Midland Hotel, Manchester

The Midland Hotel is a grand hotel in Manchester, England. Opened in 1903, it was built by the Midland Railway to serve Manchester Central railway station, its northern terminus for its rail services to London St Pancras. It faces onto St Peter's Square. The hotel was designed by Charles Trubshaw in Edwardian Baroque style and is a Grade II* listed building.

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Peterloo Massacre

The Peterloo Massacre took place at St Peter's Field, Manchester, England, on Monday 16 August 1819. Eighteen people were killed and 400–700 were injured when the cavalry of the Yeomen charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, there was an acute economic slump, accompanied by chronic unemployment and harvest failure due to the Year Without a Summer, and worsened by the Corn Laws, which kept the price of bread high. At that time, only around 11 percent of adult males had the right to vote, very few of them in the industrial north of England, which was worst hit. Radicals identified parliamentary reform as the solution, and a mass campaign to petition parliament for manhood suffrage gained three-quarters of a million signatures in 1817 but was flatly rejected by the House of Commons. When a second slump occurred in early 1819, Radicals sought to mobilise huge crowds to force the government to back down. The movement was particularly strong in the north-west, where the Manchester Patriotic Union organised a mass rally in August 1819, addressed by well-known Radical orator Henry Hunt. Shortly after the meeting began, local magistrates called on the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry to arrest Hunt and several others on the platform with him. The Yeomanry charged into the crowd, knocking down a woman and killing a child, and finally apprehended Hunt. Cheshire Magistrates' chairman William Hulton then summoned the 15th Hussars to disperse the crowd. They charged with sabres drawn, and contemporary accounts estimated that between nine and seventeen people were killed and 400 to 700 injured in the ensuing confusion. The event was first labelled the "Peterloo massacre" by the radical Manchester Observer newspaper in a bitterly ironic reference to the bloody Battle of Waterloo which had taken place four years earlier. Historian Robert Poole has called the Peterloo Massacre "the bloodiest political event of the 19th century in English soil", and "a political earthquake in the northern powerhouse of the industrial revolution". The London and national papers shared the horror felt in the Manchester region, but Peterloo's immediate effect was to cause the Tory government under Lord Liverpool to pass the Six Acts, which were aimed at suppressing any meetings for the purpose of radical reform. It also led indirectly to the foundation of The Manchester Guardian newspaper. In a survey conducted by The Guardian (the modern iteration of The Manchester Guardian) in 2006, Peterloo came second to the Putney Debates as the event from radical British history that most deserved a proper monument or a memorial. For some time, Peterloo was commemorated only by a blue plaque, criticised as being inadequate and referring only to the "dispersal by the military" of an assembly. In 2007, the city council replaced the blue plaque with a red plaque referring to "a peaceful rally" being "attacked by armed cavalry" and mentioning "15 deaths and over 600 injuries". In 2019, on the 200th anniversary of the massacre, Manchester City Council inaugurated a new Peterloo Memorial by the artist Jeremy Deller, featuring eleven concentric circles of local stone engraved with the names of the dead and the places from which the victims came.

Peterloo Memorial

The Peterloo Memorial is a memorial in Manchester, England, commemorating the Peterloo Massacre. It is sited close to the site of the massacre and was unveiled on 14 August 2019.

87 m

Prince's Theatre, Manchester

The Prince's Theatre in Oxford Street, Manchester, England, was built at a cost of £20,000 in 1864. Under the artistic and managerial leadership of Charles Calvert, "Manchester's most celebrated actor-manager", it soon became a great popular success. The theatre's first production, Shakespeare's The Tempest, took place on 15 October 1864; Calvert himself played Prospero and his wife took the role of Miranda. The Times newspaper of 18 October reported that the 1,590-seat theatre "was exceedingly well filled", and declared the evening "a brilliant success". The theatre subsequently became synonymous with Calvert's elaborate and historically accurate Shakespearian productions. The theatre's interior was extensively rebuilt by Alfred Darbyshire in 1869. The work included the addition of 300 seats, and featured a frieze over the proscenium painted by Henry Stacy Marks showing Shakespeare flanked by muses and his principal characters. The Prince's was the first theatre to introduce tip-up seats and "early doors" tickets, which for a premium allowed patrons to enter the theatre early, to avoid the usual opening-time crush. In 1874 the theatre was the venue for the premiere of Alfred Cellier's comic opera The Sultan of Mocha. The years after the First World War saw a decline in the theatre's fortunes, and by the 1930s the increasing competition from cinema was threatening its viability. The final performance took place in April 1940, after which the building was sold to the ABC cinema company, who intended to replace it with a large cinema complex. Although the theatre was demolished shortly afterwards, the intervention of the Second World War meant that the cinema was never built; the site is now occupied by Peter House, a large office complex completed in 1958.

95 m

Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre

The Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre is "one of Europe's leading specialist libraries on migration, race and ethnicity" open to members of the public, students and researchers. It increases access to and visibility of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) histories with a growing archive of material relating to the local area. Its sister organisation, the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Education Trust offers advice, training, networking opportunities, project support, exhibitions, publications and events to help community organisations to record and share their heritage. The Centre is part of the University of Manchester and is located in Manchester Central Library, where it is part of the Archives+ partnership. The current head of both the Centre and the Trust is Dr Safina Islam, who was appointed in March 2019.