Manchester Scavenger Hunt and Self-Guided Tour

The route: from the National Football Museum via Piccadilly and Albert Square to Castlefield

10 stops · about 58 min walking · start: National Football Museum · finish: Science and Industry Museum

The hunt starts at the National Football Museum near Manchester Cathedral, then passes the Royal Exchange Theatre on the way to Piccadilly Gardens. From there you walk to Manchester Art Gallery on Mosley Street, St Peter's Square and the Town Hall on Albert Square. The route then follows Deansgate to the John Rylands Library and finishes at the Science and Industry Museum in Castlefield. Every answer is on a façade, a statue or a square, so the cathedral, the library and the museums never ask you for a ticket during the game, and if Piccadilly or St Peter's Square suits you better as a starting point, the app opens the game there and rearranges the rest.

Open the route map ↗

1. 

   1National Football MuseumStart

   The National Football Museum fills the Urbis building, a sloping glass structure designed by Ian Simpson and opened in 2002. The museum moved here from Preston in 2012 and tells the story of the game in England, the country where the modern rules of football were first written down.

2. 

   2Manchester Cathedral

   Manchester's cathedral began as a medieval parish church, became a collegiate church in 1421 and was made a cathedral in 1847. Its carved wooden choir stalls from around 1500 survived a German bomb that badly damaged the building in December 1940. Look for the grotesque faces and animals carved in its stonework.

3. 

   3Royal Exchange Theatre

   The Royal Exchange was the trading hall of Manchester's cotton industry, and its present building was completed in the early 20th century. Trading ended in 1968, and in 1976 a theatre in the round, a glass and steel module, was set up inside the great hall. The old trading board still shows the prices of the last day.

4. 

   4Piccadilly Gardens

   Piccadilly Gardens is the largest open space in Manchester city centre, laid out on the site of the Manchester Royal Infirmary, which moved away in the early 20th century. Statues of Queen Victoria, the Duke of Wellington, Robert Peel and James Watt stand here, and the curved concrete pavilion wall was designed by Tadao Ando.

5. 

   5Manchester Art Gallery

   The gallery's main building on Mosley Street was designed by Charles Barry, later the architect of the Houses of Parliament, and built for the Royal Manchester Institution in the 1820s and 1830s. Its columned Greek-style portico leads to a collection known especially for its Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

6. 

   6St Peter's Square

   The square takes its name from St Peter's Church, which stood here until 1907. Today it holds the Cenotaph by Edwin Lutyens and the round Central Library, opened in 1934. Nearby, in 1819, cavalry charged a peaceful crowd calling for parliamentary reform, in what became known as the Peterloo Massacre.

7. 

   7Manchester Town Hall

   Alfred Waterhouse designed this neo-Gothic town hall, which opened in 1877 and shows the pride and wealth of the Victorian cotton city. Its clock tower rises about 85 metres above Albert Square. Inside, the Great Hall is decorated with murals by Ford Madox Brown on the history of Manchester.

8. 

   8Albert Square

   Albert Square is named after Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's husband, and its centrepiece is the Albert Memorial, a Gothic canopy designed by Thomas Worthington in the 1860s. Statues of figures such as William Gladstone and John Bright stand around the square, which is used for public events and celebrations.

9. 

   9John Rylands Library

   Enriqueta Rylands built this neo-Gothic library on Deansgate in memory of her husband John Rylands, a wealthy cotton merchant, and it opened to readers in 1900. Its architect was Basil Champneys. Now part of the University of Manchester, it holds the Rylands fragment, one of the oldest known fragments of the Gospel of John.

10. 

    10Science and Industry MuseumFinish

    This museum in Castlefield stands on the site of Liverpool Road station, the Manchester end of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened in 1830. It is considered the oldest surviving passenger railway station in the world, and the museum tells how Manchester became a centre of the Industrial Revolution.