Manchester - Secrets of the City

I recently had the rare opportunity to join an Urbis tour of some of the Secrets of the City of Manchester.  I had an ulterior motive. My fourth novel - A Fatal Intervention - includes a dramatic episode beneath the streets of the city, and I wanted to check that I'd got the details right.

There were just 23 of us. We met at the entrance to the AMC Cinemas in the Great Northern Wharehouse and were led to a normally sealed doorway that took us into the bowels of the city and the course of the former Manchester and Salford Junction Canal. Originally intended to link the Mersey and Irwell Navigation with the Rochdale Canal, one section 500 yards long runs from Watson Street to Charles Street -from the great Northern to The Palace Hotel, and another - flooded for the most part to chest height - runs from the Great Northern, under Deansgate, past the old cholera graves at St John's Gardens, and under Granda Studios.

We made our way cautiously through the pitch darkness, aided only by the light of our torches. We came across former loading bays and docks, tow paths, and huge brick lift shafts built to raise and lower goods to and from the wharehouse and the former railway high above us. We were shown the air raid shelters, warden's post, and toilets that had been constructed during the blitz. On the wall were the remains of a Code of Conduct poster reminding people of their duty to behave responsibly or risk being evicted to face the horror unfolding high above them. We saw the brick steps, now ending at the cavernous roof, up which the city workers and residents would have climbed to emerge on that foggy early morning of December 23rd 1940 to find their city ablaze and smouldering in the wake of the infamous Christmas Blitz.

The air is surprisingly clean but this is a cold, damp and haunting place. Not least due to graffiti of the devil's head and the number 666 painted in red on one of the walls, and a skeleton dangling high above us in circular cage surrounding the rungs of a metal ladder. Save a few wood lice clinging to brickwork, and a weird silk like fungus that grows only in the summer months, nothing lives or moves down here.

At several points in the floor we came across metal drains adding weight to the rumours of a tunnel, even deeper beneath our feet, dating back to the 1500s. Who knows this might just appear in a future Caton novel. Stranger things have happened. At least I know that I've got my facts right, and I have some footage for my website, and a UTube promo for A Fatal Intervention when it comes out in the New Year.

Next stop Manchester Cathedral [ One of the settings for The Head Case] and its bell tower, and St Ann's Church with its own treasures including a Renaissance masterpiece, the Second World War incendiary bomb that pierced its roof and failed to explode, and an Alfred Waterhouse inspired stained glass window of King Solomon full of Masonic text, images, and symbols that are every bit as mysterious as anything in Dan Brown's first two novels. Plenty of food for thought and inspiration. Watch this space!