As places to lunch in Manchester go, I’m not sure there’s many that have been providing midday sustenance for Mancunians - and lesser mortals - since 1806.
The Portico Library can make this claim confidently, however. Yes, it’s a library. But not the stuffy, ‘shushing’ kind. On a lunchtime this week, there was a pleasing burble of conversation, clinking of glasses, rumble of trams and the sound of industry from the tiny kitchen that overlooks Mosley Street.
Writer Elizabeth Gaskell would have had lunch here (her husband William, a minister, was the library’s longest serving chairman).
So would John Dalton, Sir Robert Peel and Peter Mark Roget, he of the thesaurus fame, which he started writing on these very premises. Try ME N Premium for FREE by clicking here for no ads, fun puzzles and brilliant new features And afterwards, if they had any sense, they all might have dozed off in the cosy reading room in the back, in front of the fire.
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