A great place for a winter’s day visit, with shelter from the rain and cold.  

Our second cathedral visit as part of a overnght Christmas break in the city centre.

A modest sandstone church on the edge of the city centre, it does appear a little small for a city the size and importance of Manchester, but inside it feels welcoming and well-loved.

There is free entry, despite the £1,460,000 running costs each year (according to the website) and no regular funding from government or the diocese.  There is a very nice website with a useful timeline and information about the church and how it is used.

It dates from 1215, built within the Baron’s Court, and beside the Manor house of the Greslet Family, whose coat of arms can still be found in the church.  It is built in the perpendicular style.  It has a short nave (stated by one of the staff to be the shortest of any cathedral in England) but is very wide.  This is due to the chapels built along the aisles later being removed when in the 19th Century they needed to accommodate bigger congregations, doubling the width of the aisles.

A few particularly memorable things from the visit:-

The new Stoller organ is lovely, installed in 2017, and we were lucky to hear christmas carols being played as part of a rehersal for an evening cpocnert

A statue of Humphrey Cheetham (1580 to 1653) an important figure in Manchester who founded a boys’ school nearby which is now a well-known music school.

There is a  unique medieval choir screen with beautful wooden carvings

There is also some interesting modern stained glass, replacing some lost in WW2 when the cathedral was bombed in the Manchester Blitz in 1940, and more recently due to damage from the IRA bomb in 1996.  The Hope window installed in 2016 completed the replacements and brings a nice colourful tone to the east end. 

Here are some provisional photos.  More to follow.