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From St Peter's Square, Oxford Road - initially Oxford Street - stretches to Rusholme (by which time it's become Wilmslow Road) and the leafy suburbs beyond. At its northern end, the Cornerhouse is the dynamo of the Manchester arts scene, with its cinema screens and three floors of gallery space (Tues-Sat 11am-6pm, Sun 2-6pm; free). From across the road (outside the Palace Hotel ), an endless stream of buses runs down Oxford Road, passing the buildings and sights detailed below. Newest addition is the Manchester Aquatics Centre (Mon-Fri 6.30am-10pm, Sat 7am-6pm, Sun 7am-10pm; GBP2.50), at Booth Street, whose two fifty-metre pools under a wave-shaped roof were built with the Commonwealth Games in mind. This is under ten minutes' walk from the Cornerhouse, while another ten minutes along Oxford Road brings you to the Gothic Revival building housing the Manchester Museum (Mon-Sat 10am-5pm; free; ). At the centre of the Egyptology world since the 1890s, the museum has done pioneering work on mummy dissection and captivating displays enlarge upon the burial practices and techniques that their work has revealed. Rocks, minerals, fossils and natural history also get their own exhibition space, while the top-floor Science for Life section concentrates on the human body and biomedical research. Another half-mile away is the city's modern art collection, housed in the redbrick Whitworth Gallery (Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 2-5pm; free; ). The gallery forms two distinct halves, "historic" and modern, with its pre-1880 historic collection incorporating a strong assembly of watercolours by Turner, Constable, Cox and Blake. The modern collection concentrates on post-1880 British staples, with Moore, Frink and Hepworth setting off contributions from lesser-known artists. With Manchester's cotton connections it is perhaps not surprising that the gallery also displays the country's widest range of textiles outside London's Victoria and Albert Museum. Walk two hundred yards south of the Whitworth Gallery and you'll catch the pungent spicy smell of Rusholme 's Wilmslow Road, a "golden mile" of curry houses, sari shops and Asian grocers. In Platt Fields Park , at the south end of the curry mile (just past Hardy's Well pub), the Gallery of Costume (daily 10am-5.30pm; free) fills Georgian Platt Hall. Its collection spans fashion through the ages, giving particular emphasis to Manchester's former role as a textile centre, its large Asian population and the clothes of the working class.
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