Jonathan Schofield takes a look at some stories from around the city
Aerial archaeology – from Manchester’s buildings
Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones. A friend of mine lives high up on Century Buildings in Manchester city centre. This overlooks the former churchyard of St Mary’s Church, built in 1753 and closed in 1890. By that time it was both dilapidated and empty having lost much of its congregation. An indication of how run down the church had become was illustrated during the last service in October 1890 when: ‘Canon Tonge was compelled to stop short in reading the lesson, for the rest of the chapter was missing from the Bible, and he was obliged to borrow another’. Not so much speaking in Tonges but reading in them.
All that remains in 2026 is the church wall around the site and the ghostly forms of the ledger stones (large flat rectangular gravestones) revealed in outline during dry weather if viewed from above. The image comes courtesy of Howard Sharrock. There are more than 5,200 sleepers in the graveyard. It’s been good to see them getting their time in the sun.
For a while the church had the tallest spire in the town and then the city. The tree in the picture below is almost an echo of that spire.
£20m fund for GM high streets
Bev Craig is up and running as Greater Manchester Mayor announcing she wants to boost Greater Manchester (GM) high streets with a new £20 million fund. This is the idea.
‘The Good Growth High Streets Fund will be made available to local businesses, business groups, and voluntary and community organisations across Greater Manchester to take forward ideas for improving their high street.’ Craig said earlier this week: “Our high streets are the beating hearts of our communities, and people want to feel pride about where they live. They are rightly worried and frustrated when they see derelict pubs, boarded-up shops and dodgy operators, and independent traders moving away. They want to see practical support for local businesses now. And that’s why I’m taking action. Good Growth High Streets Fund is all about restoring pride.”
This is very welcome because people are ‘rightly worried’ but £20m is not a huge amount given the absolutely desperate state of so many high streets in GM. Still this is a start and therefore welcome. Applications for the funding will be open ‘later this year’.
The mention of voluntary and community organisations is interesting. Given council budgetary considerations perhaps citizens have to help with cleaning and caring for the high street despite paying a council tax? I’m always impressed by what ‘friends’ groups can deliver, for example Parsonage Gardens (pictured) in Didsbury with help in terms of materials from the city council. Of course, yeah, this is a relatively wealthy area but if that care can be achieved for a garden why not for a high street?
Daily Telegraph on jobs and towers
It’s always interesting to see what the national media is saying about the city and with Andy Burnham as PM they are saying a lot.
Two stories in the Daily Telegraph offered contrasting perspectives. This one was strangely unjudgmental about how ‘Andy Burnham’s devolution push will drive 90,000 bankers and lawyers out of London’. Apparently Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds will take half of these jobs with 15,000 to 22,500 coming to the North West. As the article points out the UK is the most centralised country in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). So that movement of jobs is a good thing, right? Decentralise. Come north folks.
The mood was different in another article criticising Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) for dishing out money to private developers such as Renaker which ‘received more than £500m in loans from the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) while Andy Burnham was chairman.’ This was helped with a deal between a firm called Crestbrick founded by former Singapore model Germaine Chow which then sold flats off plan to Far Eastern investors. This is not new news as such.
Aubrey Weis, a rival developer in Manchester has been saying for some years how the loans have distorted the market in the city. He’s lost in the courts on this matter but seems to now be targeting the Supreme Court.
The Daily Telegraph claims Crestbrick ‘offers landlords the chance to buy Manchester flats at a discount before they go on the market to local buyers’ although they failed to mention this happened elsewhere in the UK because the Burnham link was the story. Andy Burnham is quoted as saying Renaker delivered ‘high-quality infrastructure’. Maybe some of these flats could house the white collar exodus?
Whatever the wrongs and rights, perhaps the Daily Telegraph article might have carried extra weight if it hadn’t included so many pictures of ‘former model Ms Chow’.
Demolishing context
They're not the most beautiful buildings but it’s a shame they’re doomed. There’s a little Georgian terrace with elegant doorways on Chester Road in Hulme. This hints at the character of the area in former times when the area was very genteel, with large houses and big gardens. It was also the home of a regiment of hussars, some buildings from that time still survive off Chester Road. I wrote about these here.
Glenbrook developers are proposing to drop the terrace and build two apartment blocks on the site to provide 162 homes. The higher block on Chester Road will be six storeys with a smaller four storey block behind. Unfortunately, the design from Tim Groom Architects is grim, utilising, by the look of it (on a rather dodgy visualisation) brick cladding, the most over used and depressing surface material currently being exploited in Greater Manchester.
Brick cladding is fake, the bricks are not structural, they’re not doing what bricks are supposed to do. Prefabricated brick panels are something to bung on the outside to make it look a bit more sympathetic to Manchester’s nineteenth century past. Was it not above the wit of Glenbrook to retain that context and incorporate the old terrace in the design or even just retain those lovely doorways?
Love your music memorabilia?
Up for auction. ‘The Factory/Manchester (Madchester) Archives from the Private Collection of the Late Mark Simmons (Factory Records/Granada TV). Preserved by the Late Kathy Skelly & Jaqcui Blud - 25 Lots.’ If you want to get your hand on some genuine tapes, videos, posters and what not from the Factory Records and Granada TV heydays then maybe bid on these, the details are here. The closing date is Sunday 23 August. I wouldn’t mind that New Order in Japan tape myself.
Kersal Wetlands and the Pink Floyd eclipse
A good place to watch the eclipse was on the highest point of Kersal Wetlands. Unfortunately, I'd forgotten the colander, but fortunately, I’d brought some wine and cheese. Even more fortunately, a young woman, with two children and a grandmother in tow, turned up and said, "We've got spare eclipse specs." That generous offer made the whole amazing experience much better.
As the sun was being eaten by the moon a small crowd gathered on the hill. There was only one metaphorical cloud in the sky. Time for a whinge.
Five minutes after the maximum with the sun seemingly pushing the moon away a woman started to play the Pink Floyd song Eclipse. Her husband, looking uncomfortable, said to the rest of us, "Do you mind if she plays this?" I grimaced and said, "Well, as long as it's just this song."
Because I did mind. I like that song, but, hey, don't dictate to us your choice of music. How many have had this row on public transport with pig ignorant individuals?
Still, the eclipse delivered in terms of the wow-factor.
The picture below was taken at the exact time of the maximum 90.3% partial eclipse. It was taken with my phone camera and not viewed through special specs. Even with just 9% residual shine that sun wouldn’t be extinguished.
Kersal Wetlands and prawn sandwiches
In terms of scale the 69 acre Kersal Wetlands (Salford M6 6NJ) is the most impressive public green space in the central areas of Greater Manchester. Effectively it’s a flood alleviation scheme with a bird sanctuary set within an exaggerated meander of the River Irwell. A walk around the full circuit on the raised embankment provides fresh air and great views of the city centre towers.
The area used to be home to Manchester Races, the Castle Irwell course, which attracted up to 70,000 people on race days but closed in 1963 with The Goodbye Consolation Plate, won by the famous jockey Lester Piggot.
There’s an interesting sporting sidenote.
When the Castle Irwell racecourse opened a new stand in 1961 it included something novel, the ‘private viewing box’ now better known as the ‘corporate box’. When the architect, Ernest Atherden, was asked to build a new stand at Old Trafford for Manchester United a little later he persuaded, with some difficulty, the club to became the first in the UK to include corporate boxes. Prawn sandwiches anyone?
If you don’t get that reference former United captain Roy Keane once criticized Old Trafford's home crowd for being too quiet and snaffling prawn sandwiches in corporate hospitality boxes rather than paying attention to the game.
Kersal Wetlands and poetry
Before the races arrived there had been a large house in the middle of the site called Castle Irwell, which was home to Suffolk-born John Fitzgerald brother of the more famous Edward Fitzgerald, translator of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. John Fitzgerald married into wealth which brought with it a large estate in Pendleton, Salford, which included a colliery. His Castle Irwell residence was a weird architectural concoction see below. Then again John Fitzgerald, a lay preacher and occasional MP, was a strange human concoction, short-sighted with a speech impediment and chunky like a turkey. He’s described more fully here.
I had no idea the region had a connection with one of my favourite translations. This gives me an excuse to quote Edward Fitzgerald and his translation of the Rubaiyat. The full version of the poem is here.
This is one of the most romantic verses in English. Go on, woo someone with it.
Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness,
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
Or maybe give a lover or a friend this sage advice.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
Wading, the beat and roundabouts
I took a party of people wading in the River Medlock on Sunday 16 August. It’s a mad tour but that’s the appeal.
One of the guests was David Bullock, a regular on the tours. The location, Ancoats and Ardwick, was his beat when he was a very young police officer. This was just after the area had been depopulated by the hasty slum clearances of the sixties.
One early morning, shortly before going off shift, he’d ended up in a recreation ground. He was alone so why not? He had a go down the slide, and then on the swings, and then there was the roundabout. In his full uniform with his shiny buttons and his traditional British bobby helmet, he pushed round and round accelerating faster and faster. Maximum speed achieved he looked up satisfied and saw his sergeant and a police inspector who had popped by. They were staring at him shaking their heads.
When he got back to the police station, a desk sergeant called him Florence, referencing the character in a children's programme of the time, The Magic Roundabout.
Byrom Street, Manchester: a strange date
Yes it's about time we got rid of the ordinal numbers. Old-fashioned imperialistic stuff, that.
Manchester quote of the week
Will tourists from New Holland or Michigan be someday amusing themselves with digging up antique steam engines at Manchester? Richard Cobden, letter from Rome, 1827
2026 answer: Yes Richard, people will be digging them up but the people won’t necessarily be from New Holland or Michigan.
UPCOMING TOURS from Jonathan Schofield
Saturday 22 August 5.30pm. The Manchester ghost tour Superb spooky stories visiting the locations inhabited by the dead with stories of the gruesome pigman, the drowned beauty who floated back, the opera singer who returned from the other side, the Manchester magician and more. Sunday 30 August 1.30pm & 3pm. Exclusive: Ruined St Luke’s Church, Cheetham Hill, a very special tour for 2026 Imagine this as a tour. A ruined church, an overgrown graveyard, a gloomy crypt. There will be music and projections. September 10am. Southern Cemetery tour A stroll through a tranquil landscape stopping at the monuments and celebrating the lives of fascinating individuals. Sunday 6 September 2pm. Secrets of KnutsfordAn amazing town with amazing architecture and great stories. This is a really fun tour with some darker moments to add definition, so crazy sports, a mad Irishman, Elizabeth Gaskell, Richard Harding Watt and the tragedy of Alan Turing.
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