OS Explorer map 277, Manchester & Salford: Oldham, Rochdale & Stockport – I do not own this map, but had visited it before starting this blog. Visited again for this post 19th September 2022.
I visited this map area as part of my All Line Rover trip in September 2022, for which I did day-by-day blog posts already, and am now going through doing my regular posts about the new map areas I visited. The main content below will therefore be just a lightly edited version of relevant parts from my post about Day 4 of the trip, and the very end of Day 3 and start of Day 5. For a more connected narrative I recommend taking a look there instead.
I arrived in Manchester at the end of a long, busy third full day of my All Line Rover trip. Having had such a busy time, I’d planned in some more restful time after this: I’d be staying in Manchester two nights, and could have a relaxed day 4 in between. As it happens, my parents had been interested in joining me somewhere on the trip, and we decided that Manchester was a good option, and they’d be arriving in the mid-afternoon on my relaxed day to spend some time with me – they’d in fact been kind enough to book the flat that I was staying in both nights, which was a two-bedroom place where they could stay too.
On Day 4, I therefore had the morning and early afternoon to myself, and decided that I would do some more relaxed local exploring, getting a train eastwards on the line towards Glossop and Dinting, which I’d heard good things about, and where I thought I could fit in a nice walk. Rather than return to Piccadilly station where the trains start from, for a bit of fun I thought I’d walk to the nearby Piccadilly Gardens tram stop instead and get a tram out eastwards a few stops to Velopark, where I could walk to Ashburys to join my train one stop out of Piccadilly.
After a luxuriously unhurried awakening and breakfast compared to the previous days of the trip, I set out at quarter to nine to head over to Piccadilly Gardens, which is a major bus/tram transport interchange. Unfortunately, it turned out that the trams on the line to Ashton-under-Lyme, which I wanted to take, were disrupted, so I ended up taking just a one-stop tram ride to Piccadlly station and getting on the train there after all – still though, that was my third tram system of the trip ticked off!
I did indeed travel out to Glossop, on the edge of the Peak District, and had a great time on a walk up a hill, and exploring the town of New Mills. However, that was all outside this map area, so I won’t dwell on it here – for details, see my full post about this day of the All Line Rover trip!
Following those adventures, I got back in to Piccadilly at about 1:30pm, and with a couple of hours yet until my parents would arrive, I got a tram across the city centre to Victoria station, [2] for one more activity I had planned for the early afternoon: I’d booked onto a tour of Chetham’s Library at 2pm.
The tour was great! Chetham’s Library is very cool – it’s a public reference library to this day, in that anyone can make an appointment to go and read things from their collection, and has been so since its foundation in around 1650, making it the oldest public library in Britain. I briefly had to excuse myself from the tour to answer my phone to a gas engineer on site where I’d reported the leak at New Mills, but they just wanted me to confirm the location, having already found the leak, so that way okay!
The library is housed within what is now Chetham’s School of Music, a private secondary school, the buildings of which started out as an ecclesiastical college in the 15th century. It’s a really beautiful site, both the library space itself with its original dark wood shelving, and the rest of the old college: we were shown ints cloisters, dining hall and various other spaces, all still used by the school and library. We were told how the library has been used by various notables through history, including John Dee and Marx and Engels.
After the tour, I’d had quite enough activity for my “rest” day, and after another short tram hop and walk through the city centre, I got back to the flat, met my parents, and had a relaxed afternoon and evening with them, showing them my photos of the trip so far, before Father Dearest cooked us his perennial (and very nice) pea and potato curry for dinner. The next morning, I headed off from Manchester early to resume my trip proper, on a train out from Manchester Victoria station heading to Leeds!
Previous visits
I’ve been to Manchester just once before, I believe, on an open day to visit the university, which would’ve been in around spring 2011. Despite being fairly confident I wanted to study physics, as I did end up doing (at least for my first degree), I remember wanting to see the maths and computer science talks/tours too, and that this meant I was solidly scheduled from about 10am to 4pm or something, and didn’t have time for lunch! I also recall really enjoying the physics lab tour, which was something none of the other universities I visited did in quite the same way, and the physics admissions talk was given by a chap who was charismatic enough to have seared himself into my memory – to impress upon us quite how fine it was to email them with questions, he kept making up examples from a made-up student called Humphrey, ending with “Love, Humph”!
Footnotes
[2] I could have got the free bus, but I’d already bought a day ticket for the trams, so thought I’d make use of it!
Visiting all the maps! 