A couple of days in my old home city of Manchester
From time to time, I’m invited to lecture to visiting delegations from China, usually in London. This week, I was asked to go to Manchester to give a couple of such lectures and I agreed since I was brought in Manchester (I left when I was 23) and still have relatives there.
So I went up the day before and caught up with my step mother Marjorie. She only gets to the cinema if i take her, so we went to see a film she was keen to view: the wonderful “Mr Turner” directed by Mike Leigh and starring Timothy Spall. This is a work which is set deservedly to win many awards and we saw it at the independent Cornerhouse cinema [see my review here]. Afterwards we had a really good meal at an Italian restaurant called “Giorgio”.
I stayed overnight in the same central Manchester hotel where the Chinese delegation was staying and where I would be giving my lectures next day. The Britannia Hotel was opened in 1982 in a building dating back to 1858 when it was the Lancashire cotton industry’s most famous warehouse.
The following morning, I met the Chinese delegation from the Hangzhou Municipal Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervsion (I’ve actually been to Hangzhous, one of the 15 cities I’ve visited on three trips to China). My two lectures were entitled “The British Political System” and “The Regulation Of Markets In The British Economy”.
I encouraged them to ask questions and I was pleased that they did because, when I first started such lectures to Chinese delegations, they were reluctant to raise issues with me. I am always respectful of China on such occasions, but I do politely point out some of the challenges that China is going to face if it is to reconcile its free market approach to the economy and its strict political control of society and I highlight some of the inconsistencies in China’s current role in the international community.
I spent my second evening in Manchester staying with my younger brother Ralph and his family. That evening, i took Ralph and my niece – 11 year old Saskia [see her latest poem here] – for a meal at a good local restaurant called “Croma”.
Next morning, Ralph and Saskia took me back into central Manchester. In his car, my brother played some of a new CD of jazz music: “Animalia” by Mammal Hands and I liked this so much that, back at home, i ordered it from Amazon.
They wanted to show me the recently reopened Central Library in St Peter’s Square. The building has been transformed in a revamp which has taken four years and cost £48M. As a university undergraduate, I spent hours and hours and hours in this building and it was fascinating to see how the iconic circular Wolfson Reading Room is still there but so much has changed with terrific use of new technologies.
I really enjoyed my couple of days back in Manchester – a veritable trip down memory lane. It rained all the time – but I that was the case for most of Britain.
November 9th, 2014 at 7:26 pm
Funnily enough I too stayed at the Britannia for two nights during Party Conference having done so a couple of decades earlier soon after it opened. Then it boasted, as it still does, Victorian cast iron pillars running up through all the floors around the Central stairwell which is pretty good, but then it had deep plush, deep blue carpets everywhere which were magnificent but now it has dowdy ones that vary in style in different corridors. A sad decline.
Having a seriously noisy disco in the basement may spin money but it deterred me from wanting to book there again now, whereas 20 years ago I couldn’t speak too highly of it. Mind you, what must once have been a housemaid’s room at what we once called the Midland Hotel was no better and, when I stayed at the Lowry, the Professional Footballers’ Association annual dinner had deprived other guests of the restaurant, so no hotel is perfect (though I did get to share a lift with England goalkeeper Dabid Seaman!).
Our old campus (UMIST) is largely intact though not for long as a lot is destined for sale or demolition (or vice versa).
November 11th, 2014 at 7:34 am
It always rains in Manchester. Best to have been born on the Merseyside