Florence? Manchester?....

The cognoscenti of Victorian London were very disparaging about the cultural offering of Victorian Manchester. The Victorian cotton barons often came from very humble, barely educated beginnings and set up businesses that turned them into the equivalent of billionaires.

They weren't entirely sure what to do with all that money apart from make more of the stuff. At some point they decided two things. One was that the industrial revolution had turned Manchester into a hell on Earth. And the second was that to be accepted in society they needed to be educated.

To do something about the former problem they set about a civic rebuilding project that provided us with some of the magnificent buildings we still have. The brought fresh water to the city and light to the city's streets. Museums, art galleries, universities and orchestras were set up.

To deal with the latter problem they sent their sons to the best schools and took themselves off for trips around Europe where they could soak up thousands of years of continental culture rather like the aristocracy had done a century earlier on their grand tours. Art works, china, glass, furniture and the like was sent back to the city to decorate their mansions in the southern suburbs and Cheshire. And they collected styles of architecture that took their fancy to build their homes, offices and factories in the city.

To London society, the Manchester men got it all wrong. In their eyes it was the wrong art and architecture. It lacked what they considered 'class' and was a mere vulgar show of wealth. Not that the Manchester cotton barons worried about that. After all we have always been the city that could look London in the eye and say 'This is how you do it!'

So Manchester is littered with styles of architecture lifted from the great cities of Europe. On Princess Street they built the Athenaeum, now part of the Manchester Art Gallery, in the style of a Renaissance palace in Florence.