Salford

Didsbury was bustling yesterday; Manchester was quiet; MediaCityUK (puh-lease!) is a ghost town. I went for a walk this morning to pick up the Bridgewater Canal outside Old Trafford: once I’d found it, I wondered if it was perfectly “safe” to walk along it. (Yes, it was.)

Oh, but it’s dreary. Trafford Park is just (gross generalisation alert) logistics and warehouses. Nature is there, but sidelined and neglected. The walk to Salford gallery in the afternoon was just . . . but hush: this is where people live and go to school.

But Salford Museum and Art Gallery is the business! Bold, redbrick Italianate, Victorian, grand, set at the head of Peel Park (a real park, unlike Trafford, with trees, grass and flowerbeds) – the kind of place that can feed a child’s imagination and an adult’s curiosity (and vice versa). I spent longer than I thought I would looking at a recreation of a shopping street before heading upstairs to the galleries. My favourite was one by George Clausen – almost a copy of The Stone Pickers in the Laing. There was also a rather wonderful orrery – a mechanical model of the solar system, named after the Earl of Orrery.

Then to the Lowry to look again at the exhibition of Lowry’s works. I keep forgetting that he is more than just factories and stick figures – more a kind of Larkin in paint.

MediaCityUK (yuk) almost looked attractive in the afternoon dusk – but still a ghost town.