Refreshed from our quieter day yesterday, we set off on public
transport this morning in the same manner we had two days ago. Our wait at the
local bus stop was almost as long as that day, and today there was not the same
excuse, so we accepted that this is what the locals have to deal with all the
time. No wonder so many people give up on using public transport! It is the
same worldwide.
Alighting at Piccadilly Station, we took the number 42 bus down to
Corridor Manchester, the “Innovation District". Certainly it is the corridor of the university and the city’s
Royal Infirmary, so perhaps you might consider this to be the incubator of ideas, if nothing else. It is also
the location of The Whitworth and the Manchester Museum, our destinations for
the day.
The Whitworth Art Gallery, founded in 1889 by Robert Darbishire
with a bequest from Sir Joseph Whitworth, was completed in 1908, and in 1958 the gallery became part
of the Victoria University of Manchester. While the old building has expanded and reinvented itself over the past 127 years, it
is just in the last year that it has been reborn after a £15 million
development. It is not just an extension, or a doubling in size, it has
effectively provided an entirely new building while retaining the best of the old
building.
We thought the galleries and the space within quite brilliant, but
the work on display, of the 55,000 items held, was in line with our comments
about contemporary galleries. Some we thought quite wonderful, most were either
beyond us or simply “not art” in our uneducated opinion.
The gallery has a large textile collection, totally appropriate
for one founded on the wealth of that industry. Today we wandered about the
first floor examining the exhibition of work by Tibor Reich, a Hungarian Jew who
moved to Britain in 1937 at the age of twenty one. Just nine years later he
established Tibor Limited in Strafford-upon-Avon, where he went on to
revolutionise the drab interiors of British homes with his stylish colours and
textiles. The firm rapidly gained an international reputation working on
commissions for the Festival of Britain, Expo ’58 and Concorde. Perhaps his
commercial expertise was not quite equal to his artistic talent, because flood
in 1977 brought the factory to an end and retirement for Tibor.
We lunched in the park adjacent to the gallery, this undergoing a
tidy up, obviously having slipped below the radar of those renovating
Manchester. Here as on the streets of Manchester was evidence of the cosmopolitan
populace of the city, often foreign languages more audible than English. Here
the Muslim women are more conservative in their dress, many of the young ones
still wearing the niqab (face veil) in addition to the hijab and robe.
The bus had brought us through obstacles of major road works as we
came down Oxford Street, much of this related to the construction of bus lanes,
the completion of which our bus driver is looking forward to. We walked back
toward the city between high safety fences, soon arriving at the Manchester
Museum and spent a couple of hours there with a hundred local families. The
noise and crowds were quite tiring however we gave the museum our best shot and
did find many exhibits of great interest. We were delighted also to find items
from “home”; stuffed tuataras, kakapo and saddlebacks.
We returned home an hour earlier than two days ago, co-ordinating
the connections with great precision, minutes to spare between each change. The
weather had cleared beautifully and promises to remain so for the next couple
of days.
While we sat over our cups of coffee the steam train came past as
it had several times yesterday; our camp is adjacent to the tourist East
Lancashire Railway, a twelve mile heritage line that takes day trippers out for
a dose of nostalgia. I think it looks quite marvellous puffing its way through
but Chris cannot get past the filthy smelly aspect of coal powered engines.
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