Friday 28 August 2020

Beautiful Britain - Manchester Town Hall


Back to Britain today, and an A4 size drawing of Alfred Waterhouse’s high Victorian Gothic masterpiece, Manchester Town Hall. It was completed in 1877. The building contains offices and grand ceremonial rooms such as the Great Hall which is decorated with Ford Madox Brown's imposing Manchester Murals illustrating the history of the city, which, to be honest, are worth visiting the building for in their own right.  The clock tower rises to 280 feet. 

I’ve had a very soft spot for Manchester since my first visit to the city in January 2007. I was appearing in the first round of the BBC TV quiz show Mastermind. I’d appeared in four other quiz shows over the past couple of years, and hadn’t won any of them. This, mark you, considering that I thought of myself as a pretty good quizzer at the time too. I won that show, and since it was the first ever quiz that I won, I look back on Manchester with real fondness. 

It really is a fine city. It’s a brilliant mixture of the old and the modern. And, what’s more, it was the first city in England to bring back its trams – in the early 1990s!

No comments:

Post a Comment