Manchester Beyond the Centre: Six Places Worth the Tram Fare

Manchester's city centre is small — you can cross it in twenty-five minutes — and a visitor who stays inside it sees a fraction of the place. The tram network and a handful of short bus rides open up the rest, and the rest is where the city is least like anywhere else.

These six are ordered roughly by how far they are from the middle, and every one of them is reachable and back within an afternoon.

Castlefield, where the canals start

Castlefield is a ten-minute walk south-west of Deansgate and it is the oldest and strangest part of the city. It holds the reconstructed gatehouse of the Roman fort the city takes its name from, the terminus of the Bridgewater Canal, and a stack of Victorian railway viaducts crossing overhead — brick, iron, and one of them now carrying a raised walkway.

The basin below is where the canals meet, and on a dry evening the towpaths and the pubs along them are as pleasant as anything in the centre. It is also the clearest single illustration of what Manchester actually was: a Roman crossing that became a canal terminus that became a railway junction, all stacked in the same few hundred metres.

Ancoats, the mills that started it

Ancoats, immediately north-east of the Northern Quarter, has a reasonable claim to being the first industrial suburb in the world — mills built to steam power along the Rochdale Canal from the 1790s. Most of them are flats now, but the scale of the buildings is intact, and walking the canal from Ducie Street toward New Islington shows you the thing itself rather than a museum's account of it.

The area is also, as the food guide to the city notes, where a lot of the best cooking has settled — so it combines well with an evening rather than needing an afternoon of its own.

Salford Quays, for water and three big buildings

Two or three stops out on the tram, the Quays are the old Manchester Ship Canal docks, rebuilt. Three things there are worth the trip.

The Lowry is a theatre and gallery complex holding the largest public collection of L. S. Lowry's work — the matchstick industrial scenes that are, for a lot of people, the mental image of this part of England. Imperial War Museum North sits across the water in a Daniel Libeskind building of deliberately canted planes and no level floors; the building is an argument in itself, and admission to the permanent galleries is free. MediaCity is the broadcasting campus that moved a large part of the BBC north.

The water between them is the point as much as the buildings are. It is the one part of Manchester that feels open.

The Whitworth, a gallery that opens onto a park

South of the centre on Oxford Road, on the university corridor, the Whitworth is an art gallery that was extended into the park behind it — glass wings that put trees on both sides of you while you look at the work. The collection runs to textiles, wallpapers and modern British art, and the building's relationship to Whitworth Park is the reason to go even if the exhibition does not grab you. Admission to the permanent collection is free.

It is a straightforward bus ride down Oxford Road, and it sits conveniently on the way to or from Rusholme, which makes a gallery afternoon and a curry evening a natural pairing.

Victoria Baths, if the dates line up

A little further out in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Victoria Baths is an Edwardian public swimming baths of 1906 — three pools, Turkish baths, stained glass, glazed brick in green and cream. It closed in 1993 and has been slowly restored since; it won a televised national restoration competition in 2003, which is how most people in Britain first heard of it.

It is not a swimming pool any more and it is not open daily. It opens for tours, events and open days on a published schedule, so this is one to check before you build an afternoon around it. When it is open it is the single most photogenic interior in the city.

Chorlton and Levenshulme, for the ordinary version

If you want to see how Manchester actually lives rather than how it presents itself, go south. Chorlton is bars, second-hand shops, bakeries and a large green common, about twenty minutes out. Levenshulme is less polished, more mixed, and holds a weekend market behind the station that is the best single reason to make the trip.

Neither has a sight in it. That is rather the point: they are the answer to the question of what a decent northern English neighbourhood is like in the 2020s, which is a more interesting question than most museums answer.

Getting to all of it

The Metrolink tram reaches Salford Quays, Altrincham and Chorlton's neighbours; buses run constantly down Oxford Road for the Whitworth and Rusholme; and Castlefield and Ancoats are walkable from the centre. Contactless payment works across trams and buses, and daily caps apply, so a day of moving around costs less than the individual fares suggest.

Opening days for the Whitworth, the Lowry and especially Victoria Baths change with the season and with what is on. Check each before you set out — particularly the baths, which is the one on this list most likely to be closed on the day you turn up.

Heaton Park, and the scale of the green

North of the centre, reachable on the Bury tram line, Heaton Park is one of the largest municipal parks in Europe — several hundred acres of grassland, woodland and boating lake around a Georgian house. It is not a manicured city garden; it is big enough to walk in for two hours and not repeat yourself, and on a warm weekend most of north Manchester appears to be in it.

This is the answer to a question visitors often have late in a trip: where do people here actually go on a day off. The answer, for a large part of the city, is here.

Working out which of these fits your day

The six above do not all combine. A rough guide to pairing them:

• Castlefield and Ancoats are both walkable from the centre and both canal-side, so they make a single long walk rather than two outings — start at the Bridgewater basin and follow the water north-east.
• Salford Quays wants a half-day of its own. Two museums and the walk between them across the water is three hours minimum, and rushing it is pointless.
• The Whitworth and Rusholme belong together, because they are on the same road: gallery in the afternoon, dinner on the Curry Mile after.
• Chorlton or Levenshulme is an evening or a weekend morning, not a sight to be ticked.
• Victoria Baths is dictated entirely by its opening schedule, so check it first and build the rest of the day around whatever it says.

One practical warning about the weather

Manchester's reputation for rain is exaggerated in quantity and accurate in character: it is not that it rains constantly, but that it drizzles unpredictably and the sky can close in within twenty minutes. Almost everything on this page except Heaton Park and the canal walks has an indoor version of itself, which is worth knowing when you are deciding what to do with a morning that has turned.

Take a coat you can walk in rather than an umbrella. Most of this is best done on foot, and the wind off the Pennines makes an umbrella a liability rather than a help.