Manchester notes

Last week was all about visiting cities which are delightfully grittier than Munich. Not that it’s hard for a place to show more grit than our home city (which could be mistaken for the setting of many fairy tales), but last week’s destinations were particularly satisfying in their lack of polish. Cheers to the Travel Bloggers Unite conference for giving us an excuse to visit Manchester for the first time.

I didn’t know much about Manchester before we went, but its name always conjured up a hardscrabble, industrial city in my mind. Turns out it’s a solid destination for a long weekend, full of personality and culture, and extremely visitor-friendly. The city center is very walkable and easy to explore. There are three free buses that run through downtown, but we never bothered to try them out since we were so content walking everywhere. An excellent tool for exploring on our own was the iphone app from Creative Tourist – one of the best city apps I’ve used, and free!

Manchester has the most high-tech tourist information center I’ve ever seen. We had fun playing with big interactive Surface maps of the city while waiting for our walking tour to begin (Visit Manchester offers an impressive array of walking tours). Our tour covered a lot of interesting bits from Manchester’s history and architecture, included a visit to the very beautiful John Rylands Library, and ended at The Castle Hotel over a tasty pint of ale.

We spent several hours admiring the exhibits at the Manchester Art Gallery. The audioguide is skippable; the Pre-Raphaelite collection and Adolphe Valette’s paintings of Manchester are highlights.

Another memorable couple hours were spent at The Birdcage.

We stayed at The Light, an “aparthotel” (hotel made up of apartments) well-located in the Northern Quarter. I want to be able to rave about this place – it has so much going for it (nice new apartments with pretty good furnishings and spectacular views) – but it fell a little short in strange and unnecessary ways, like the staff’s refusal to provide us with a usable frying pan, or the ill-fitting sheet that kept coming off the bed in the night.

Manchester’s airport is an easy train ride away from the city center, but if you’re traveling in a group of 3-4 people it makes sense to get a taxi instead.

We should have planned for more than one free day during our visit to Manchester, because there was so much we didn’t get a chance to see. There are a couple vegetarian restaurants on my to-try list for next time, and I can’t wait to have tea in the cafe in the town hall. I’d also love to go back to the People’s History Museum, and even give the Imperial War Museum a look (while its name invokes images of me dying of boredom, we had a chat with a guy from the museum one evening, and his descriptions and enthusiasm were so complete that he had me convinced it’s worth a visit; besides, like many museums in Britain, entrance is free). I hope there will be a next time.