Inside Manchester's secret passageways

Manchester can lay claim to many things, from vegetarianism to the laws of thermodynamics. It’s also the home of the oldest public library in the English-speaking world, and it’s about 60-seconds walk from the Arndale.

While many will have heard of Chetham’s School of Music, and the stunning Stoller Hall, tucked away in the school’s tiny campus is a wonder of hidden passageways, grand halls, secret doors and the very room in which Marx and Engels observed the squalor of the city’s poor before devising the Communist Manifesto.

Chetham’s Library is as old as the city’s cathedral, and was built at the same time, developing from the site of an old manor house, right in the centre of the city, in 1421.

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The modest ‘parish church’ of the time went on to become the cathedral, and the manor house - now the library - used as lodgings for priests and choristers, and latterly, a hospital, library and school for the poor, thanks to its patron, Humphrey Chetham.

Engels and Marx were not the only academics to find themselves within the library’s wood panelled surrounds. A couple of hundred years before, in the mid-1500s,- Dr John Dee, philosopher, astronomer, contemporary of Nostradamus and ‘conjurer’ to Elizabeth I lived and studied here too.

He had interests in more niche pursuits too, like alchemy and necromancy - speaking to the dead - and would have wandered the halls musing upon such matters. These cloisters and corridors are thick with history, and you can walk them too.

“It’s the most complete mediaeval building in the north of England,” says Siân-Louise Mason, Chetham’s visitor services co-ordinator and expert tour guide. “It’s amazing that we’re still