you find weird useless crap interesting.
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