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Manchester

Manchester, the world's first industrial city, pairs Victorian mills, canals and radical history with a legendary music scene and two giant football clubs, all explored with self-guided audio guides.

Manchester calls itself the world's first industrial city, and it earned the title: the cotton trade of the Victorian era made it "Cottonopolis", the world's largest marketplace for cotton goods, and the mills, warehouses and canals that fed that trade still shape the streets. But this is not a museum city. Red brick has been turned into lofts, studios and bars, the music that came out of here (the Smiths, the Haçienda, Oasis) still hums under everything, and two of the biggest football clubs on earth play on either side of town.

It is also a city of ideas and arguments: the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, the birth of the suffragette movement, Marx and Engels reading side by side in a seventeenth-century library. Every landmark has an audio guide that tells its story, so you can walk, tram or canal-hop between them at your own pace and let each place explain itself. A good place to start is the Gothic Revival Manchester Town Hall on Albert Square, the civic heart of the city and the showpiece of its Victorian confidence.

Castlefield, where the city began

In AD 79 the Roman general Agricola ordered a fort called Mamucium built on a sandstone bluff above the rivers Medlock and Irwell. The Mamucium Roman Fort Reconstruction marks the spot, and around it the Castlefield Urban Heritage Park is the oldest corner of Manchester: cobbles, canal basins and old warehouses along the Bridgewater Canal, which opened in 1761 as Britain's first wholly artificial waterway. Overhead, the National Trust - Castlefield Viaduct has turned a disused railway bridge into an elevated garden. A few steps away, the Science and Industry Museum occupies the former Liverpool Road station, where the world's first intercity passenger railway opened in 1830. Inside are working textile machines, the Manchester Baby computer and the last stationary steam engine built to power a mill.

Libraries, protest and the radical city

Manchester's reading rooms are among its most surprising sights. Chetham's Library, opened in 1653, is the oldest free public reference library in the English-speaking world, with chained books and the table where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels worked together. The John Rylands Library on Deansgate, opened in 1900 by Enriqueta Rylands in memory of her husband, is a neo-Gothic cathedral of books holding a fragment that is the oldest known piece of the New Testament. On the Irwell, the People's History Museum fills a converted Edwardian pumping station with two centuries of protest and social movements, from Peterloo to the Labour Party. Nearby, the Emmeline Pankhurst Statue honours the Manchester-born leader of the suffragettes.

The Northern Quarter and Ancoats

North-east of Piccadilly, the warehouses and textile mills of the Northern Quarter now hold street art, vinyl shops and late-night bars. Afflecks is the indoor emporium of vintage and oddities that anchors the district, and the Manchester Craft and Design Centre, in a former fish market, has working studios where you can talk to the makers. Keep walking into Ancoats, often described as the world's first industrial suburb, where mill complexes such as Murrays' Mills have been reborn as apartments and restaurants.

Salford Quays and the waterfront

The docks of the Manchester Ship Canal, dug between 1888 and 1894, are now a glassy waterfront about twenty minutes by tram from the centre. Lowry is the glass-fronted arts centre with theatre, comedy and the city's collection of L. S. Lowry's matchstick-figure paintings; across the water stands IWM North, Daniel Libeskind's jagged Imperial War Museum, free to enter. MediaCityUK, home to the BBC and ITV, completes the set.

Football: two clubs, one city

Manchester United has played at Old Trafford, in neighbouring Trafford, since 1910; the United Trinity statue of Best, Law and Charlton waits outside. Manchester City's Etihad Stadium in east Manchester was built for the 2002 Commonwealth Games and converted into a football ground the following year. For the whole story of the game, the National Football Museum behind Exchange Square keeps Maradona's "Hand of God" shirt and the original Premier League trophy.

Getting around

The centre is compact and flat, and Metrolink, the UK's first modern tram system (opened 1992), links the city centre with Salford Quays, Old Trafford and the Etihad. Canal towpaths run from Castlefield into the suburbs, and the Alan Turing Memorial in Sackville Gardens, by Canal Street in the Gay Village, makes a quiet stop between districts.