Wheel of Manchester

The Hanging Bridge is a medieval bridge spanning the Hanging Ditch, which connected the rivers Irk and Irwell in Manchester, England. The first reference to the bridge was in 1343, when it was called Hengand Brigge, but the present structure was built in 1421, replacing an earlier bridge. Material taken from Manchester's Roman fort may have been used in its construction. It has been speculated that the Hanging Ditch may be of Roman origin, part of a defensive circuit between the rivers Irk and Irwell.The name may derive from the Old English hen, meaning wild birds, and the Welsh gan, meaning between two hills. At its Irwell end, the Hanging Ditch was 120 feet (37 m) wide and 40 feet (12 m) deep. A stream flowed through the ditch, from the Irk to the Irwell – possibly the lost River Dene, which gave its name to Deansgate. The bridge has two arches and was built using sandstone from Collyhurst. It is 108 feet (33 m) long and 9 feet (2.7 m) wide. The Hanging Bridge formed part of Manchester's medieval defences, when it was the main route from Manchester to the cathedral, then a parish church. In 1600, the Hanging Ditch was condemned as an insanitary open sewer, and in the following years the ditch was culverted and the bridge buried and built over. A directory published in 1772 recorded that nine houses had been built along the line of the bridge, suggesting that it may have been covered over during the first phase of Manchester's town planning, some time in the 1770s. The bridge was then forgotten, remembered only in the name of the area where it had stood, until its rediscovery and subsequent excavation as a result of demolition work carried out in the 1880s. The bridge was put on display, and in three months had about 32,000 paying visitors. It was once again covered up during the Victorian expansion of Manchester. More than 100 years later it was uncovered again, and following restoration work it went on display in 2002 as a main attraction of Manchester Cathedral's newly built visitor centre. Today the bridge is largely hidden by modern buildings, but it can be seen in the basement of Manchester Cathedral Visitor Centre, where it forms one side of the refectory. The bridge is listed as a Scheduled Ancient Monument.

Exchange Square tram stop is a stop in the City Zone of Greater Manchester's Metrolink light rail system, in Exchange Square opposite the Manchester Arndale shopping centre in Manchester city centre. It is part of the Second City Crossing (2CC).Construction began in 2014 and the line to the stop was tested in November 2015. The stop opened as a north-facing terminus on 6 December 2015 with trams running to Rochdale, until the full Second City Crossing was completed in early 2017. Once the Second City Crossing opened in February 2017, services extended to East Didsbury.

The Corn Exchange, Manchester is a shopping centre in Exchange Square, Manchester, England. The building was originally used as a corn exchange and was previously named the Corn & Produce Exchange, and subsequently The Triangle. Following an IRA bomb attack on central Manchester in 1996, it was renovated and was a modern shopping centre until 2014. The building was sold to investors and has been re-developed into a number of food outlets. It is a grade II listed building.

Corporation Street Bridge is a skyway which crosses Corporation Street in Manchester city centre, Manchester. The bridge replaced the old footbridge, which was damaged beyond repair in the 1996 Manchester bombing. The bridge is shaped in the form of a hyperboloid and links the Marks & Spencer/Selfridges building to the Manchester Arndale.

Shambles Square is a square in Manchester, England. It was created in 1999, when The Old Wellington Inn and Sinclair's Oyster Bar were rebuilt there, having been moved from the Old Shambles nearby as part of major building works in the city following the 1996 Manchester bombing.

The Old Wellington Inn is a half-timbered pub in Manchester city centre, England. It is part of Shambles Square, which was created in 1999, and is near Manchester Cathedral. It is a Grade II listed building.

The 1996 Manchester bombing was an attack carried out by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) on Saturday, 15 June 1996. The IRA detonated a 1,500-kilogram (3,300 lb) lorry bomb on Corporation Street in the centre of Manchester, England. It was the biggest bomb detonated in Great Britain since the Second World War. It targeted the city's infrastructure and economy and caused significant damage, estimated by insurers at £700 million (equivalent to £1.4 billion in 2021), a sum surpassed only by the 1993 Bishopsgate bombing, also by the IRA.At the time, England was hosting the Euro '96 football championships and a Russia vs. Germany match was scheduled to take place in Manchester the following day. The IRA sent telephoned warnings about 90 minutes before the bomb detonated. At least 75,000 people were evacuated, but the bomb squad were unable to defuse the bomb in time. More than 200 people were injured, but there were no fatalities despite the strength of the bomb, which has been largely credited to the rapid response of emergency services in evacuating the city centre.Although Manchester had been targeted by the IRA before, it had not been subjected to an attack on this scale. In February 1996, the IRA had ended its seventeen-month ceasefire with a large truck bomb attack on London's Canary Wharf financial district, though the 3,300-pound bomb of Manchester was three times the size of the Canary Wharf bomb. The Manchester bombing was condemned by the British and Irish governments and U.S. President Bill Clinton. Five days after the blast, the IRA issued a statement from Dublin in which it claimed responsibility, but regretted causing injury to civilians.Several buildings were damaged beyond repair and had to be demolished, while many more were closed for months for structural repairs. Most of the rebuilding work was completed by the end of 1999, at a cost of £1.2 billion, although redevelopment continued until 2005. The perpetrators have not been caught, and although Greater Manchester Police (GMP) had suggested it was unlikely that anyone will be charged in connection with the bombing, a suspect was arrested on 8 September 2022. The bombing has, however, been viewed by some as a "catalyst" for Manchester's mass regeneration, turning it into a modern "powerhouse" city with above-national average economic growth in the 20 years following the bombing.

Cathedral Gardens is an open space in Manchester city centre, in North West England. It is bounded by Victoria railway station to the north, Chetham's School of Music to the west, the perimeter of Manchester Cathedral and the Corn Exchange on Fennel Street to the south and Urbis to the east. Cathedral Gardens comprises wide areas of grassy plots, surrounded by paved walking areas and stylised concrete sitting areas. On the west side, is a short water feature.

New Cathedral Street is a pedestrianised retail street in Manchester city centre, England. It runs between Exchange Square and Exchange Street (off St Mary's Gate, Manchester). The street is home to the Manchester branch of Marks and Spencer and Selfridges (east side), and Harvey Nichols, the largest Ted Baker and Hugo Boss stores outside London, Lacoste, Louis Vuitton, Reiss, Henri Lloyd, Massimo, Zara and Burberry (west side). The street and buildings that stand today were all built as part of the rebuilding since the 1996 IRA bombing of the city centre. The block of buildings to the west are on the site of the former Victoria Street and Victoria Buildings which were aligned differently. Cathedral Street is an older street to the east of the cathedral and further to the north.

Urbis is a building in Manchester, England, designed by Ian Simpson, which opened in 2002 as part of the redevelopment of Exchange Square. Originally a Museum of the City, a switch was made in 2005-06 to presenting exhibitions on popular culture alongside talks, gigs and special events. Urbis closed in 2010, reopening in 2012 as the National Football Museum.

A plaster and resin sculpture of Michael Jackson stood outside Craven Cottage in Fulham, London, the ground of Fulham Football Club, from 2011 until 2013. Commissioned by the club's chairman Mohamed Al-Fayed, it was removed by his successor Shahid Khan. From 2014 to 2019 the statue was on display at the National Football Museum in Manchester.

The Harry Langton Collection includes cultural and sporting items relating to the history of football and forms the core of both the National Football Museum in Manchester, England and the World Rugby Museum, housed in the South Stand of Twickenham Stadium. It was created by Harry Langton (10 November 1929 – 6 September 2000), a sports journalist, after he took early retirement in 1972 from the Daily Express, a British newspaper, to launch Sports Design, a business publishing and selling sporting prints in London. With premises in Islington and the Camden Passage antique market on his doorstep, Langton soon ventured into dealing in old sporting prints, paintings and antiques. There was little market then for football, his own special interest, and over the last two decades of the century he gradually built up a vast quantity of football art and antiques illustrating the long, and global, history of the game. All codes were included. In 1981 an early display of this collection was viewed and praised by Sir Stanley Rous, the former Secretary of the Football Association, which encouraged further collecting with the idea of making it available to a wider public. Already it was attracting attention abroad. Some exhibits traveled to Germany for the opening of a Munich bank. Others appeared as black and white photographs at 'Fussball in der Vitrine' at the Galerie Littmann in Baumleingasse Basle in May 1982. In the spring of 1987 after many fruitless applications to municipal authorities for exhibition space, Sports Design presented 'Football Art – the Langton Collection' at the Wingfield Sporting Gallery in south-west London. Serious recognition arrived when the Tyne and Wear Museums Service joined the Langton Collection with the 'Soccer in Tyne and Wear 1879-1988 Exhibition' in Newcastle. This ran for two months before moving to Sunderland in January 1989. There it was viewed by an Italian promoter who proposed taking it to Italy for the 1990 Football World Cup. Transported to Rome it was ceremoniously opened at the Spazio Peroni by Silvio Berlusconi, one of whose companies, Gruppo Fininvest, was the major sponsor, and drew visitors throughout the tournament. The following year, to mark the 1991 Rugby World Cup, an exhibition of specifically rugby and old (pre soccer) football art and objects was hosted by the auctioneers Christie's at their South Kensington rooms. The Rugby Football Union later bought the specifically rugby items for the World Rugby Museum. The entire collection crossed the Atlantic in 1994 for the next World Cup. Organised by an American company, the SPI Group, it was displayed at Sotheby's in New York City. By this time problems of moving and preserving the large collection prompted an agreement with SPI that if a suitable buyer could be found it was for sale. Thus the Langton collection eventually became the FIFA Museum Collection in 1996. With support from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the efforts of Bryan Gray, the chairman of Preston North End F.C. it formed the major part of the National Football Museum, opened in Deepdale Preston in February 2001. After the sale of the main collection to FIFA, Langton continued to acquire works in his capacity as consultant. These pieces were designed to fill gaps and not to be comprehensive in themselves. Although Langton was closely involved with the Preston museum, he died in September 2000 before it opened. In 2006, his widow, Ann Langton (9 September 1929 – 12 February 2013), compiled a collection of poetry relating to football, called Saved, A Rare Anthology of Football from Homer to Gazza, which was launched at the National Football Museum's Hall of Fame Awards in Liverpool. Financial problems led to a decision to relocate the National Football Museum to the Urbis building in Manchester, which reopened on 6 July 2012. After the death of Langton's widow Ann in February 2013, the Director of the National Football Museum, Kevin Moore, wrote to her family that: "Without Harry, supported by Ann, there would have been no FIFA Collection and therefore no National Football Museum, and therefore both we and the nation as a whole owe them both a great debt of gratitude." In early 2016 the FIFA Museum Collection was renamed The FIFA-Langton collection by FIFA and NFM. This was in order to avoid confusion between the collection and those of the newly opened FIFA World Football Museum at Enge in Zurich and to better recognise the founding work by Harry Langton in football history and art appreciation.