July 29 - City Hall. Pretty much the only old building we could find but we didn't want it to feel left out coming after Oxford.
We briefly stopped in Manchester for a day,
mostly to catch up with Tash’s friend Lis who lives nearby. We were pleasantly surprised by the city as
we expected (based on what other people had told us) a bit of a craphole. In actual fact it was very pleasant, has an
enormous shopping district, not that we did much shopping as we a) can’t afford
it given the exchange rate and b) can’t carry it all home... The best bit was the northern quarter, which
has heaps of retro, gothic and pop culture shops. I really wanted the astroboy lamp and the
lego man umbrella stand, but they just wouldn’t be easy to transport alas.
However, there are some pretty cool small
museums as well which we sampled. The
first was the museum of Science and Industry.
July 29 - People's Museum. Tash demonstrates her solidarity with the workers by making a badge saying "Free Tash".
This is interesting, but very heavily skewed towards the kids, and
almost as heavily skewed towards Manchester.
I did notice that they had an Electron Microscope as an exhibit which is
almost exactly the same as the one my department has at home, so either they
replace things very regularly or we need to update some of our equipment! More interesting though was the People’s
Museum (by which they really mean the Union Movement Museum). Obviously this had a fairly obvious bias to
it as well, but it’s really well set up and has lots of interesting
exhibits. Importantly all the museums
are free, and the People’s Museum had a badge making bit at the end!
Anyway, we managed to catch up with Lis for
dinner, which was great (although we didn’t have anywhere near enough gossip
for her I’m afraid) and then we left Manchester and went to Liverpool.
