Outside the Peveril of the Peak, on the pavement of Great Bridgewater Street, there is a table-football table. Not inside, where you might reasonably keep one, but on the street, where anyone can play. The pub behind it is a small island building wrapped in green glazed tiles, with stained glass and a dark Victorian oak interior, and it has been a registered public house since 1830. The locals call it the Pev. During the war it was reputedly used as a brothel by American GIs, and there is a ghost story about pint glasses that move on their own. You come for the tiles and stay for the beer, and if the table is free, you play.
A few doors along is the Britons Protection, first recorded under that name in 1820. It has an ornate tiled hallway and one of the finest Victorian interiors in the city, and it keeps more than 200 whiskies and a serious range of unfiltered real ales. It is a drinking pub rather than a dining one, and it makes no apology for that. These two sit almost within sight of the Bridgewater Hall, which is a useful thing to know if you are ever early for a concert.
Manchester's old pubs are a genuine reason to visit, and the best of them are survivors. Out on Rochdale Road, at the edge of the Northern Quarter, the Marble Arch dates to 1888 and has tiled walls, mosaic floors, ornate ceilings and a floor that visibly slopes. It is the brewery tap for Marble Beers, so the ales are made more or less on the premises. There is a fire and a wooden bar and a beer garden, and it has been called one of the most impressive historic pubs in the UK.
The strangest of them stands on Exchange Square. Sinclair's Oyster Bar traces its roots to 1720 and took the oyster name in 1845. When the 1996 IRA bomb triggered the wholesale redevelopment of that corner of the city, the entire timber-framed building was taken apart and moved about 300 metres, then reassembled brick by brick where it stands now, beside the old Wellington Inn. It pours Sam Smith's, which by city-centre standards is remarkably cheap, and there are tables out on the square. Over on Portland Street the Circus Tavern began life in the late 1700s as a house and became a pub around 1840; it is famous for having the smallest bar in Europe and is barely wider than a corridor. If you want food with more ceremony, Mr Thomas's Chop House and Sam's Chop House are the Victorian survivors, serving corned-beef hash and steak-and-kidney pudding the way they have for well over a century. The Temple, on Great Bracewell Street, is a tiny basement bar that was once a public toilet.
For eating, the building to head for is Mackie Mayor, a food hall under the iron-and-glass roof of the restored Smithfield Market Hall on Swan Street. The hall went up in 1858, fell into dereliction, and reopened in 2017 with a run of independent kitchens beneath it. Just around the corner is the Northern Quarter, which is where the city keeps its independent shops. Oldham Street and its side streets hold record shops, vintage clothing, Fig + Sparrow, and the Manchester Craft & Design Centre, where makers work in studios in a converted fish and poultry market.
On the corner of Oldham Street and Church Street is Afflecks, which used to be a department store and is now a warren of independent stalls selling alternative clothing, vinyl, vintage, tattoos and a great deal you did not know you wanted. The outside is covered in mosaics by the artist Mark Kennedy, depicting Manchester's various heroes. For something more conventional there is the Manchester Arndale, one of the largest city-centre shopping centres in Britain, which also contains a market of independent food and gift stalls.
It is worth eating like a Mancunian while you are here, which is a stranger instruction than it sounds. Vimto was invented in the city in 1908 by John Noel Nichols, originally as a herbal tonic, and there is a statue-fountain to it near the university. Eccles cakes come from Eccles, first sold by James Birch in 1793. A Manchester tart is shortcrust pastry, raspberry jam, custard and coconut with a cherry on top. Then there is the Manchester egg, which is a pickled egg wrapped in black pudding and pork, breadcrumbed and fried, and which tells you something about the city's relationship with restraint.
Manchester is best walked, and the walking is urban rather than rural. The place to start is Castlefield, the most photogenic corner of the city, where the Bridgewater Canal, the Rochdale Canal and the River Medlock meet beneath towering railway viaducts and iron footbridges. It became the UK's first designated Urban Heritage Park in 1982, and the reconstructed gateways and ramparts of the Roman fort of Mamucium, opened in 1984, mark the spot where the whole thing began around AD 79. Roman auxiliaries built the fort near two major roads, and the civilian settlement that grew up beside it included a cluster of furnaces that archaeologists have described as an industrial estate, which makes it arguably the city's first industry. The name Manchester descends from Mamucium.
From there you can follow Oldham Street up through the Northern Quarter's street art to Ancoats, once known as Little Italy and often called the world's first industrial suburb. Murrays' Mills, among the earliest surviving steam-powered cotton mills, stand around Cutting Room Square, and like most of the surviving mills they are now flats and offices and bars. The Rochdale Canal threads directly through the centre, dropping through its locks behind Canal Street. A different walk runs from St Peter's Square to Albert Square, past the Peterloo memorial, the rotunda of the Central Library, and the neo-Gothic Town Hall.
The Town Hall is worth going inside for. Alfred Waterhouse designed it and it went up between 1868 and 1877; the Great Hall holds twelve murals by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown, painted between 1879 and 1893, the year he died, telling the city's story from the Romans through John Kay's flying shuttle to the age of science. People frequently look for them in the Cathedral. They are not in the Cathedral. Venetian craftsmen also laid a mosaic floor inside the building featuring sixty-seven bees, because the worker bee is Manchester's symbol, granted with city status in 1842 and standing for industry. After the 2017 Arena attack the bee became the emblem of the city's grief and solidarity, most visibly in Qubek's mural of twenty-two bees on Oldham Street, one for each person killed.
The Cathedral itself is worth the detour for its woodwork. Its late-medieval core is largely fifteenth and sixteenth century, it has one of the widest naves in England, and its early-sixteenth-century carved choir stalls and misericords are among the finest in the country. Next door is Chetham's Library, founded in 1653 and the oldest surviving free public reference library in the English-speaking world. In 1845 Karl Marx came to visit Friedrich Engels here and the two of them researched at one of its tables, work that fed into The Communist Manifesto. The table is still shown to visitors.
Much of what made Manchester famous involves standing on the site of something that is no longer there. The Free Trade Hall, where Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney launched the militant suffragette campaign in 1905, and where Bob Dylan was heckled as Judas in 1966, is now a hotel that has kept its façade. The Haçienda, the Factory Records nightclub that ran from 1982 to 1997 and gave the world Madchester, was demolished and replaced by a block of flats called, without apparent irony, the Haçienda. The Boardwalk, where Oasis played their first gig, has closed. Maine Road, Manchester City's home for nearly eighty years, was pulled down after the club moved in 2003. The hundreds of cotton mills that built the city are mostly gone, and the ones that remain are bars. Guided music tours will walk you round what is left of the Smiths, Joy Division, the Stone Roses and Oasis.
There is a great deal for families that does still exist, most of it free. The Science and Industry Museum on Liverpool Road occupies the 1830 railway station and warehouse, the oldest surviving purpose-built passenger station in the world, and holds steam engines and textile machinery. The National Football Museum at Cathedral Gardens is the largest in the world and keeps the 1966 World Cup trophy and the oldest surviving FA Cup. The Manchester Museum, the Art Gallery and the Whitworth are all free, and Heaton Park to the north is one of the largest municipal parks in Europe, with a boating lake, an animal farm and a tramway museum. Both Old Trafford and the Etihad run stadium tours.
Getting around is easy. Piccadilly and Victoria are the two main stations, with direct trains to London Euston in about two hours, and the Metrolink trams reach almost everywhere, including the airport, roughly every twelve minutes from Victoria in about an hour. The buses and trams now run together under the Bee Network, with tap-and-go and a single fare cap, which is the sort of thing the rest of the country tends to get around to later. What Manchester does today, as Disraeli is supposed to have said, the rest of the world does tomorrow.
Ten minutes out by tram, in Ordsall, is Salford Lads' Club, a plain red-brick building opened in 1904. The Smiths were photographed outside it in 1985 for the cover of The Queen Is Dead, and fans have been turning up ever since to stand in the same spot. There is a Smiths Room inside that welcomes them. Baden-Powell opened the place, and long before Morrissey the Hollies rehearsed there. It is still, when all is said and done, a boys' club.
