Life in Northern Towns

Every year we find an excuse to go down to London: sometimes for a mini break; other times to meet friends and relations; but this year we were very fortunate to get tickets for the blessed KATE BUSH ! I put this down to adopting the strategy of choosing a date not released to the fan club, hitting the refresh button from 9:29am onwards and not using Ticketmaster.  The strategy worked and it meant we were in London for 22 hours. This time we stayed in Travelodge by Euston Station – small room, noisy air con and on street level next to a road junction.  In its defence it was cheap and clean, but I think Ibis or Premier Inn will be taking our business next time. As we had a few hours to spare we decided to head down to Berwick Street just off Oxford Street.  We decided to walk so we could check out the Fopp in the Waterstones branch on the corner of Gower Street.  Shock horror, Fopp had gone! We continued onto Tottenham Court Road and window shopped past H...

I've been to lots of northern towns, cities, suburbs and villages over the years for this blog, but at no point have I written about Manchester,  my home city.  The reason being I couldn't condense 40 plus years of knowledge into one pithy post.  So to get over this hurdle I've developed a new feature - An Insider's Guide to Manchester.  Each post will focus on one aspect that Manchester has to offer - good, bad or indifferent.  My first post in this series is Manchester Museum. The first time I went to Manchester Museum I was on a school trip with my primary school. The trip has always stuck in my mind as I'd never been to a museum before and never to this part of Manchester which is on the edge of the city centre near the suburbs of Victoria Park, Hulme and Rusholme.   Manchester Museum is part of the University of Manchester and is housed in a wonderful Victorian building that stretches down Oxford Road.  I always remember I was meant to complet...

We'd originally intended to go to Cheadle, though after getting stuck on Upper Brook Street for 45 minutes, time was ticking on and we decided to sack that one off and go to Withington instead. Many moons ago in the late 1990s, I lived in Withington in a smelly shared house with a group of current and ex-students.  Funnily enough that's how I got to meet Neil, but that's a story for another time.  On the whole it was fun, although the bathroom was a nightmare on many levels - six people, one bathroom; the ceramic snake at the end of the bath did not help with my snake phobia; and there was the time when the it was invaded by mushrooms which popped the tiles off the wall.  Eventually I left, in part due to Withington as I witnessed a scary incident in the local shop and the local kids were becoming a nightmare.  Once I had to step over a group of them as they were lying across the pavement.  So it was interesting to see how much it had changed. G...