Manchester

• 

Sights & Museums

The blending of history and heritage in Manchester is a constant, highly active and very visible process. Driven by the 1996 IRA bomb and the staging of 2002's Commonwealth Games, the last decade has seen as furious a programme of rebuilding as the city has experienced since the cotton mills and their attendant slums sprang up in 19th-century Cottonopolis. Today, any exhaustive city guide would be made redundant within days, as new building conversions spring up citywide like stop-motion footage of fungus on a nature documentary.

The anchor of history, though, holds steady. Manchester is no stranger to upheaval, having witnessed and absorbed abrupt incursions of interlopers from Roman legions to Bonnie Prince Charlie's Jacobite rebellion and late 20th-century Irish republicanism. At the end of it all, the Manchester of today is a far brasher place, for which much of the credit, if that's the appropriate word, must go to the 1996 explosion. The largest bomb to be detonated in mainland Britain, it took no lives but did ultimately provide the impetus for a regeneration that has left areas of the centre unrecognisable to anyone who last saw them a decade earlier. This allows the city to present itself as a living, vibrant and developing location, but has itself come at a cost, as much of the character of the old city is being subsumed under pricey new accommodation, while old-fashioned pubs are fast being replaced by rapacious wine bars.

Still, the enviable sweep of history represented across the city remains intact, albeit often buried beneath indifferent promotion. Manchester's museums have all benefited from the financial quantum leap in the wake of the bomb and the Commonwealth Games; the council have faced up to the fact that talking the city up as an international player means actually having to make it look like an international city. In many ways Manchester still lags behind in this sense, but old favourites such as the Manchester Art Gallery and Manchester Museum have had major refits, while entirely new attractions such as the Lowry, Imperial War Museum North, Urbis and Sportcity have arrived in very modern architectural forms and wrenched the city into the 21st century.

New public spaces
The arrival of self-explanatory New Cathedral Street nicely connects old and new Manchester, and opens up the old sightline between the cathedral and St Ann's church (now bordered by glossy new shops). In the background, Beetham Tower looms iconically. The new public spaces of Cathedral Gardens and Exchange Square have added some much needed air amid an oppressively claustrophobic mania for development, although decent green space still comes at a premium, and generally every demolished building is immediately replaced with another taller one.

A near-psychotic drive to turn the City Centre into a residential area sometimes creates the feeling that the population is being replaced by an invisible army of subletters. Affordable housing remains a mostly notional concept.

• Did you find this useful? Yes No
• 

---