Manchester; Monday, 13 November, 2006

Having left my luggage in the hotel storage room I headed over to the station to catch the tram to the Western side of the city. The main attraction is the Museum of Science and Industry which charts Manchester’s rise to prominence during the industrial revolution, as well as housing exhibits on the history of gas and electricity; the sewage system in Manchester and the general history of Manchester from its Roman roots.

Part of the museum is based in the worlds first railway station, the original building of the Manchester to Liverpool railway, made famous by Stephenson’s Rocket, and fittingly there is an exhibit on this (in the Second Class booking hall!)

Across the road from the main part of the museum, but still part of it, is an exhibition on air and space with lots of models of planes (and some cars for no readily explained reason) and some background on space.

You could easily spend a couple of days looking around the site, longer still if you decided to read every caption and take in every talk that the museum puts on. After about four hours my legs and feet had decided they had enough, and with a short lunch inside me I headed back to the tram stop and the North Eastern part of the city.

On Exchange Square, once home of the Corn exchange, a large Ferris wheel has been erected, supposedly only temporarily, but as it’s been here before and the council got in very serious trouble with its citizens when they allowed it to go, it is likely that it might by staying. The wheel isn’t as large as the London eye, or as creaky as the Prata wheel in Vienna, but it does offer stunning (if slightly concerning when the wind gets up) views over the city centre and surrounding countryside.

Back down on solid ground I wandered around the corner to the Cathedral, a building that is quite lost amongst the high-rise shopping centres and office blocks of modern Manchester, but quite visible from the top of a big wheel that’s not so gently rocking in the wind.

After a quick look round the cathedral it was time to head back to the hotel, pick up my bags and head back out to the airport.