Manchester travel guide

Top 10 sights in Manchester

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

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   1© The original uploader was Tagishsimon at English Wikipedia. · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Manchester Piccadilly station

   The main station of Manchester, opened in 1842 and rebuilt for the 2002 Commonwealth Games. Its trains to London take just over two hours; its through platforms are a national bottleneck that has been argued about for twenty years.

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   2© Marnanel · CC BY-SA 4.0

   English Football Hall of Fame

   The hall of fame of English football, inside the National Football Museum, which inducts players, managers and women's players — the women's category having been added long after the game itself had been banned by the FA from 1921 to 1971.

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   3© 瑞丽江的河水 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Manchester Cathedral

   The cathedral of Manchester, rebuilt from 1421 in Perpendicular Gothic and possessing the widest nave in England. It was badly damaged by the 1940 blitz and again by the IRA bomb of 1996, and it has been repaired both times.

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   4© David Dixon · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Manchester Art Gallery

   The city gallery on Mosley Street, free, with an exceptional Pre-Raphaelite collection — Holman Hunt, Rossetti and Millais bought by Manchester merchants who liked the moral seriousness. A suffragette attacked several of the pictures in 1913.

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   5© DrPhoenix · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Manchester Museum

   The university museum, holding archaeology, anthropology and natural history, and one of the largest Egyptian collections in Britain — much of it from excavations Manchester cotton money paid for. Entry is free.

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   6© Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Chetham's Library

   A library founded by bequest in 1653 and the oldest free public reference library in the English-speaking world, still in its fifteenth-century buildings. Marx and Engels worked at a desk in the window in the summer of 1845; the desk is shown.

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   7© David Dixon · CC BY-SA 2.0

   National Football Museum

   England's national football museum, in the glass wedge of the former Urbis building, holding the FA's collection — the 1966 World Cup shirts, the earliest known rule books, and the ball from the 1966 final.

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   8© The_Cathedral_Church_of_St_John_the_Evangelist,_Chapel_Street,_Salford.jpg: Ian · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Cathedral Church of St. John the Evangelist

   The Catholic cathedral of Salford, opened in 1848 in Gothic revival at the height of Irish immigration into the region. Its spire is a landmark on Chapel Street and it is Grade II listed.

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   9© Imperial_War_Museum_2008.jpg: pit-yacker from UK derivative work: IxK85 (talk) · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Imperial War Museum North

   Daniel Libeskind's building of 2002 at Salford Quays, three curved shards representing a world shattered by conflict, with a floor that is deliberately never level. Its main hall is periodically blacked out for a projection across every wall.

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    10© Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). · CC BY-SA 4.0

    Lyme Park

    A Tudor and Georgian house in a deer park on the edge of the Peak District, remodelled by Giacomo Leoni in the 1720s. Its exterior stood in for Pemberley in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice, which is why the lake is so photographed.

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Popular tickets & tours in Manchester

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   1© Pimlico Badger · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Heaton Park

   More than six hundred acres at Higher Blackley, the largest municipal park in Europe. It encloses the grounds of Heaton Hall, a neoclassical house remodelled by James Wyatt in 1772, which opens periodically as a museum and event space.

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   2© Briangeorge1945 · CC BY-SA 4.0

   MediaCityUK

   Eighty hectares on the Manchester Ship Canal developed from 2007, to which the BBC moved several departments from London — a deliberate act of decentralisation that has been more successful than its critics predicted. ITV and the university's media school followed.

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   3© Maarten · CC BY 2.0

   Mamucium

   The Roman fort founded about AD 79 at a river crossing in what is now Castlefield, and the origin of the city's name. A section of wall and a gate have been reconstructed on the excavated foundations, under a railway viaduct.

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   4© Diruwiki(akaKokiri) · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Castlefield

   A conservation area in central Manchester bounded by the Irwell, Quay Street, Deansgate and Chester Road, on the site of the Roman fort of Mamucium from which the city takes its name. Canal basins, warehouses and viaducts stacked over each other make it the clearest reading of the industrial city.

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   5© Mikey from Wythenshawe, Manchester, UK · CC BY 2.0

   Chorlton-on-Medlock

   An inner district south of the centre, where the Pankhurst family lived at 62 Nelson Street — the Women's Social and Political Union was founded in the front parlour in 1903. The house is now the Pankhurst Centre.

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   6© Science Museum Group · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Science and Industry Museum

   A museum on the site of Liverpool Road station, the world's first passenger railway terminus, opened in 1830 — the oldest surviving station building anywhere. Its halls hold working mill engines that are run for visitors, which is loud and worth staying for.

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   Belle Vue Zoological Gardens

   A zoo, amusement park, exhibition hall and speedway that opened at Belle Vue in Manchester in 1836. John Jennison began it as pleasure gardens and an open-air dance floor aimed at the middle classes; it became one of the great attractions of northern England, and its zoo grew into the third largest in Britain.

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   8© David Dixon · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Bramall Hall

   A black-and-white timber-framed manor house whose oldest parts are fourteenth century, with Tudor and nineteenth-century additions, in a park at Bramhall. It is the finest half-timbered house in the region and is owned by the local council.

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   Alan Turing Memorial

   A bronze of 2001 in Sackville Gardens showing Turing seated with an apple in his hand. He was convicted of gross indecency in 1952, chemically castrated, and died in 1954; the government apologised in 2009 and pardoned him in 2013.

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    Albert Square

    A square in central Manchester, dominated by the Grade I listed town hall that Alfred Waterhouse built in Victorian Gothic. It holds the Christmas markets and has been the city's gathering place for mourning and celebration alike.

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