Manchester

A widow built this library in memory of her husband, and church is what it resembles inside and out. The reading room is tall with narrow windows, dark even by day. Collection items need requesting in advance, and a glass extension joins onto the side.

The oldest surviving passenger railway terminus in the world stands inside this museum. The 1830 line to Liverpool ended here. The platform and waiting rooms are still there. Steam engines run at set times, and the noise fills the building then.

Bombing stripped the roof and windows, so the rebuilt interior is bright and full of new glass. The choir stalls have hinged seats and every underside carries a different carving. Free concerts run at midday on weekdays.

A district of old clothing warehouses now holding record shops and cafes. Murals get painted over often enough that a wall differs year to year and film crews dress the streets as an American city, while Sunday brings a later start for most of them.

Three canals meet where the Roman fort stood, with railway viaducts crossing above them. The fort gateway is a 1980s reconstruction, so the stone is not original. People perch on the waterside steps, which have no rail, so hold on to children.

The city gallery is free to enter and splits Pre-Raphaelite work from modern painting by floor. Suffragettes broke the glass on paintings here in 1913, and a note marks where. An old wing and a new one join by a link, so the floor levels do not line up.

In 1819 cavalry rode into a crowd demanding reform here and eighteen people died. The memorial is a stepped circle, and it drew criticism because a wheelchair cannot get up it. Each stone carries the name of a town the marchers walked in from.

A museum of the game's rules and records, inside a wedge of glass. About half the displays are things to touch and kick, which holds children for a long time, and entry conditions differ by where you live, so look it up before setting off.

Broadcasters moving here turned the old docks into a quarter, and the footbridge swings aside when a boat comes through. Studio tours drop out when filming schedules shift, so check on the day, and a bridge walks you over to the gallery opposite.

A Chinese arch raised in 1987 stands with a car park all round it, which makes an angle hard to find. Its tiles and timber were shipped from China and assembled on the spot.

Manchester United's ground, nicknamed the Theatre of Dreams. Between fixtures, stadium tours add the museum, changing room and dugout. The clock on the south-east corner stays stopped at the time of the Munich air crash, 6 February 1958.

Opened in 1653, held to be the oldest public library anywhere in English. The window alcove where Marx and Engels studied in 1845 is still there. Being inside a music school, visitors join guided tours booked online.

The university's gallery stands in Whitworth Park with free entry. In 2015 a glass extension opened toward the park and won Museum of the Year that year. Its wallpaper and textile holdings bring out things rarely shown elsewhere.

Daniel Libeskind's war museum across the water from Salford Quays, built as shards of a broken globe. Entry is free, and every hour the lights go down for a film thrown across all the walls. A footbridge over the canal leads to MediaCity.

The university museum, reopened in 2023 after major works. Stan, a cast of a T. rex skeleton, rears up mid-hall; the South Asia gallery is new. Entry is free; children love the upstairs room of live frogs.

A 517m hill in the Peak District, reached by an hour's rail ride from Manchester to Hope or Edale. Its slopes keep slipping, hence Shivering Mountain, and a road given up to landslides in 1979 lies cracked below. Wind scours the ridge path; pack a warm top.

A Georgian house and deer park near Altrincham, out to the city's south-west, run by the National Trust. Fallow deer roam loose and come close, but feeding them is banned. Displays tell how the house served as a military hospital between 1917 and 1919.