Chetham has the oldest surviving public library in the English speaking world, which opened in the 1600s. It is housed in a medieval building built 200 years earlier that is surely unique to the city in terms of age, character and design. The library also has another claim to fame. In the 1840s its most frequent visitors were a double act called Marx and Engels who spent days on end there bashing out the ideas that would fill the pages of Engels’ Conditions of the Working Class in England and Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Now you might think that a place of such significance would be one of the city’s principal tourist attractions, trumpeted by civic leaders as a must-visit destination for tourists and life-long inhabitants alike.
Instead, visiting the library is a surreal and baffling experience.
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