If you want to use private car hire in Manchester to do some exploring, the city’s many parks offer some wonderful options for unwinding and going on a voyage of discovery.
Unlike in London, you won’t find many of them in the centre, although the cute Mayfield Park was opened in 2022 amid much fanfare, the first new park in the city for a century.
Outside the centre, however, there are some fascinating parks. To the south down Wilmslow Road, for instance, is Whitworth Park. Housing the must-see Whitworth Art Gallery, its intriguing claims to fame include a meteorite falling there in 2015, though it has never been found.
Further south is Platt Fields, where Platt Hall Gallery of Costume is one of several attractions.
This 90-hectare park includes a heart-shaped lake, a stone arch that used to belong to Manchester Cathedral and one of the surviving stretches of Nico Ditch, a Saxon-era earthwork stretched across south Manchester. Its origin and purpose are uncertain, although one story claims it was dug in a single night as a defence against Viking invaders.
At the north end of the city is the huge Heaton Park, at 640 acres the largest municipal park in Europe and also home to the city’s highest point above sea level, although not by the Temple folly as once thought, but a patch of woodland behind the community orchard.
Features of the park include the tramway museum, where you can still see some of Manchester’s old (pre-1949) trams running, a boating lake, pitch and putt, animal centre and the Lightopia Festival on winter nights.
Other fine open spaces include the Fletcher Moss Park and Botanic Gardens in Didsbury, the large open areas of Wythenshawe Park and Alexandra Park, and the wonderfully named Boggart Hole Clough, a boggart being a traditional name for a mythical creature like an elf or sprite.
Each offers a green oasis in a busy city, showing there is so much more to Manchester than its stereotypes.