THE MANCHESTER SHIP CANAL “What Lancashire thinks to-day, England will think to-morrow.” That is a political byword, not always supported by events; but if we enlarge the scope into a plenary comprehension of affairs, the truth of it becomes much more evident. Railways, in the opening of the Manchester and Liverpool Railway, August 26th, 1830, the first in England, originated in Lancashire, and spread from it; and canals, although the first was made elsewhere, at Manchester first became of importance. The opening of the Duke of Bridgewater’s In some ways even more wonderful are the changes that have overtaken Trafford Park, at the head of the Canal. Time was, and not so long since, when the park railings, along the Chester Road, at the outskirts of Manchester, disclosed broad stretches of wooded lawns, sloping to the Irwell, but it is now as though some magician’s wand had waved away the trees and the lawns and in one act had replaced them with a close imitation of the East India Docks, where skyscraping blocks of fireproof warehouses and mazes of railway sidings form amazing evidences of what the Canal has already done for Manchester. It has certainly “done for” any lingering rural fringe. I well remember in the long ago being dumped down by the railway in Manchester, as a stranger, Having since then come to it and left it by several roads, I am now fully informed as to its limits, and, with that knowledge, the houses look a little kindlier, the streets do not seem quite interminable. But I am still impressed with the extraordinary length to which the paved roads and lanes—paved with granite setts—run. There is a lane—a country lane, for it is bordered with hedges—which I found when exploring the neighbourhood on a bicycle, and that lane went on and At Old Trafford are the Botanical Gardens, once admirably placed, but now as incongruous as though, say, St. James’s Park were set beside the Commercial Road. Manchester amused itself in a genteel way there; but to see how Manchester can intensely enjoy itself after a spell of dogged work, the Belle Vue Gardens, Longsight, should be visited at holiday time. The place is the, superlatively the, popular resort, and is Hampstead Heath, Rosherville, and the Crystal Palace combined. THE FENIANS There is no end to describing Manchester: it is so vast and so varied, and its story presents so many chapters. One might say something of the Fenian outrage of September 18th, 1867, when Sergeant Brett, in charge of the prison-van conveying prisoners to Belle Vue Gaol, was shot in the Hyde Road by a desperate gang of forty armed men endeavouring to release the criminals, Kelly and Deasy. Of those arrested, Allen, Larkin, and O’Brien were sentenced to death, and hanged at the New Bailey Prison, Salford; figuring since in In another glance at Manchester the great Town Hall, in Albert Square, demands notice, not merely because it cost considerably over a million pounds, but because it is one of the chief architectural embellishments of the city. Opened in 1877, it was, like many other modern public buildings here, the work of Alfred Waterhouse. The style is an enriched Early English and the exterior stately to a degree. But what shall we say of the beautiful but dark interior, with its maze of corridors, its unexpected steps up and steps down? The stranger to Manchester, however, must needs entrust himself to the perils of that wilderness, for in the very fine and striking series of twelve fresco paintings by Ford Madox Brown he will find not only a justification of pre-Raphaelite methods, allied with some fine colouring and some very quaint drawing, but an illuminating pictorial commentary upon the history of the city. BACK STREETS It is not, however, all culture at Manchester: there are all sorts here, as in every great city. Some think the Cheetham Hill suburb the last word in dignity and ease: others extol Whalley Range, but all unite in reviling the Redbank district and Angel Meadow, or Angel Street as I believe it is now styled. Any intimate acquaintance with large towns and the flagrant purlieus in them, usually styled Providence Place, Pleasant View, and the like, will prepare the reader for If one thing is more certain than another in any great town, it is that the stranger should not explore back streets. Civic pride will see eye to eye with me there. For, indeed, the stranger in back streets sees strange sights, hears weird language, and smells still weirder odours that are not mentioned in conventional council chambers. The back streets converse in a speech of their own: they read a literature their own, and feed on food of which the front streets know nothing. In fact, in back streets and front you have two worlds that are entirely dissimilar, and know little, and would probably like to know even less, of one another. |