Manchester can lay claim to many things, from vegetarianism to the laws of thermodynamics. It’s also the home of the oldest public library in the English-speaking world, and it’s about 60-seconds walk from the Arndale.
While many will have heard of Chetham’s School of Music, and the stunning Stoller Hall, tucked away in the school’s tiny campus is a wonder of hidden passageways, grand halls, secret doors and the very room in which Marx and Engels observed the squalor of the city’s poor before devising the Communist Manifesto.
Chetham’s Library is as old as the city’s cathedral, and was built at the same time, developing from the site of an old manor house, right in the centre of the city, in 1421.
