The widest nave in England, medieval misericords with a dragon and a backgammon game, and two direct hits in one century.
Manchester’s cathedral is a parish church that got promoted. It was founded as a collegiate church in 1421 under a licence from Henry V, on a site that had held a church since at least the Norman period, and it only became a cathedral in 1847 when Manchester finally got a diocese of its own.
That history explains the shape. It is broad rather than tall — the widest nave in England, at about 35 metres across including its aisles — because it grew by having chantry chapels added along the sides by wealthy families, each of whom wanted their own bit, until the walls had effectively moved outward.
The misericords
The best thing in the building, and the thing most people walk past.
The quire stalls were carved between about 1505 and 1510 by a workshop from Ripon, and the tip-up seats have carvings on their undersides — misericords, the small ledges that let a monk appear to be standing during a long service while actually being propped up.
They are not pious. There is a man being tipped out of a wheelbarrow by a hobgoblin, a fox running off with a goose, a dragon, and a group of men playing what is generally identified as backgammon. There is also an elephant carved by someone who had clearly never seen one.
They are considered among the finest sets in the country.
Twice destroyed
In December 1940 a landmine detonated beside the north-east corner during the Christmas Blitz. The medieval Lady Chapel was destroyed, the roof went, and the building was open to the sky for years. The rebuilding ran into the 1950s.
In June 1996 the IRA bomb on Corporation Street — 1,500 kg, the largest peacetime explosion in Britain — blew out the Victorian glass again.
So most of the windows are modern. Anthony Hollaway’s abstract glass in the west end, made between 1973 and 1995, is deep blue and red and very good, and it exists because of the two attacks.
Around it
Chetham’s Library is a two-minute walk away, in the surviving medieval college buildings — the oldest free public reference library in the English-speaking world, opened 1653, and the room where Marx and Engels read together in the summer of 1845. Access is by pre-booked tour and it is worth the planning.
Hanging Ditch, the passage beside the cathedral, is named for a medieval watercourse, not for what people assume.
More Landmarks
Manchester Town Hall
Waterhouse's Gothic town hall, the most confident building in the city, back after the longest restoration in its history.
John Rylands Library
A widow spent a cotton fortune on a cathedral for books. It is free, and it is the most beautiful room in Manchester.
Old Trafford and the Etihad
Two stadiums, two very different stories, and an honest account of what a tour gets you when there is no match on.