Manchester

Manchester is not one of the worlds great cities, but the perfect starting point for the trip. However it is bike friendly and has lots of trams.
I’m staying just near the station and an easy walk to the centre of town. Plenty of time for all the last minute organising such as getting a UK SIM card and plenty of cash for traveling through small towns that have no ATMs and don’t take cards. I’m expecting that will be an exaggeration but we’ll see. I also found another book about the walk so now I’ve got more than enough to read each night about the next day’s route.
I’m having a bit of trouble with the local accent, even hearing aids don’t help. I missed most of what the guy in the phone shop was talking about.

This morning I walked around the city to check out a few interesting sites. First stop was an odd little park opposite the University, Manchester is not much into green spaces. In it was a statue of Alan Turing, an AIDS/HIV memorial and small rainbow mosaics set into the paths. It seemed a sad little park, full of rubbish. Then I walked up through the “gay village”, basically a couple of block with a few seedy looking bars flying rainbow flags, then on through China town, with its typical archway. This is supposedly the largest China town in the UK.
Then I headed for the Northern Quarter. This is where all the good coffee shops and cafes are. There I found the Manchester Design and Craft Centre. This centre has a whole lot of tiny craft studios with little shop fronts set around a light filled space with a little cafe in the middle, a great spot for lunch. Then back through the middle of town where there is the most awful statue of Queen Victoria I’ve ever seen.

I gave the Football Museum a miss, but the little People’s Museum was great, full of stories and paraphernalia of causes and struggles, voting rights, chartists, suffragettes, unions and workers rights. In one square I found a statue of Abraham Lincoln, in recognition of the support Manchester workers gave to the cause of abolition of slavery.Read more