Jonathan Schofield takes a look at some stories from around the city
Rant of the week: Manchester Museum finds a reason it didn't need to find to ditch a mummy
Manchester Museum has taken the last ‘mummy’ off display and is being insufferably smug about it. This from the BBC. ‘(A) museum spokesman said removing the display "reflects changes in how we think about our responsibility towards ancestors, museum collections and the communities they represent". He said: "Before making this change, we consulted with Egyptian colleagues, members of the Egyptian diaspora and visitors to the museum, helping us to understand people's feelings about care for mummified people. However, the decision to remove Asru from display aligns most closely with what we understand about her own wishes.”
How can the museum possibly 'understand her own wishes'. Asru may have really loved the prospect of her afterlife in a Manchester Museum but we don’t know because she can’t tell us. She’s dead, you see, she’s shuffled off this mortal coil, she’s gone before us, and that’s been the case for more than two and a half millennia.
Worse, what’s that line mean about consulting Egyptian colleagues who weren’t around 2,700 years ago? Presumably the museum didn’t consult anybody at the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation in Cairo which the last time I looked is actually in Egypt. Not here. Egypt.
The Royal Mummies Hall contains twenty-two wrapped and not so wrapped ancient bigwigs, in Egypt, as with the image below. They haven’t been put in ‘storage’ as the museum puts it about poor Asru.
Curators need to be curators and not politicians or priests
Many British curators seem to believe they occupy a space somewhere between politicians and priests, Manchester Museum is proud to be at the forefront of this and seemingly wants to police our opinions while trying to shape our consciences.
The word curator comes from the Latin verb to care, it doesn’t come from the Latin verb to ram your politics from your own age (2026) down someone’s necks in publicly funded museums and galleries.
I think captions on exhibits and so on should be restricted to what, where, who and how. People, certainly adult humans, can interpret them as they see fit without having to follow the predictable bias of our political-priestly curators.
Museums should be about wonder and inspiration and the mummies in Manchester Museum have helped provide that for generations of children and adults. Surely Age of Enlightenment principles should apply here: enquiry, rationality, freedom of thought without religious or political bias—in other words, objectivity—especially in a museum attached to a university as prestigious as Manchester.
It would appear Manchester Museum, trapped in its own policy of ‘decolonisation’ has contradicted itself. It’s essentially telling Egyptian museums in Egypt that here in the West we’re better than you because we’re so kind and good and nice. This is Orientalism. The museum must feel very cosy and loving of itself about becoming a little less interesting than it was.
Meanwhile poor old long-dead Asru—remember her, a person—has been put in ‘storage’ like a lost piece of luggage. No, worse. This is a former human being left in ‘storage’. She lived in a world that was so different from ours, slavery, autocracy, Pharaonic Empire, the pursuit of glory, but she now finds her opinions, which we can’t even guess, judged by people looking through the lens of 2026 voguish thought.
The museum staff have constructed a grievance, found people who agree with them and agreed with the people who agree with them and answered their own question.
Rochdale Town Hall councillors in huge row
Free of charge with free tours, restored, open and wow. Rochdale Town Hall is something else. I'm going to do a full review soon.
The Town Hall is part of an ensemble of St Chad's parish church, gardens, the 'fairy steps' and the best public space in Greater Manchester, the Esplanade. The 400-year-old steps are officially called Packer Spout Steps or Church Steps. Growing up in Rochdale we called them 'the fairy steps' because my brothers and I could never reach the same figure when counting them and that seemed magical. There was also the tale of the church a 1,000 years before being moved to its present site my fairies or pixies.
Anyway aside from the utterly stunning exterior and interior I'll be writing about the little details, both the exquisite ones but also the funny or curious ones. The devil really is the detail. Or rather the delight.
The Town Hall was designed by William Henry Crossland (more of him later). It was a controversial project built in the hard years of the 1860s when Lancashire was affected by a famine brought on by the American Civil War resulting in much reduced availablity of raw cotton for the mills and thus unemployment and distress.
People such as Councillor Edward Taylor thought the Town Hall scheme was a vanity project and argued for a new town sanitation scheme. He lost. In the Mayor's Reception Room there's a sculpture of his shaking his fist at a chief supporter of building such a grand Town Hall. That's what I mean about the glorious details.
Let's gossip about William Henry Crossland, architect of Rochdale Town Hall
Our Billy had a complicated personal life. On 1 October 1859 he married Lavinia Cardwell Pigot who died in 1876. They had one daughter Maud born 1860. Crossland also had one illegitimate son Cecil Henry Crossland Hatt with his married mistress and then ‘common-law’ wife, Eliza Ruth Hatt, an actress working under the stage name Ruth Rutland.
In death the family came together - some of them. Crossland died in 1908 but for some reason he isn’t present in the family vault he’d designed in Highgate Cemetery. No-one knows where he or his son Cecil ended up.
Still, it’s busy in that family vault. There’s his daughter Maud, his parents-in-law and his adopted stepson Benjamin Tilley Hatt.
Also occupying the space in the tomb is his wife Lavinia and his mistress Eliza Ruth Hatt.
Helmets and no bang bang
The Number 10 of the North is a great bonus for Manchester tourism. It’s great to say the seat of British government is here once a week. When the PM or the cabinet aren’t present I like to say to guests the globe over: “What do you notice about the police officers outside the entrance?” They all notice the helmets. This is good because generally Greater Manchester Police have ditched the traditional bobby helmets for security guard caps. But that's not what I mean. It takes a couple of minutes, but eventually, and this has happened in the last couple of weeks with Canadian, Danish, German, South African guests and others, they go: "They're not carrying guns." They are universally astonished by this.
The saddest memorial in a church
I took people on a tour along and around Chapel Street in Salford on Saturday. I’ve written this article about the Sacred Trinity Church which contains this passage.
I recall a visit to the church when the rector Andy Salmon pointed out some framed panels in a side chapel. I thought this curious as I’d already seen another large World War One memorial. I don’t know why but I lazily counted the dead, there were 353 names. Then I read the dedication and reeled. It read: ‘In revered and honoured memory of the officers, non-commissioned officers and men of the Salford Battalions of the Lancashire Fusiliers who fell in action at Thiepval, France, on July 1st 1916.’ That was the first day of the Battle of the Somme. One day, one town, 353, and how many other maimed and wounded? I’ve seen many memorials to WW1 but none with this scale of devastation. Ironically up until that time, the Salford Pals, as they were known, had been nicknamed by other troops as ‘God’s Own’ because they’d had so few casualties.
I wish this were in Manchester (part one)
Speaking of churches I’ve been in Copenhagen recently. If you go hire a bike and cycle through tough areas that aren’t the perfectly manicured city centre and the freaky hippy zoo attraction that is Christiana Free Town and get yourself to Grundtvigs Church from 1926. You see it and it blows your mind. What the hell happened with Peder Jensen-Klint and his son Kaare Klint. Did they see visions? Had they watched Metropolis?
Look at the picture here, an ensemble of buildings by those fine designers and that church, an image of Expressionism apparently based on trad Danish buildings but honestly, Peder, not much eh? You don’t force brick up there, going on and on like some massive organ (musical one, folks). Go, if in Copenhagen. There’s even a hill and Denmark doesn’t do hills.
The closest we have in Manchester and much earlier is the First Church of Christ Scientist by Edgar Wood in Victoria Park. Actually it’s even more original but smaller but it needs some loving because it’s closed to the public and in a bad state. Meanwhile Grundtvigs Church and Messrs Klint I hail your design.
Latitude twins part two: Alygdzher
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned how high Manchester was on the globe at 53 degrees of latitude, something which like policemen having no guns amazes some people from lower latitudes. I then found a latitude twin on Hudson Bay in Canada: Attawapiskat.
This time lets go east and visit Alygdzher in the Irkutsk Oblast, Russia. It’s home to a few hundred Turkic people in this village 2,300 miles from Moscow. The locals are known delightfully as Tofalars. It looks incredibly pretty in the image below but apparently it’s bitingly cold in winter.
Quote of the week
'Perhaps the secret of the Manchester character is that it is nine-tenths hard North Country grit, solid Lancashire bone and muscle and brain, plus the remaining tenth, acting as leaven, of liberal-minded and enterprising foreign influence, a contribution from Europe.’ JB Priestley writing in 1937.
Upcoming Jonathan Schofield tours: Sunday 27 September 1.30pm Exclusive: Ruined St Luke’s Church, Cheetham Hill, a very special tour for 2026. Wednesday 30 September 6pm Secrets of Ancoats and New Islington. Saturday 3 October 10am The Didsbury Tour Saturday 10 October 10am Secrets of the Northern Quarter and Piccadilly
