Overview
The world’s first industrial city, Manchester grew on cotton and engineering, and its Victorian warehouses and mills now house apartments, bars, museums and studios. It has an outsized cultural reach for its size, above all in music, and its two football clubs are known around the world. Lively, friendly and reinventing itself, it pairs its industrial heritage with a strong food, arts and nightlife scene, an easy trip north from London.
Highlights
The Science and Industry Museum, set in the world’s oldest surviving passenger railway station, tells the industrial story, and the neo-Gothic Town Hall crowns the centre. The bars, record shops and street art of the Northern Quarter lead the nightlife, and the canals of Castlefield give a walkable slice of the old industrial city. Football at Old Trafford and the Etihad draws its own crowds.