Manchester Walking Tour: Northern Quarter Street Art and Ancoats Mills

Manchester was the first great industrial city in the world, and the streets on this walk are where you can still feel it. This route starts on the towpath of the Rochdale Canal, steps up into the bustle of Piccadilly Gardens, then wanders through the Northern Quarter, a grid of old warehouses now full of record shops, vintage stalls, cafes and some of the best street art in Britain, before finishing among the restored cotton mills of Ancoats. It is a short, flat walk of roughly two and a half kilometers, and one of the most characterful self-guided walking tours in the north of England, where almost every redbrick wall has a story or a mural on it.

Before you set off

Give yourself about an hour and a half at an easy pace, and longer if you get lost in Affleck's or stop for coffee, which in the Northern Quarter is very easy to do. The streets are flat and paved, and the canal towpath is level but can be slippery after rain, so wear shoes with some grip. Manchester has a reputation for rain that it does its best to live up to, so bring a waterproof layer whatever the sky looks like when you start. The Northern Quarter wakes up late: late morning and early afternoon are best, when the shops are open and the streets are busy but not yet crowded with the evening bar trade. Affleck's and the Craft and Design Centre keep their own opening hours and are usually closed on some days, so check before you go if you want to browse. Keep your eyes up as you walk. The street art changes constantly, and some of the best pieces are high on gable ends, above shopfronts or down side streets you would otherwise pass without a glance.

Rochdale Canal

You begin beside the water on the Rochdale Canal, a dark, still ribbon running between brick walls right through the middle of Manchester. Stand on the towpath for a minute and listen: the traffic of the city is only yards away, yet down here it sounds distant. This canal was a marvel in its day. Opened in 1804, it was the first to cross the Pennine hills between Lancashire and Yorkshire, climbing over the moors by a long staircase of locks so that barges could carry cotton, coal, grain and finished cloth between the mill towns and the ports. Look out for the heavy wooden lock gates and the worn stone edges where ropes once rubbed grooves into the corners. The stretch through the city center is known to boaters as the Rochdale Nine, a flight of nine locks that drops the canal down toward its meeting with the Bridgewater Canal at Castlefield. As road and rail took over, most of the canal fell silent in the twentieth century, and it was only restored and reopened along its full length around the turn of this century. The mills you will see at the end of this walk once lined its banks. Now climb up to street level and head north to Piccadilly Gardens, about five minutes away.

Piccadilly Gardens

Piccadilly Gardens is the big open crossroads of central Manchester, where trams glide in, buses queue and half the city seems to cut across on its way somewhere else. Stand near the fountains and get your bearings. For generations this was the site of the old Manchester Royal Infirmary, which stood here until the early twentieth century, and after the hospital moved away the site became sunken gardens, much loved and much photographed. They were replaced at the start of this century by the open lawns, fountains and long concrete wall you see now, a change many Mancunians still grumble about. Look around for the statues on the edge of the square, among them Queen Victoria, who sits on a grand plinth here. What matters most for this walk is the street that leaves the square to the north. Oldham Street was once one of the busiest shopping streets in the city, lined with drapers and department stores, and it marks the edge of the Northern Quarter. As the big retailers left for newer centers, the cheap rents behind it drew in musicians, artists, record dealers and small traders, and the neighborhood you are about to enter grew out of them. Walk north up Oldham Street for about three minutes, and look for a tall corner building with mosaics on its walls.

Affleck's

This rambling building is Affleck's, a Manchester institution for more than forty years. It began life as the Affleck and Brown department store, a grand Victorian drapers that sold fabric, furniture and fashion to the city's middle classes. When the store closed, the empty floors were taken over in the early 1980s by a jumble of small traders, and the place has been a haven for the city's alternative scene ever since. Inside, over several floors linked by narrow staircases, you will find vintage clothing, records, posters, badges, tattoo studios, costume shops and stalls that are hard to describe in a single word. Generations of teenagers have come here to buy their first band T-shirt or to find people who dress like them, and plenty of musicians who went on to play the big stages browsed here first. Before you go in, look at the outside walls. They are decorated with colorful mosaics, including one that reads "And on the sixth day God created MANchester," a line that sums up the city's affectionate self-belief, alongside other emblems of the city and its music. Take your time inside, then come back out and walk a minute east along the side street, where the walls start to fill with murals.