Manchester has a long and occasionally turbulent history, evolving from a textile town to a music industry center. The metropolis in northern England is now forging a new identity as a center of the world's cultures.
Are you familiar with the John Rylands Library? Questioned our breakfast server. It is my all-time favorite location in the city.
In the dining area of Manchester's Stock Exchange Hotel, a spectacular domed trading hall from the early 20th century served as our dining location. We had just come from our bedroom, decorated with sepia photographs of the bustling ancient trading hall, snow-white bedding, and pillows the size of small mountains. Gary Neville, a former Manchester United soccer player, is a co-owner of the hotel.
Our server correctly assumed that we were getting ready for a day of active cultural travel because we were fueling up with a breakfast of Staffordshire oatcakes with mushrooms, a regional specialty.
Fortunately, my boyfriend and I could reassure her given the intensity with which they were remarked said. This famous northern English city, which was founded in the textile industry in the 19th century and is currently polishing a well-deserved reputation for culture in all its forms, from football (of course) to music, theatre, and the visual arts, has been our first visit on the weekend.
In what was then a busy and slum-filled area of the city, Enriqueta Rylands, the widow of the businessman after whom it was named, constructed the John Rylands Research Institute & Library in 1900. It is a neo-Gothic palace of learning brimming with literary treasures, including the earliest Gospels papyrus fragment, which dates to roughly the year 200. Visitors can study in the double-height reading room under the Art Nouveau light fittings meant to evoke the cotton blooms from which Rylands and this city gained their fortune. An elegant stone stairway accesses the reading room.
What a great day we’re having. Just SOLD this atmospheric oil painting by @JanePaiceArt to one of our collectors from Anglesey at the @McrArtFair Lots of lovely art enthusiasts here in Manchester and more tomorrow. See you soon @LifeFullColour1 on Stand 234. pic.twitter.com/8oeLteJa88
— Sara McKee 🐝 (@SaraMcKeeFRSA) November 5, 2022
When we visited, the library was hosting two free exhibitions, one featuring copies of Dante's Divine Comedy and the other focusing on the city's late-20th-century pop culture, including early documentation of the Situationist-influenced design for the Haçienda club, which in the late 1980s became the center of the dance music scene. Dante and Curtis somehow looked like the ideal match in a city where high art and popular culture happily, occasionally haphazardly, merge.
Manchester was one of the wealthiest cities in the world in the 19th century. This fact is reflected in the city's urban landscape, which combines Victorian opulence with enormous historic cotton mills and rapid modern construction. The fact that enslaved people farmed the raw cotton that made the city wealthy in the Americas is still a problem for the city.
I saw the fascinating Science & Industry Museum equipment that, beginning in the late 18th century, transformed spinning and weaving in northwest England. Still, I didn't see anything about the human suffering that served as the foundation for that revolution. The director, Sally MacDonald, assured me the tale would be portrayed in greater detail in the ensuing years when the museum's extensive makeover is completed.
Domestic labor was also exploited; it is no accident that Friedrich Engels wrote: "The Condition of the Working Class in England" (1845), which contains horrifying depictions of slum living.
Outside of Home, an arts facility with a varied program of live performance, visual art, and film, there is a statue of Engels, who spent 20 years working for his family's thread business. Once located in a village square in eastern Ukraine, the locals took down this unpolished concrete memorial to communist principles in 2015 after Soviet monuments were made illegal. In 2017, the British artist Phil Collins brought it to Manchester as a piece of art that speaks forcefully to the question of who is remembered and where. It still wore the colors of the Ukrainian flag that had been daubed during protests.
A portion of the British Art Show, a quinquennial overview of British art, was sampled us at Home. Home is just one of the cultural organizations that have thrived under a politically stable municipal government that has recognized the arts as a way to improve Manchester economically and socially in the postindustrial age since the 1990s.
Over a fantastic lunch at Refuge, situated in a gorgeous 19th-century insurance company office, Home's director Dave Moutrey informed me of this history. He added that a deadly IRA bombing of the city center in 1996 served as a stimulus for active cultural regeneration. Later that year, the Bridgewater Hall opened, giving Manchester's two top-notch symphony orchestras—the BBC Philharmonic and the Hallé—a home. Many institutions have undergone renovations in the intervening years, not the least of which is the Whitworth, a university museum with a magnificent collection of historical art and design that also hosts modern art exhibitions. It is situated in a garden filled with trees. (We especially appreciated a commission by American Suzanne Lacy, who filmed locals in a Lancashire town participating in singing customs in an abandoned textile mill.)
The Manchester International Festival, however, has grown in significance both to the city's standing abroad and to the goals of other cultural institutions. It takes place every two years. MIF has commissioned work from various artists since its creation in 2007, including Steve McQueen, Punchdrunk, and Marina Abramovic. Its purpose is to stage the kinds of performances that London either wouldn't or couldn't.
Manchester's cultural leaders work well together; Moutrey and I had lunch with Esme Ward, director of the Manchester Museum, and John McGrath, creative director of MIF. She had just taken me on a tour of the museum's galleries, which will reopen in February 2023 after a significant renovation and feature an exhibition of its exquisite collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts.
The establishment of a new location for MIF called the Factory in homage to Manchester's Factory Records, the record company that released Joy Division and New Order, will be the subsequent significant development for Manchester. McGrath gave me a hard-hat tour of the construction site and showed me the enormous, L-shaped arena, which can hold 5,000 people for a standing concert or 1,600 people for a theatre production. The Factory will include year-round programming, bars, and an outdoor area flowing down to the banks of the river Irwell when it opens in the summer of 2023, just in time for MIF's subsequent edition. He contends that this building will not be found anywhere else in the United Kingdom. He expects this will contribute to Manchester being "a net importer of artists—and a net exporter of arts."