Manchester

The Bridgewater Hall is an international concert venue in Manchester city centre, England. It cost around £42 million to build and... currently hosts over 250 performances a year. The hall is home to the The Hallé orchestra, the UK's oldest extant symphony orchestra and the primary concert venue for the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. The building sits on a bed of 280 springs, which help reduce external noise. The venue is named after the Third Duke of Bridgewater who commissioned the eponymous Bridgewater Canal that crosses Manchester, although the hall is situated on a specially constructed arm of the Rochdale Canal. Proposals to replace the concert venue in the Free Trade Hall existed since it was damaged in the Second World War but the hall, which was home to the The Hallé orchestra was repaired and renovated. Despite being a popular venue, the Free Trade Hall, built in the 1850s, had poor acoustics. Throughout the 1970s and 80s several schemes to replace it were considered but the project became more likely in 1998 after the creation of the Central Manchester Development Corporation.
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Manchester Alternative General Information Centre or M.A.G.I.C. was an alternative society centre in Manchester, England, in the 1970s.

Manchester Town Hall is a Victorian-era, Neo-gothic municipal building in Manchester, England. The building functions as the ceremonial headquarters... of Manchester City Council and houses a number of local government departments. Designed by architect Alfred Waterhouse the town hall was completed in 1877. The building occupies a triangular site facing Albert Square and contains offices and grand ceremonial rooms such as the Great Hall which is decorated with the imposing Manchester Murals by Ford Madox Brown illustrating the history of the city. The entrance and Sculpture Hall contain busts and statues of influential figures including Dalton, Joule and Barbirolli. The exterior is dominated by the clock tower which rises to 87 metres and houses Great Abel, the clock bell. In 1938, a detached Town Hall Extension was completed and is connected by two covered bridges over Lloyd Street. The town hall, which was granted Grade I listed building status on 25 February 1952 is regarded as one of the finest interpretations of neogothic architecture in the United Kingdom. Manchester's original civic administration was housed in the Police Office in King Street.
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The Refuge Assurance Building, now the Palace Hotel or Refuge Building, stands at the corner of Oxford Street and Whitworth Street in Manchester,... England. The first phase of this Grade II* listed red brick and terracotta building was designed for the Refuge Assurance Company by Alfred Waterhouse and built 1891–1895. The inside was of Burmantofts faience and glazed brick. The ground floor was one enormous open business hall. It was extended, with a striking 217-foot tower, along Oxford Street by his son Paul Waterhouse in 1910–1912. It was further extended along Whitworth Street by Stanley Birkett in 1932. The Refuge Assurance Company occupied the building until 1987. Although, the Refuge Assurance company had discussed turning the building into a new home for The Hallé, the funding required for the project did not materialise. It was converted to a hotel by Richard Newman in 1996, and is now the Palace Hotel, owned and operated by the Principal Hayley Group. Some scenes in the 1960 film Hell Is a City were shot on the roof.
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Urbis is an exhibition centre located in Manchester, England. From 2002 to 2010, the centre hosted changing exhibits on popular culture topics... including urban living, art, music, fashion, photography and videogames alongside talks, gigs and special events. As of July 2011, Urbis is temporarily closed while the interior space is adapted before opening as the National Football Museum later in the year. Urbis is located in a unique building in Cathedral Gardens, designed by Ian Simpson Architects with consulting engineers Martin Stockley Associates. The building opened in June 2002 as part of the redevelopment of Exchange Square known as the Millennium Quarter. Urbis, a museum and exhibition centre intended to showcase inner-city life, opened on 27 June 2002 as part of regeneration after the 1996 Manchester bombing. The project attracted £30 million funding from the Millennium Commission and £1 million from Manchester City Council towards the running costs. The exhibition space covered five floors and hosted temporary exhibitions running for between three and five months.
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The Whitworth Art Gallery is an art gallery in Manchester, England, containing about 55,000 items in its collection. The museum is located south of... the Manchester University campus, in Whitworth Park. It was founded by Robert Darbishire with a donation from Sir Joseph Whitworth in 1889, as The Whitworth Institute and Park.The first building was completed in 1908. In 1958 the gallery became part of the University of Manchester. In October 1995 a Mezzanine Court in the centre of the building was opened. This new gallery, designed chiefly for the display of sculpture, won a RIBA regional award. In 2010 the art gallery received 172,000 visitors, making it one of Greater Manchester's ten most-visited tourist attractions. The Whitworth has notable collections of watercolours, sculptures, wallpapers and textiles. The gallery focuses on modern artists, and the art collections include works by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ford Madox Brown, Eduardo Paolozzi, Francis Bacon, William Blake, David Hockney, L. S. Lowry, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso, and a fine collection of works by J.M.W. Turner.
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The Manchester Museum is owned by the University of Manchester. Sited on Oxford Road at the heart of the university's group of neo-Gothic buildings,... it provides access to about six million items from every continent and serves both as a resource for academic research and teaching and as a regional public museum. The museum's first collections were assembled by the Manchester Society of Natural History, formed in 1821 with the purchase of the collection of John Leigh Philips. In 1850 the collections of the Manchester Geological Society were added. By the 1860s both societies encountered financial difficulties and, on the advice of the evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley, Owens College accepted responsibility for the collections in 1867. The college was then in Quay Street and the museum in Peter Street. The old museum was sold in 1875 after the college had moved to new buildings in Oxford Street. The college commissioned Alfred Waterhouse, the architect of London's Natural History Museum, to design a museum to house the collections for the benefit of students and the public on a site in Oxford Road .
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Manchester Jewish Museum tells the story of the Jewish community in Manchester, England over the last 200 years. It occupies the former Spanish and... Portuguese Synagogue on Cheetham Hill Road and is a grade II* listed building The synagogue was completed in 1874 but the building became redundant through the migration of the Jewish population away from the Cheetham area further north to Prestwich and Whitefield. It was re-opened as a museum in March 1984. The synagogue was built in the Moorish Revival style by the noted Manchester architect Edward Salomons in 1874. Although it is far from being the largest or most magnificent of the world's many Moorish revival synagogues, which include the opulent Princes Road Synagogue in Liverpool, it is considered by architectural historian H.A. Meeks to be a "jewel". The style, a homage to the architecture of Moorish Spain, perhaps seemed particularly fitting for the home of a Sephardic congregation. The two tiers of horseshoe windows on the facade are emblematic of the style, and the recessed doorway and arcade of five windows on the floor above the entrance are particularly decorative.
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Stephen David T. Beard is a reality TV participant and actor, playing Archie Carpenter in the Channel 4 soap opera Hollyoaks. In October 2007, Beard... was first introduced to British television screens on MTV UK's reality TV series Living on the Edge. The show documented the lives of several teenagers in Alderley Edge in Cheshire, a wealthy village in the North West of England. The second series aired on 14 October 2008, with Beard as the only original cast member returning for the second series. Living on the Edge portrayed Beard as a player, dating many girls. He cheated on former girlfriend Brooke with another Living on the Edge cast member, Millie. In the series two finale, they are seen together on the beach but it is left unclear if they become official as a couple. The second series of Living on the Edge showed Beard auditioning and landing the part as Archie Carpenter on Channel 4's Hollyoaks. He played the role from November 2008 to June 2010. Stephen Beard currently lives in Wilmslow in the United Kingdom. He studied at Manchester Grammar School, but then moved to Kings School in Macclesfield after being expelled.
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Chris Roberts is a computer game designer, programmer, film producer, and director. He is best known for creating the popular Wing Commander series... while employed at Origin Systems. Born in Redwood City, California, Roberts grew up in Manchester, England. He attended the same school with the computer music composer Martin Galway. As a teenager, he created several hit games for the BBC Micro, including Stryker's Run and Wizadore. Roberts returned to the United States in 1986. He soon found a job at Origin Systems, where he created Times of Lore, published in 1988. The game's interface had a strong influence on other Origin products such as the popular Ultima series. A similar game system was used in Roberts' next release for Origin, Bad Blood . Wing Commander was published later in 1990 and was highly acclaimed. Wing Commander soon became Origin's most successful product, eclipsing even the Ultima series. Roberts wasn't as heavily involved in the sequel Wing Commander II, which he only produced. He instead concentrated on Strike Commander.
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Carole Pope is a Canadian rock singer-songwriter, whose provocative blend of hard-edged New Wave rock with explicit homoerotic and BDSM-themed... lyrics made her one of the first openly lesbian famous entertainers in the world. She is the sister of Emmy Award-winning television producer and screenwriter Elaine Pope. Pope was raised in Scarborough, Ontario, where she met her longtime musical partner, Kevan Staples at an audition for another band. In 1968, they began performing together as a duo in Yorkville, which was Toronto's live music and arts district at the time. In 1970, they adopted the name O, changing it to The Bullwhip Brothers the following year. In 1975, they added several other musicians to the lineup and changed the band's name to Rough Trade. Pope often performed in black leather pants and bondage attire. She won the Juno Award for Most Promising Female Vocalist in 1981, and subsequently won the Juno Award for Best Female Vocalist in 1982 and 1983. She and Staples co-wrote the 1983 single "Transformation," recorded by Nona Hendryx.
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Martin Fry is lead singer of the band, ABC. He grew up in Bramhall, Stockport, alongside his younger brother Jamie . Martin Fry first met up with... future bandmates Mark White and Stephen Singleton while interviewing them for a fanzine that he edited called Modern Drugs. White and Singleton, then fronting a rock band called Vice Versa, invited Fry to join their band to play keyboard. The group changed its name to ABC and changed its sound to a polished type of pop music called New Romantic that at that time led them to be categorized with bands like Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, and The Human League. Between 1982 and 1992, ABC recorded six studio albums and released a greatest hits compilation, Absolutely. During this time, the band went through numerous personnel changes, with Martin Fry and Mark White being the only permanent members. Following the Zillionaire album, ABC temporarily disappeared from the limelight while Fry was treated for Hodgkin's disease.
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Arthur Edward George 'Art' Themen is a British jazz saxophonist . Themen was born on 26 November 1939 in Manchester. In 1958 he began his medical... studies at the University of Cambridge, going on in 1961 to complete his studies at St Mary's Hospital Medical School in London, qualifying in 1964. He specialised in orthopaedic medicine, eventually becoming a consultant. Themen started playing jazz with the Cambridge University Jazz Group, and then in London playing with blues musicians Jack Bruce and Alexis Korner. In 1965 he played with the Peter Stuyvesant Jazz Orchestra in Zürich, going on to play with such English luminaries as Michael Garrick and Graham Collier's Music. In 1974 he entered on what was to be one of his central musical relationships when he started playing with Stan Tracey. He has played with all of Tracey's groups, touring with him all over the world as well as around the UK. He has also played and toured with musicians such as Nat Adderley, Ian Carr, George Coleman, and Al Haig. In 1995 he formed a quartet with pianist John Critchinson.
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Karl Pilkington is a British podcaster, author, television personality and former radio producer. He is best known for the Sky travel series, An... Idiot Abroad, which was also presented in the United States on the Science Channel, in Canada on Discovery Channel and in Australia on One HD, and The Ricky Gervais Show with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Karl Pilkington was born, brought up and educated in Manchester, England at Ashton-on-Mersey School. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant contacted Pilkington's school after a conversation during their XFM show and discovered that he attained only one GCSE, in History, for which he achieved an "E" grade. Pilkington was surprised and upset at this as he recalled sitting through several other GCSE exams, as well as sending in a 'little clay man' for Art; a failure to register for the exams was offered as an explanation by Gervais and Merchant for his lack of other grades. Pilkington had been working at XFM as a producer for several years, when he began work on The Ricky Gervais Show, broadcast on Saturday afternoons. At first he served purely in a "behind-the-scenes" role.
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Johnny Marr is an English musician and songwriter. Marr rose to fame in the 1980s as the guitarist in The Smiths, with whom he formed a prolific... songwriting partnership with Morrissey. Marr has been a member of Electronic, The The, and Modest Mouse. In 2008, he joined The Cribs after touring with them on 2008's NME Awards Tour, a group in which he would remain until 2011. Marr was voted the fourth best guitarist of the last 30 years in a poll conducted by the BBC in 2010. Marr was born in Ardwick, Manchester, the son of Irish immigrants. His parents came from Athy in County Kildare. In 1975 he attended the Roman Catholic St Augustine's Grammar School, which in 1977 merged with other schools to form a comprehensive school, St John Plessington High School. Marr had aspirations to be a professional football player, and was approached by Nottingham Forest and had trials with Manchester City . In an interview with FourFourTwo magazine, Marr said "I was good enough for City, but they didn't follow up because I was probably the only player out there wearing eyeliner.
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David Warner is an English actor who is known for playing both romantic leads and sinister or villainous characters, across a range of media,... including film, animation, television, and video games. Over the course of his long career he is most famous for his roles in films such as Tom Jones, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Cross of Iron, Madhouse on Castle Street, Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment, Little Malcolm, The Omen, The Island, Time Bandits, Tron, The Company of Wolves, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, The Lost World, Titanic and Planet of the Apes. In 1981, he won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or Special for his portrayal of Pomponius Falco in the television miniseries Masada. Warner was born in Manchester, Lancashire, England, the son of Doreen and Herbert Simon Warner, who was a nursing home proprietor. He was born out of wedlock and frequently taken to be brought up by each of his parents, eventually settling with his Russian Jewish father and his stepmother.
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William John Paul "Liam" Gallagher is an English musician and singer-songwriter, the former frontman of the English rock band Oasis and currently of... the band Beady Eye. Gallagher's erratic behaviour, distinctive singing style, and abrasive attitude have been the subject of commentary in the press. He remains one of the most recognisable figures in modern British music. Although his elder brother Noel Gallagher wrote the majority of Oasis's songs, Liam has penned the singles "Songbird" and "I'm Outta Time", along with a string of album tracks and B-sides. Since Noel's departure from Oasis in August 2009, Liam has said he will continue making music with ex-Oasis members Gem Archer, Andy Bell, drummer Chris Sharrock and keyboard player Jay Darlington, recording under the bandname Beady Eye. Jeff Wootton, guitarist for the Phase III Gorillaz House Band, will also be a member. Gallagher was born in Burnage, Manchester, and is the third and youngest child of Irish parents Thomas and Peggy Gallagher.
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John Taylor is a British jazz pianist; he has occasionally performed on the organ and the synthesiser. He is one of Europe's most celebrated jazz... pianists and composers. John Taylor first came to the attention of the jazz audience in 1969 when he partnered saxophonists Alan Skidmore and John Surman. He was later reunited with Surman in the short-lived group Morning Glory and in the 1980s with Miroslav Vitous’s quartet. In the early 1970s he was accompanist to the singer Cleo Laine and started to compose for his own sextet. Taylor also worked with many visiting artists at Ronnie Scott’s club and later became a member of Ronnie’s quintet. In 1977 Taylor formed the trio Azimuth, with Norma Winstone and Kenny Wheeler. On some of the group's recording Taylor played synthesiser and organ. The group was described by Richard Williams as "…one of the most imaginatively conceived and delicately balanced contemporary chamber-jazz groups". The trio made several recordings for ECM Records and performed in Europe, the USA and Canada.
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Noel Thomas David Gallagher is an English musician and singer-songwriter, formerly the lead guitarist, backing vocalist and principal songwriter of... the English rock band Oasis. He is currently fronting his solo project, Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds. Raised in Burnage, Manchester with his brother Liam, Noel Gallagher began learning guitar at the age of thirteen. After a series of odd jobs in construction, he worked for local Manchester band Inspiral Carpets as a roadie and technician in 1988. Whilst touring with them, he learned that Liam had formed a band of his own, known as The Rain, which eventually took on the name Oasis. After Gallagher returned to England, he was invited by his brother to join Oasis as songwriter and guitarist. Oasis' debut album, Definitely Maybe , marked the beginning of the band's rise to fame as head of the Britpop movement. Oasis' second album, Morning Glory?, reached the top of the album charts in many countries and their third studio album, Be Here Now, became the fastest-selling album in UK chart history. Britpop eventually declined in popularity and Oasis' next two albums failed to revive it.
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Jonathan "Johnny" Clegg is a musician from South Africa, who has recorded and performed with his bands Juluka and Savuka. Sometimes called Le Zoulou... Blanc , he is an important figure in South African popular music history, with songs that mix Zulu with English lyrics, and African with various Western European music styles. Clegg was born in Bacup, Lancashire, to an English father and a Rhodesian mother. Clegg's mother's family were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Poland, and Clegg had a "secular Jewish" upbringing. Already in his youth, Clegg, a white, English-speaking person who was raised in the U.K., Israel, Rhodesia , Zambia, and South Africa, became interested in Zulu street music and took part in traditional Zulu dance competitions. As a young man, in the early stages of his musical career, he combined his music with the study of anthropology, a subject which he also taught for a while at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where he was influenced, among others, by the work of David Webster, a social anthropologist who was assassinated in 1989.
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