Although I was later to live near Manchester, England for some years, I have not spent any time in the city since working on Top of the Pops,
broadcasting live from the converted church facilities of the BBC Dickinson Road Studios in the 1960s.
I was there last week on family business, and the city has changed, much of it for the better – except for the traffic.
Landing at Manchester Airport – Ringway to those in the know – in heavily overcast conditions on July 12, 2008, I was in a BA Airbus A321. Unbeknownst to me, right behind our flight was an Airbus A380
paying a visit to the airport. This behemoth had her gear down but the nearest she got to the tarmac was about 50 feet and she then went around for a full circuit. Clearly visible on her side was a décal proclaiming it
Recyclable by Design. Bizarre…
The airport has an Aviation Viewing Park which was absolutely packed for the occasion. In the park there is the second
Concorde, built (Nr 102) registered as G-BOAC (British Overseas Airway Corporation, which merged with British European Airways – BEA – to form BA); there is also the front-end of a DC-10; a Hawker-Siddeley Trident 3B; and an Avro RJX-400 – the last passenger aircraft to be built in Britain, with the wing design based on the Avro Vulcan bomber, complete with the kinked leading edge that reduced wind buffeting.
A V Roe was a physician and he was the first man to fly what became known as the 1909 Roe Triplane now located in Manchester's
Museum of Science and Industry, which I found time to visit during my trip. Manchester was the first city in Britain to have a dedicated flying service : Roe ran operations between Belfast, Liverpool, Manchester and Hull. The company later went on to build the legendary Lancaster bomber during WW-II, as well as the cold war Vulcan bomber. Another airline that flew early on to Manchester was Royal Dutch KLM who came from Amsterdam flying DC-2s with a “request” stop offered at Doncaster.
Manchester was also the first city to start a dedicated railway (in 1830) with service to Liverpool using, initially, George & Robert Stephenson’s
Rocket and, later, their much-improved
Planet locomotive. The museum is housed in what was the Manchester terminus of the railway and, if you drop in on weekends, you can ride a train drawn by an exact copy of the Planet. The dominance of steam power in the area also created a massive industry in the manufacture of steam engines for use in areas such as the textile industry, and for farm and road making machinery, all of which the museum exhibits.
Later, Rolls-Royce started in Manchester when Charles Rolls agreed to market and sell the cars designed by Henry Royce. Ford also manufactured the Model T in Manchester and, surprisingly, he built the world’s first moving production line at Trafford Park, not in the US. Both Rolls-Royce and Ford left the city when production volumes could not be coped with – RR went to Crewe, Cheshire, and Ford went to Dagenham, Essex.
The museum presents its collections in an imaginative and compelling way with some of the best display signage I have seen in a long time; it also provides what I think is unique access for research, and the like, to the remainder of its collection that it does not have space to display to the public. To assist in this, that collection is clearly catalogued on their web site.
My kind of museum. But the visiting exhibit while I was there (
Dinosaurs having gone back to its home in Toronto where we saw it in June 2008 at the Royal Ontario Museum) was
Body Worlds. Four traveling exhibitions (three in N America and one in Europe) display
human corpses that have been plasticized (in the company’s Plastinarium) intended for health education purposes. They show healthy and diseased organs and life-like posed plastinates that show where those organs actually reside (or did reside).
It was supposed to be a beautiful experience; to show the naturalness of the human body; to recognize that we are all different both internally and externally. And I guess some people around me did find it to encompass those things. But I frankly found it gruesome...and what can be less natural than a
plasticized corpse? So, I guess I’ll stick to admiring the A380, thanks - a technologist to the last.
