The architecture and history of Manchester is just as much a reason to visit as the food. Photo / 123RF
Mancunian Steve McCabe revisits his hometown and finds a cosmopolitan city has sprung up among the dark satanic mills.
You don't go to Manchester for the weather. Britain has something we British like, in our ironic way, to call "summer", but on my recent trip to Manchester - in June, no less - the sky is unrelentingly grey. My first view of Manchester, my birthplace and a city I am returning to for the first time in over a decade, comes after my plane descends through a bank of low cloud which, I suspect, has been there ever since I last left. The temperature - in June, I would remind you - is higher in Auckland than in Manchester. In the summer.
What, then, would possess one to travel halfway round the world to visit Manchester? It isn't an easy city to get to for Kiwis; I have arrived via Sydney, and Singapore, and London, and while this isn't quite the shortest route, it's not far from it - you'll not get there in less than three flights.
If the weather isn't a reason to get you to Manchester, the food will be. British food has long been the stuff of mockery so I'll not try to convince you that the fish and chips in the northwest of England are any better than a New Zealand takeaway. Instead, I'll direct you to Rusholme, on the southern edge of the city centre.
I head out of town on Oxford Rd, away from St. Peter's Square, past the now-empty BBC studios. Beyond the University, where Oxford Rd becomes Wilmslow Rd, is the Curry Mile. The Curry Mile has no official beginning or end; it has no signposts. But don't worry - you'll know it when you get there, Neil tells me. Neil's my brother, a lifelong resident of Manchester and the best tour guide I could wish for. "What are you in the mood for?" he asks me. "Indian? Bangladeshi? Pakistani?" I pause to think. "Well, if they don't appeal to you, we could always go Arab. Not tried the new Afghani places yet, mind."
The choice is, simply, bewildering. The Curry Mile, the inevitable product of the mingling, over the decades, of Manchester's large Indian and student communities, has maybe 70 restaurants, and I am delighted to have a insider's recommendations to guide me. The smells of spices call from every direction; Neil's young sons point toward a cafe on the corner - they're a little young to want to site and wait for table service - and Neil nods. The counter is packed to overflowing with chicken dishes, and fish dishes, and rice dishes. We order by pointing - a bit of this, please, a bit of that, oh, and lots of that one; no menus, precious little labelling or signing. The cafe is far from classy, the stains on the formica tabletop older than my nephews. But the food is the focus - chicken korma, doner kebab, seekh kebab, fish spiced and fried into a life-enriching experience.
It would, of course, be unfair to suggest Manchester's attractions are limited to Indian restaurants. The city is also home to the best Chinese food in Britain - some would say in Europe, and who am I to argue? The day before I leave, Neil takes me into the city for lunch.
We walk from Victoria Station to Albert Square, in the heart of the city, and visit Manchester Town Hall.
There was a time when Manchester was the centre of the world's trade; built on cotton from the recently independent United States, it led the Industrial Revolution. The Town Hall's Gothic splendour speaks to an era when Manchester's cotton trade made her the most important city in the country, if not the world. Even though I've not lived in Manchester for over 20 years, when I look up at the towering spire, a cotton boll at its top to remind the world of the source of Manchester's prestige and power, I'm a proud Mancunian again. We explore the Town Hall's magnificent interior; widely praised as Britain's finest example of Neo-Gothic architecture - Manchester Town Hall has stood in for the Houses of Parliament in any number of film and TV productions, most recently The Iron Lady.
Civic pride renewed, we make our way from Albert Square to Chinatown. Britain's second-largest Chinese community - only London's is bigger - began more than 100 years ago with immigration from Hong Kong, and is now home to enough Chinese restaurants that, again, I am glad for Neil's local knowledge. Neil takes me down Faulkner St, past the paifang, the large Chinese archway that, since 1987, has been the focal point of Chinese identity in Manchester. Fu's Chinese Restaurant is Neil's choice, and again his taste is impeccable. Like most of its neighbours, Fu's menu focuses on Cantonese dishes; close your eyes as you walk down George St or Princes St and, if you concentrate on the astonishing aromas and not the cold, you could quite easily be in Kowloon or Guangzhou.
Lunch is filling, tasty, but not terribly cheap. The fried rice is as good as anything I have tasted in Hong Kong; the noodles with char siu pork are crunchy and fantastic; the dim sum are everything you would expect of dim sum. Maybe it's the couple - or is it three? - Tsing Tao beers we each enjoy, but the bill passes $30.
It's my last afternoon in England, and I don't know when I'm going to be back again, so Neil tells me we're having a couple more pints before catching the tram home. First stop is the Via Fossa on Canal St. The interior, gloomy and wooden dark, was reconstructed from an old monastery, and has a wonderfully sepulchral feel, even in the middle of the afternoon. We visit a couple more of Manchester's more quirky and unusual pubs as we make our way back to the tram stop. The Circus Tavern, on Portland St, is so tiny that the two of us are about all it can hold at one time, while the Temple of Convenience, on Great Bridgewater St, is quite possibly the oddest pub I've ever raised a glass in - down a flight of concrete steps, it is an underground public toiled converted into a surprisingly pleasant bar. There are many more superb pubs in Manchester that could have kept us busy, and refreshed, all afternoon and into the evening, but I wanted one last chance to walk around the city.
In the middle of Manchester is one of its ugliest features, the Arndale Centre, the largest city-centre shopping mall in Europe. My memory, as we walk down Cross St, is that the Arndale is an unsightly mass of yellow concrete in the heart of a lovely city; my memory isn't completely wrong. Despite efforts to renovate and remodel after the catastrophic bombing by the IRA in 1996, and even with the rebuilding of the northern half of the complex, the Arndale centre remains an unappealing, unattractive monstrosity in the middle of a city that deserves better. But beyond it, just a little further down Market Street, is St. Anne's Square, one of the lovelier public spaces in Manchester.
With St. Anne's Church, its sandstone softness a delight after the hideousness of the Arndale Centre, at its northern end, St. Anne's Square is home to the Royal Exchange, once said to be the largest room in the world when it served as the main trading exchange for Manchester's cotton. Inside the Exchange building, trading no longer takes place, and so a unique theatre, a seven-sided metal framework suspended from the four massive columns supporting the building's roof, fills the space. Outside, in the square, cafes and bars surround the local artists' displays that fill the flagstones of the square, and, by the war-memorial statue, a young lady sings opera. We get a better class of buskers in Manchester, I comment to Neil.
So maybe food isn't the only reason to visit Manchester. The history, the architecture, the unbeatable, unforgettable pubs - there are many reasons to visit this beautiful, exciting city. But the weather will never be among them.
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