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Central Deansgate cuts through the city from the canal to the cathedral. South of Peter Street, the Peter's Fields development has transformed a magnificent sweep of late-nineteenth-century warehousing into the Great Northern commercial and leisure complex. North along Deansgate, past Peter Street, keep an eye out for modern Lincoln Square (tucked between Queen and Brazenose streets), named after its standing statue of the American President. Across Deansgate, opposite Brazenose Street, is the beautifully detailed John Rylands Library (Mon-Fri 10am-5.30pm, Sat 10am-1pm; free; guided tours Wed noon; GBP1; ), the city's supreme example of Victorian Gothic. Venture inside to see the superb interior - carved and burnished wood, Art Nouveau metalwork, delicately crafted stone and stained glass. From the library, continue up Deansgate and left into Bridge Street to reach the People's History Museum (Tues-Sun 11am-4.30pm; GBP1, free on Fri; ), an exhibition recording the lives and protests of England's working class over the last two hundred years. St Ann's Square is tucked away off the eastern side of Deansgate, a couple of blocks up from John Dalton Street. Crowning glory of the square is the Royal Exchange , which houses the famous Royal Exchange Theatre , the country's largest theatre-in-the-round, whose steel-and-glass cat's cradle sits plonked under the building's immense glass-domed roof. Formerly the Cotton Exchange, this building employed seven thousand people until trading finished on December 31, 1968 - the old trading board still shows the last day's prices for American and Egyptian cotton. Deansgate ends with the small, Perpendicular Cathedral (daily 7.30am-6pm; free organ recitals Thurs at 1pm), the third church on this site since its foundation in the ninth century. A fragment of stone by the choir and a fourteenth-century arch by the tower are all that remain of the earlier structures, and in truth it's been hacked about too much to have any real coherence - the famed widest nave in England (114ft, as opposed to York Minster's 106ft) is entirely a result of rich families adding side chapels to the fifteenth-century church, which were later opened out to provide space for Manchester's burgeoning population of worshippers. The cathedral's choristers are trained in Chetham's Hospital School , across the way on Long Millgate (ask at the porter's lodge for entrance), whose oak-panelled library (Mon-Fri 9am-12.30pm & 1.30-4.30pm) is a real delight. Someone is usually on hand to show you the restored reading room, with the windowed alcove where, it's claimed, Marx and Engels used to study. The area around the cathedral is being refashioned as the city's Millennium Quarter , with the six-storey Urbis at its core. This hi-tech visitor centre (due to open during 2002) explores the experience of the planet's cities - Manchester, naturally, claimed as the world's first industrial city - through a series of interactive exhibits.
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