Elizabeth Gaskell House, 84 Plymouth Grove, Rusholme, Manchester

The journalist Brian Redhead, editor of the Manchester Guardian before he became a stalwart of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, after walking down Cross Street and meeting, in quick succession, the cricketer Cyril Washbrook, the artist L S Lowry and the conductor Sir John Barbirolli, remarked, “Manchester’s like that.  It’s big enough for things to happen and small enough for you to get there and be part of them.”

It was ever so.

If in the 1850s you’d been invited to tea or dinner with Rev William Gaskell (1805-1884) and his wife Elizabeth (1810-1865) at their out-of-town villa at 42 Plymouth Grove (now renumbered 84), you might have shared hospitality with some of the greatest figures of Victorian society, alongside local residents who knew each other and became known to posterity.

William Gaskell’s Unitarian congregation at the Cross Street Chapel included such figures as –

• Sir William Fairbairn Bt (1789-1874), civil engineer
• Sir Benjamin Heywood (1793-1865), first president of the Manchester Mechanics’ Institute
• Robert Hyde Greg (1795-1875), MP for Manchester (1839-1841)
• Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth (1804-1877), co-founder of the Manchester Statistical Society
• Thomas Worthington (1826-1909), architect

The Gaskells’ status – he a great preacher and philanthropist, she a celebrated novelist who unlike the Brontës and Mary Ann Evans made no secret of her gender – attracted visitors from outside Manchester, including Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Ruskin.

By the time the Gaskells bought their elegant Greek Revival villa in 1850, William had been minister at Cross Street since 1828, and Elizabeth had published her first novel, Mary Barton:  a tale of Manchester Life (1848).

The pianist and conductor Charles Hallé (1819-1895) gave piano lessons to the Gaskells’ daughters at Plymouth Grove after he settled in Manchester in 1853.

Elizabeth wrote her later novels at the house, including Cranford (1853) and North and South (1855), and longed to have a peaceful home outside Manchester.

After her death in 1865, William continued to live at Plymouth Grove until his own death in 1884.

His two surviving unmarried daughters, Meta and Julia, kept the house on.  Julia died in 1908, and after Meta’s death in 1913 the family gave it up.

International appeals for it to become a museum commemorating Elizabeth Gaskell’s writing were rejected by Manchester City Council.  Manchester University owned it from 1969 to 2000

Listed Grade II*, it was purchased in 2004 by the Manchester Historic Buildings Trust, which opened it as a museum ten years later.

It’s a delightful place.  The ground floor rooms are restored as closely as possible to their appearance in the Gaskell’s time.  The upstairs rooms contain exhibitions and administrative offices.

In the basement is a coffee shop with exceptional cake.

It’s well worth a bus-ride out of town to visit:  http://elizabethgaskellhouse.co.uk.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Manchester’s Heritage, please click here.

The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Hanging Bridge, Manchester Cathedral Visitor Centre

Deep beneath the streets around Manchester Cathedral the tiny River Irk flows towards the River Irwell.

Some of the nearby buildings date only from the rebuilding after the 1996 IRA bomb attack.  Others were part of the post-war redevelopment that followed the Blitz.  Very little of the central Manchester streetscape dates back before the Victorians.

The Cathedral, itself heavily restored after the Blitz, is largely a Victorian building, enlarged after the diocese was established in 1847 and repeatedly embellished between the 1860s and 1933-34.

As the parish church it had been refounded in 1421 by Thomas de la Warre, Lord of the Manor, as the Collegiate Church of St Mary, St Denys and St George, a thank-offering for the victory at Agincourt in 1415.

Its predecessor dates back to 1215 and stood next to a fortified manor house that probably occupied the site of the present-day Chetham’s School of Music.

These archaeological layers of history are vividly apparent if you eat and drink at the Manchester Cathedral Visitor Centre, where the arches of the Hanging Ditch Bridge over the River Irk have been uncovered (though current building work makes them temporarily inaccessible):  http://www.manchestercathedralvisitorcentre.org/the-hanging-ditch-bridge.

Though the Roman Castlefield is more apparent as a modern tourist attraction, this is the heart of modern Manchester, dating back to the time in the late tenth century, when the more prosperous settlement was on the opposite bank of the Irwell and Manchester was a subsidiary manor within the hundred of Salford.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Manchester’s Heritage, please click here.

The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Chetham’s Library, Manchester

Twenty-first century concerns about social inclusion and lamentations about the decline of local-authority amenities such as schools and libraries are nothing new.

Chetham’s School and Library was a seventeenth-century attempt to educate the underprivileged and give access to learning to members of the public.

Humphrey Chetham (1580-1653), a prosperous bachelor cotton-merchant and banker, made provision in his will to benefit the sons “of honest, industrious parents and not of wandering or idle beggars or roagues nor that any of the said boyes shal bee bastards nor such as are lame, infirme or diseased at the time of their ellection” by founding the school that still bears his name.

(In comparison, the older Manchester Grammar School, – which stood nearby until it moved out to Fallowfield in 1931 – was founded in 1515 by Hugh Oldham, Bishop of Exeter, “for boys who, having pregnant wit, have been for the most part brought up rudely and idly.”)

His trustees bought the decayed college buildings that had been built by Thomas de la Warre, Lord of the Manor, when he refounded and rebuilt the parish church, now the Cathedral, in 1421.

They spent £400 on buildings and £1,000 on the books which were to be available to the general public free of charge.

Naturally, the books stayed firmly chained to the shelves, and readers had to move to the location of the book they wanted, using oak stools with S-shaped hand holds that remain in the library.

Stepping into the Library, which is accessible to tourists or readers alike, is a journey back in time.

Though the catalogue is now digitised, the books are still arranged in presses, secured by wooden gates instead of chains, and are brought to readers by library staff.

The table where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels researched and wrote in 1845 is still beside the stained-glass window which, Engels later remarked, “ensures that the weather is always fine there”.

Nowadays the school is a specialised music school, open to boys and girls, and some of the medieval buildings are off-limits to the public for much of the time.

Visitors are made very welcome, and guided tours are available.  There’s no charge but donations are appreciated.  It’s advisable to make an appointment simply to be sure of a place:  http://library.chethams.com/about/visiting.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Manchester’s Heritage, please click here.

The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.