London Road Railway Station nowadays marks the beginning of central Manchester. Hitherto the long, long approach, although busy and crowded, has been, if not a thought suburban, at least busy chiefly on the retail scale. Here, however, where the railway brings travellers in from London, you see Manchester as the great city of immense warehouses: the place that no longer manufactures but deals in bulk and by wholesale with the goods produced in a dependent circle of towns.

From London Road you come immediately into Piccadilly, which is not in the least like the Piccadilly in London; and there you find yourself at the very hub of Manchester’s hurly-burly. There is perhaps not much significance in all this to the commercial man who travels down by express from London, and merely rouses himself from his newspaper to alight and then to take a cab from this railway terminus to one of the others, or to his business appointments; but to trace the road down from London on a bicycle and thus enter Manchester is to understand the great metropolis of cotton as it really is in relation to the rest of the country. To such a traveller the noise, the crowds, the furious energy, and the great sooty piles of buildings are not a little terrible. There is much good modern architecture in Manchester’s streets, but a black cloak covers it all. And yet the sky, though generally overcast, for the climate of Manchester is tearful, is not scored with smoke-wreaths, and factory-chimneys are not a feature of Manchester itself. The sooty deposit comes insensibly in the air from the outer ring of towns, and although it is not evident in the sky, it very soon tones down brick and stone and terra-cotta to one dull monotone. For all the rain that washes the city, it does not suffice to cleanse away its coating of soot. The blackness of Manchester is the first characteristic that impresses itself upon the stranger. It greatly impressed the first Shah of Persia who visited England: Nasr-ed-din, who came in 1873, and afterwards wrote an account of his travels. “The City of Manchester,” he wrote, “by reason of its exceeding number of manufactures, has its houses, doors, and walls black as coal, and the complexions, visages, and the dress of people are all black. The whole of the ladies of that place at most times wear black clothing, because no sooner do they put on white or coloured garments, than they are suddenly black!”

This not without its picturesque exaggerations, and the citizens of Manchester will hardly recognise themselves in that inky complexion, but it will serve as a traveller’s tale, and puts a keener edge on the unsharpened blade of truth. The blackest blackness of all, however, is that of the great Infirmary building, in Piccadilly, whose sable hue is own brother to darkest night. Only long years have brought it to this richness of tint. Art could not produce such a black; dull, light-absorbing as it is, the building looks like an etching against the sky, and its Doric architecture in this coating would probably astonish any ancient Greek who might be privileged to revisit the earth and see what modern times had made of ancient models. But the Infirmary, ill-placed in these days amidst the roar of the streets, is presently to be removed, and this, the finest site in the city, is to be the home of an Art Gallery and Public Library.

There are statues on the broad pavement in front of the Infirmary, and very fine ones too. But the latest addition to their number, that of Queen Victoria, is not a success. Manchester people do not—and rightly they do not—like it. The bronze seated figure of the Queen is a poor copy by Onslow Ford of the well-known statue by Alfred Gilbert at Winchester, and is set in a great canopied chair-like throne that forms a ridiculous object, seen along the street, resembling a gigantic grandfather’s-chair. The figure is the very picture of senility. Was Onslow Ford, after all, a bitter satirist of the age and of the Empire? The horrible thing looks as though he had successfully striven to typify the decay that had set in during the last years of the Victorian Era: that glorious, world-moulding era of which the second Jubilee, in 1897, was really the monument and epitaph. Here you see the tired, aged face, the hands nervelessly holding orb and sceptre; and you cannot but think that this is really typical of that time. Given another ten years of Victorian recluse rule, with old-established abuses clustering around a long-occupied throne, cobwebbed methods hugged jealously, outrageous Prime Ministers, whether of the Old Man Eloquent type or the equally harmful man of the Blazing Indiscretions, and the slowly built Empire would swiftly have sped down the road to disintegration. A more fitting monument than this for modern Manchester, which lives in the present and for the future, would be a statue of the patriot King, under whose rule in the new century the nation and the Empire shall, please God, have a new birth.

Piccadilly gives place to Market Street, and then to Victoria Street, and Deansgate, which, although it forms one of the approaches to the Cathedral, is not named after any decanal dignitary but from a dene or dean—i.e. a hollow—once sloping to the confluence here of the rivers Irwell and Irk. Here, by those affronted rivers, once troutful streams but now of Stygian blackness, and running in tunnels and under innumerable bridges, is the very core of Manchester, whose long story contains little of the doings of kings and queens, or of the romantic ways of feudal lords; but is compact of a much more romantic and human interest: the story of the striving upwards of a people, through the disheartening chances of the centuries. It is not given to the casual wayfarer to perceive this romance, envisaged as it is in the grim and grimy outskirts, or in the everyday crowding and turmoiling of the central traffic; but it is there, nevertheless, and I, for one, refuse to treat of Manchester in particular, or of the road in general, in mere terms of topography; for the road, and the places to which it conducts, take in their compass the entire interests and sympathies of mankind: the blood and tears, the joys and sorrows of the ages.