St Benedict's church in Ardwick
The thing about Manchester is, for all the patches of increasingly non-distinct new builds around the city centre and along the Oxford Road corridor, all you have to do is stumble a few yards behind Piccadilly station in the right direction and you're right in the middle of a tragic and horribly beautiful urban decline: grand, crumbling mills, streets almost empty of pedestrians, offensive post-war terraces, grim off-licences and boarded-up pubs. Yes, this is a post-industrial urban space as it should be: farewell blandness, hello poetry. And, most excitingly of all if you're me, you might come across a couple of redbrick churches (one derelict, one recently-derelict) that offer strong evidence that around here, somewhere, there used to be a thriving community.
All Soul's Church on Every Street, in Ancoats (built 1840) offers any ecclesiastical architecture enthusiast a thrill, even though you can only see it from the outside: immediately one can see that it's shape seems modelled on Milan Cathedral, although it is radically plainer and the decorative elements are distinctly romanesque: essentially then a shrunken Norman duomo stripped down to its bare essentials (ie: no spikes), and, of course, rendered in industrial red rather than that classical white. One suspects it could still do a good bit of damage to Silvio Berlusconi if you threw it at him, though.
All Souls in Ancoats
Sadly, All Soul's has been closed since 1984, and after having served some sort of industrial purpose since then (contradictory accounts suggest either 'joinery workshop' or 'timber merchants', though I suppose that a timber concern based in the choir could be selling all their wood to the joiners in the nave) is apparently shortly to re-open as something called the 'Manchester Miracle Centre', although when I visited I could find little evidence of refurbishment going on and indeed came across a sign from a demolition company nearby, which had me worriedly attempting to navigate the planning applications section of the council's website (which, by the way, could be a lot better designed).
Amble along the long stretches of dual carriageway to Ardwick and one might eventually turn the right corner to find the High Anglican dream that is St Benedict's on Bennett Street (named for wealthy church benefactor John Marsland Bennett), built 1880 and ceasing to function as a church in 2002. A tall and classy redbrick tower, one of the largest rose windows I've ever seen on a parish church in these isles, an attached school house and presbytery, and... a modest but nevertheless conspicuous sign for something called the 'Manchester Climbing Centre'.
Circle the church, inspecting the doors and windows, and you'd be forgiven for thinking that whoever this Climbing Centre are, they're using it as a warehouse. Plastic and metal screens bolted behind the stained glass and some sort of concrete actually gluing the big west doors shut does not exactly scream: “come on in.” But stroll through the car park and you'll find a door that actually looks like it might open, although you still need to press a button to get buzzed in by the receptionist.
And, inside, they've done something to the place that no rational human being could ever have expected. Go on, guess what they've done to it. If you had 'several large climbing walls in the nave', you win the box of Rose's chocolates. Yes, the Manchester Climbing Centre, it turns out, is a real climbing centre (not that, as a man who only really leaves the house to go to university or see some fantastic churches, I had really acquired the concept of a climbing centre before I visited St Benedict's), complete with rubber (or, not really rubber, some sort of synthetic floor material like rebound ace or something) floor and balcony café.
But, both mercifully and surreally, the owners have maintained the original Victorian stained glass (including some very beautiful examples), plaques celebrating particular members of the congregation, and breathtaking wooden ceiling (I do like a parish church with a nice wooden ceiling), so that you can wander through admiring all this, while you're standing on a rubber floor surrounded by healthy-living types developing their climbing skills on the plastic, multi-coloured climbing walls that stretch up to the aforementioned breathtaking wooden ceiling.
So, to conclude: even if the Manchester Miracle Centre might not make the church-lover believe in miracles, the Manchester Climbing Centre certainly will.
By Tom Whyman
