Secret Manchester: The Portico Library

I was trying to find something to write about for this week’s column, and was checking through the usual suspects – Manchester Art Galley, the Whitwoth, Cornerhouse, and then thought I’d just have a quick look on Creative Tourist to see if they had added anything new. Seeing as its where I find the listings for nearly every event seen on these pages, I check it obsessively and wasn’t expecting much to come from the search. I certainly wasn’t expecting the gem that is the Portico Library. Opened in 1806 as a Library and Newsroom on Mosely Steet (declared by John Dalton ‘he most elegant … in town’), the Library retains a faded elegance which belies its up-to-date research catalogues, wi-fi and super efficient librarians.

Having suffered financially in the 20s and 30s, the ground floor of the Grade II listed building is leased, but finding the small side door, being buzzed in, and going up the stairs and emerging into a hushed and airy reading room has quite a charm of its own. The floor-to-ceiling shelves hold mainly 19th century collection of travel, biography and ‘polite’ literature, with lesser known names jostling for shelf space with Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gasckall.

What I had come for, however, were not the books or the homemade cake on offer, but the Gallery, currently hosting Clare Allan’s ‘Burnt Wood and Paper,’ an exhibition capturing ‘the feels of the places I draw… places with stories and histories’. That curiosity surrounding where and how somewhere sits in hisory is communicated through Allan’s series of black and white charcoal sketches, which oscillate between beautifully still snowy scenes, and bustling contemporary city scapes. There is a sweetness amd innocence to the opening images -‘When it Snowed’, which, as you’d expect, shows snowy hills rising behind cottages covered with a blanket of snow – which is refreshingly undercut before it becomes to saccharine  by ‘Peak Road and the Shooting Cabin’ (‘Houses on the estate that were once white) and ‘Bin Day on Cote Lane,’ which have a grittier and more contemporary feel.

The reimaginigs of Adolphe Valette’s work are really interseting, and again open a fascinating dialogue surrouning place and time, as Allan recreates an old image using contemporary Manchester, most successfully , I felt, in Albert Square (after Valette). The exhibition moves toward its close with a series of nudes, which though beautifully observed, I felt sat slightly oddly with the majority of the exhibition.

There is much to admire here – but my favourite had to be the picure of the Portico itself, which captured the sense of discovery and secrecy felt on finding that little side door and ringing the buzzer. You have to be a member to use the reading room, but anyone can go and sit in the main libary and sample tea and cake in quite spectacular surroundings.