Tropical Manchester...

On Ducie Street, between Piccadilly Station and the cutting edge of the N4 there is a huge Victorian, red brick railway warehouse. It's an enormous, austere building with the interior supported by impressive wrought iron columns. It's a working building with none of the decoration of the cotton warehouses in other parts of the city where palaces from Vienna, Florence and Venice line up with Scottish Baronial castles and French chateaux from the Loire.

It's now a hotel, well an aparthotel, where you can rent an apartment for your trip to Manchester. It looks impressive and a bit forbidding from outside. It was only last week, for the first time, that I had the chance to go in for a meeting. From the outside it looks to be a solid cube but I was interested to find that it has an internal courtyard to provide light to the centre of the building. They have glazed it at roof level to produce a spacious atrium.

They have created a tropical garden inside with figs and palms. This is the tallest. It looks in very good condition considering that palms are few and far between in Manchester's parks. But I used to think the palms that line the Trafford Centre were real but are, in fact, glorious fakes. I wonder if this one came from the same nursery as the ones at the Trafford Centre?