The Manchester and Glasgow Road, Volume 2 (of 2) / This Way to Gretna Green

by Charles G. Harper

In another glance at Manchester the great Town Hall, in Albert Square, demands notice, not merely because it cost considerably over a million pounds, but because it is one of the chief architectural embellishments of the city. Opened in 1877, it was, like many other modern public buildings here, the work of Alfred Waterhouse. The style is an enriched Early English and the exterior stately to a degree. But what shall we say of the beautiful but dark interior, with its maze of corridors, its unexpected steps up and steps down? The stranger to Manchester, however, must needs entrust himself to the perils of that wilderness, for in the very fine and striking series of twelve fresco paintings by Ford Madox Brown he will find not only a justification of pre-Raphaelite methods, allied with some fine colouring and some very quaint drawing, but an illuminating pictorial commentary upon the history of the city.

BACK STREETS

It is not, however, all culture at Manchester: there are all sorts here, as in every great city. Some think the Cheetham Hill suburb the last word in dignity and ease: others extol Whalley Range, but all unite in reviling the Redbank district and Angel Meadow, or Angel Street as I believe it is now styled. Any intimate acquaintance with large towns and the flagrant purlieus in them, usually styled Providence Place, Pleasant View, and the like, will prepare the reader for the statement that angels do not inhabit Angel Meadow, any more than they do Seven Dials in London. Culture does not linger here. There is oblique testimony to this in a recent resolution of the Watch Committee to supply a police-constable with a new “set of teeth, to take the place of those he has lost in the discharge of his duty.” They were the celestials of the Angel Meadow district who knocked the constable’s teeth out. Hallelujah! The place is not so far from the Cathedral and the Strangeways Gaol, but neither the promise of present punishment that the gaol holds forth for evil courses, nor the hope of Heaven for the repentant that the Cathedral typifies, suffices to blanch the scarlet sins of Redbank, or to win the inhabitants of Angel Meadow to a better life.

If one thing is more certain than another in any great town, it is that the stranger should not explore back streets. Civic pride will see eye to eye with me there. For, indeed, the stranger in back streets sees strange sights, hears weird language, and smells still weirder odours that are not mentioned in conventional council chambers. The back streets converse in a speech of their own: they read a literature their own, and feed on food of which the front streets know nothing. In fact, in back streets and front you have two worlds that are entirely dissimilar, and know little, and would probably like to know even less, of one another.

IX

In despair at picturing Manchester in brief—for it is not to be done—I will devote some pages to a few words as to coaching times, and then conclude. Little can with advantage be said of those times, because the inns to and from which the coaches and waggons came and went are nearly all of the past, and because old inns of any kind are rare in Manchester nowadays. The ancient “Seven Stars” in Withy Grove is, however, not only much older than the oldest coach, but looks it too, in its timbered gables and stout walls, and is even of age remote enough for it to be claimed that the Collegiate Church itself is junior to it. Nay, it even pretends to be the “Oldest Licensed House in Great Britain.” Near it is the equally picturesque and ancient “Old Rover’s Return.” The “Bull’s Head,” in a neighbouring alley, with the finely moulded head of a bull by way of sign, has convivial memories and associations with early postal times, and there stands a grotesquely out-of-plumb timbered and lath-and-plastered old tenement in Long Millgate that was once the “Sun” inn, the place where Ben Brierley and his fellow dialect-poets found inspiration in the chimney-corner. The initials “W. A. F.” and the date 1647, are found upon the old building, but it is obviously at least a century older than that. No longer an inn, it is still known as “Poets’ Corner,” and in its rather vague celebrity the curio-dealer who now occupies the premises doubtless finds his account.

THE “SUN” INN, POET’S CORNER.

THE “BRIDGEWATER ARMS”