Richard Wentworth is a very good teacher. We have watched him shape and guide a flimsy idea about what to do for Museums at Night into an actual, proper event. We have seen him turn the city into his school, with us his willing students. We have observed him creating something quite remarkable from our collective contributions.

And what did he create? On paper, it looks simple: an exhibition at the Whitworth, one created from objects donated by members of the public the previous evening. We’ve been in on this project since the start and so we had no cynicism to park; we can imagine, though, a certain rolling of eyes at the thought of an artist creating an exhibition from some of the things donated, the Tesco receipt pulled from the musty depths of a rucksack, the pair of pants, the erasers and lipstick pen, the badges and bus pass. We can hear the Daily Mail headlines a-screaming that Public Money Was Surely Wasted on such an exercise. And, to be fair, we would forgive a smattering of cynicism. Sure, how can you make something meaningful out of a load of junk “donated” by the public?

This was an exercise in curatorial magic. It proved that art is alchemy.

Yet the strangest thing happened. First, several people donated things of real value, from the Russian artists who gave the most wonderful paper sculpture to the person who donated their grandfather’s beautifully-made wooden tape measure. Second, there was an ingenious “process” by which you donated your object. You didn’t just hand it over; you walked through a six-stage acquisition process, one that aped the real-life museological acquisition process. From describing materials to recording weight, as donators moved through each stage there was a gathering sense of their object’s actual value; the donation went from being a bit of a laugh to something more serious. By the time we signed our own object over – well, frankly, it was a wrench. Bagged up and labelled, along with it went our story and a small fragment of our ego: would the recipient care about the object (and by extension us) as much as we did?

“There was a strange, slightly festive, slightly primitive, feeling last night,” said Wentworth of the donation process. “It was like watching Princess Diana’s funeral, where I saw ordinary people throwing flowers. Last night was a bit like that; people were bringing things and everything was charged. In fact, eat your heart out, Antiques Roadshow, it felt quite substantial.”

As Wentworth and his team spent the following day sifting through the donated objects, “many of the things started talking to each other. There was an incredible pattern, a set of rhymes.” Wentworth arranged objects into small groups, with these groups then scattered unlabelled through the gallery. “The debate surrounding each and every donation had a profound tenderness to it and at different moments the most ordinary thing was able to rise to high levels of shared appreciation,” wrote Wentworth in a hand-out given to attenders on the night. Of all the objects, three stood out: the Russian paper sculpture, an iron railroad spike from New Jersey, and a Tesco invoice stained by a coffee spill. “The author(s) of this particular artwork made a spectacular intervention by interpreting this coffee stain as a replica map of Africa. Enjoy their knowledge of politics and geography as you look at it. In this instance, Europe had to be invented as stain-free,” wrote Wentworth of the meticulous and surprisingly accurate map biro-ed over the stain.

So, the exhibition at the Whitworth last night turned out to be much more than a show of unwanted tat. It was testament to the lure and the power of collecting; how we give inanimate objects a kind of emotional charge; how we invest memories and meaning in the most ordinary of things. It was a comment on the kind of power our museums and galleries hold over us, and in turn just how much we hold them in regard. It was an articulation of the ties that bind us to things, things to place, place back to people (one of the best things Wentworth said last night was that “this couldn’t happen in London; it’s not the same, there isn’t the same emotional glue”).

But mostly it was about how art is alchemy. As an exercise in curatorial magic, it taught all those assembled last night that the application of an artistic eye can transform the banal into the exquisite. “Maybe that’s the point of artworks,” said Wentworth. “They give us a kind of collective energy. This is a very unusual energy field – and you are part of it.” We couldn’t have been more pleased to have been part of something so special. Like we said, Richard Wentworth is a very good teacher.

When you think of Land Art, you might think of Robert Smithson’s epic earthworks hidden away in the desert of Utah. Or you might think of Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapping coastlines and monuments in tarpaulin. Or maybe, a bit closer to home, you might think of Antony Gormley’s high-profile urban interventions. Land Art doesn’t tend to be associated with intimacy, government departments, mountain bike trails, forest management or sudden showers of hail stones on an otherwise mild afternoon. But this is exactly what you encounter at Grizedale Forest, the home of two arts organisations and a permanent collection of around 60 sculptures.

The relationship between Grizedale Forest and the visual arts is as fascinating as it is complex. The Grizedale Society began commissioning sculptures in 1977, when its remit covered visual arts and also running a theatre. Many of the sculptors involved in the early days, such as David Nash and Richard Harris, have gone on to become household names. Since 1999, however, care of the artwork has been the responsibility of the Forestry Commission (operating under the title Grizedale Sculpture), while an international arts programme continues under the auspices of Grizedale Arts, a separate organisation based nearby. But the collection of sculptures isn’t static: Grizedale Sculpture still works with artists and has just launched an ambitious new commissioning programme, Art Roots.

The forest is also the subject of Edwina Fitzpatrick’s practice-based doctoral research, co-supervised by Glasgow University and Grizedale Sculpture. The artist tells me that her research takes the form of artworks or experiments, to explore the notion of mutability, change and “the landscape as a cultural archive”. She is also developing the archive held by Grizedale Sculpture; plugging holes by interviewing artists and producing the most basic of documents – a database of all of the artworks that have and do exist in the forest. Fitzpatrick describes Grizedale as having “many guises… it is many things all in one place, a strange mixture,” and definitely a place that’s ripe for both artistic inspiration and further research.

To see all the art could take days; you start in the centre of the forest and follow a network of trails to find it

When I meet Hayley Skipper, the Arts Development Officer for the Forestry Commission, she is keen to point out that “this is not Yorkshire Sculpture Park”. This isn’t a criticism; it’s just that the two couldn’t be more different. The experience of visiting Grizedale works best as one element of another activity: walking, cycling, a tree-top adventure weekend, a getaway from the city. To see all of the sculptures could take up to five days, and visitors access the forest, unusually, from the centre, where a network of trails lead to and around the artworks. Sculptures appear suddenly through the trees, either confrontationally like Robert Bryce Muir’s mythical “Mea Culpa” or shyly like Colin Rose’s “Ting”.

Skipper takes me to Carron Crag, the highest point in the forest. Despite it being early March, snow sparkles on the ground, and the climate here seems to be a law unto itself. At the peak we can see the extent of the forested area and how its valley location keeps it hidden from Windermere, Hawkshead and other nearby towns. We can see, too, a visual map of forest management: different tree types and ages being harvested and planted. On the ground, a monkey puzzle tree, holly bush or spruce occasionally appear due to test planting and self-seeding; these natural anomalies feel like sculptural objects in their own right.

Descending the mountain again, Skipper shows me the outcome of a 2011 commission by muf architecture/art (above). The simplicity of “The Wood for the Trees” – a fallen tree hovering between a car park and a thoroughfare – belies Muff’s research and engagement with the place. Clues as to the extent of this research appear in the sound work nearby, a combination of bird song and voices of the people of Grizedale Forest. It forms an intimate portrait of the delicate balance of people, industry, plant and animal life that has developed here.

It is no wonder that artists are keen to work within this ecology; the forest as a context for artworks is both beautiful and politically charged.  England’s total wooded area makes up around 10% of its land mass, one of the lowest percentages in Europe. Despite costing around 90p per household per year to manage, for two years the present government dithered over a decision to sell them off. A huge public outcry forced the government to reconsider; it is this context that Skipper believes will be addressed by future artists when using the forest as subject matter and site for their work.

Skipper already knows who some of those future artists will be thanks to Art Roots, a partnership between the Arts Council and the Forestry Commission that has seen Skipper and her team work with artists Tania Kovats, Laura Ford, Keith Wilson and others. Edwina Fitzpatrick says that artists coming to Grizedale “are attracted to working within nature in a romantic sense, but all end up having to confront the idea of forest management and the artificiality of the landscape. They realise that nature is a construct.” What she means is that everything at Grizedale is constructed, from dry stone walls to a forest established to shore up the area’s poor, shallow soil. The sculptures are simply another layer of construction, although they, like the forest, change and succumb to the elements over time.

The magic of Grizedale Forest is its ability to appeal to everyone, from super-fit mountain bikers to art lovers. It is day trip-able from Liverpool or Manchester, and surprisingly accessible from Leeds, Newcastle or London. One note of caution, though: having approached from both north and south, signage is less visible from the north – perhaps this is because us townies leaving the M6 at junction 36 need extra help. My advice? Take your time. You may well take a wrong turn, yet getting lost here can be a pleasure.

Liverpool is a place that appreciates the importance of a good brew. Walk down practically any street in the city centre and you’re likely to spot at least one coffee shop (Bold Street has a Costa Coffee, a Starbucks and a Café Nero situated within 50 metres of each other). However, as any discerning caffeine fiend is aware, not all coffees are created equal. If you’re a Scouser in the know, you’ll have already paid a visit to Bold Street Coffee to sample the delights of its single blend filter coffees, as well as experience what might very possibly be the best Flat White currently served in the North West of England. You’ll probably have feasted on its excellent sandwiches, chatted with the friendly baristas and maybe even congratulated them on their daring decision to play Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” at full blast at 7.30am. And you’ll probably have wished that there were more coffee shops in the city offering as good an experience.

Thankfully, there are. Situated snugly at the crossroads of Duke Street and Hanover Street is Duke Street Espresso Bar, Bold Street Coffee’s little brother. An airy, stylish homage to the kind of cafés that are ten-a-penny in places like New York, it is a coffee geek’s dream. Peek at the menu and you’ll see a plethora of single origin brews, all hand ground on the premises, which you can choose to have brewed either via the drip-brew method or in an aeropress. Look up and you’ll see a ceiling strewn with hundreds of paper espresso cups. Listen and you’ll hear everything from Richard Hawley to Miles Davis coming from the stereo.

A homage to the kinds of cafés that are ten-a-penny in New York, it’s a coffee geek’s dream

Duke Street Espresso Bar describes itself as a “toastery’’, meaning that the food on offer focuses mainly on bread. Slices of toast start at 60p and can be topped with peanut butter, jam, marmalade, honey or marmite. Alternatively, you could pick up one of its selection of pastries; the excellent homemade toasted fruit loaf (£2.50) is packed full of dried fruit and comes in doorstop-sized slabs dripping with butter. If you’re looking for something slightly more substantial, go for one of the toasted bagels, which come filled to the hilt with pastrami and cheese.

Duke Street Espresso Bar isn’t as big as Bold Street Coffee but, because of its location, it does tend to be quieter, allowing you to hunker down and enjoy a good coffee and some handy free WiFi in relative peace (at least for now). If your tastes veer towards something a little stronger, the bar hosts occasional Wine & Cheese evenings and has even been known to mix up some coffee-based cocktails (its Flat White Russians are particularly delicious). In a city where it can often feel as though chains rule the roost, it’s nice to know that there’s somewhere local and unique where you can enjoy good ambience, good food, good tunes and a damn fine cup of coffee.

LOOK/13, the biennial photo fest that opens in Liverpool this weekend, is an event that captures the complexity and diversity of the photographic image. It does so via snaps of the urban landscape and large format displays, via new commissions, retrospective exhibitions, solo shows and pop-up studios, and via a National Photography Symposium run by Manchester’s Redeye. While the festival theme may focus on the person behind the lens (and the question “who do you think you are?”), much of what takes place is a reminder of two things. First, that despite, or perhaps because of, the advent of the digital age, photography has never felt so fresh. And second, that Liverpool is a city that gets culture.

“The reason the festival is here is because it’s such a great place to have a visual arts festival,” says festival director Patrick Henry. “Though it started life as a mini festival in Manchester in 2007, it was felt that Liverpool was the place where it could be made bigger and more ambitious.” The reason for Liverpool’s supremacy, in Henry’s mind at least, is to do with the city itself. “You’ve got collections in the city’s museums, galleries and studios, but it’s also a great venue for temporary events. Everything is within walking distance, it’s easily navigable; you’ve got the river and the waterfront, the Liverpool tradition of having a good time. That sense of the city is the backbone of the festival.”

Often, festivals can feel a bit detached from their setting. Not here.

While Henry is happy to wax lyrical about a city he is clearly so fond of, he does have a point. Liverpool’s tradition of cross-city arts festivals stretches back to the early 1990s, with Liverpool Biennial and this week’s Light Night just two of many carrying the flag for Scouse festivals with clout. “The way we have collaborated on this festival is particular to Liverpool,” says Henry. “We haven’t parachuted our programme into other people’s venues; each venue has developed its own programme and that means the festival is rooted in the city. It gives it strength and integrity, and is quite unusual for such a large event – often, festivals can feel a bit detached from their setting, which isn’t the case here.”

When it comes to photography, Liverpool also has form – something that Henry, as the former director of the Open Eye Gallery, knows all too well. Set up in 1977, home to a considerable archive as well as gallery space, the Open Eye is one of the UK’s leading such organisations. “But there are other good collections in the city,” says Henry. “The Walker has some quite unexpected things, including two major bodies of work by Martin Parr and Tom Wood. That work is part of the festival – and hasn’t been shown since it was acquired in the 1980s.” Practitioners have long come to Merseyside to make new work, and Martin Parr was no exception. His series of documentary images of New Brighton in the 1970s and 80s, and subsequent book, The Last Resort, launched his career. Tom Wood, meanwhile, photographed the people and places of Liverpool for over twenty years, his images forming a unique record of a city undergoing seismic economic and social change. “Both Parr and Wood showed their work at a joint exhibition at the Open Eye in 1986 – so, in a sense, LOOK/13 brings the pair together again,” says Henry.

Though the programme covers every major arts venue in the city, for Henry there are a couple of stand-out shows. The first is Kurt Tong’s solo exhibition at the Victoria Gallery and Museum. “He was born in Hong Kong but spent much of his life in the UK,” says Henry. “His project is about him trying to find a way of talking to his daughters about who they are, where they come from, and their mixed heritage. It was the first major element of the festival that we programmed and while it is incredibly personal, that idea – who do you think you are – went on to connect to and shape the rest of the programme.” The second is Keith Medley’s Double Take. The exhibition of Medley’s work at the Walker uses materials gathered from the commercial photographer’s portrait studio in Wallasey, a studio that continued using glass plates until the 1960s. “He would take two portraits of each sitter on the same plate, side by side,” says Henry. “We have taken these portraits and printed them up as doubles and they have a strange, uncanny relationship to each other. Sometimes one of the portraits has been scratched out, occasionally there is a different person, but generally it’s the same person with two different expressions – the two faces that the sitter has presented to the camera – and they can look so different that the effect of seeing both is spellbinding.” The Walker Art Gallery also hosts a major show by Rankin, while Henry’s old stamping ground, Open Eye, stages the first gallery exhibition in the UK for the French photographer, Charles Fréger.

It appears that LOOK/13 is set to have a good run. As for the idea that Liverpool is somehow better than Manchester in the photographic stakes, well, that’s only half true. Manchester’s Redeye worked as hard as its Liverpool counterparts to bring the first LOOK festival to Liverpool in 2011. “There’s a really strong photography hub around Manchester and Liverpool, which is about history, which is about teaching and working, which is about the archives that exist in both cities. The Manchester-Liverpool connection has been gathering strength over the past eight or nine years, and it has set the groundwork for that North West hub to exist.” Critical friend, yes, but it turns out that Manchester isn’t a rival after all. Liverpool may be a city that gets culture, but it’s one that gets collaboration, too.

Fancy a night at the museum? Good. You’ve come to the right place. As the nationwide nocturnal celebration of museum goodness gets underway on Thursday, further details of what’s planned in Manchester have been released. Now, we’ve spoken at length about Richard Wentworth and what he has planned already. We hope you’ve submitted pictures to our #lovecollecting campaign, and are planning on donating something to Manchester Art Gallery or Manchester Museum on Thursday night. Or perhaps you have your eye on one of Wentworth’s strange, circuitous bus tours of the city?

Electronic, mashed-up blues provide a soundtrack to Wentworth’s exhibition in a night

There is more, though. Alongside the bus tours and donation stations at Manchester Museum on Thursday, expect to find jewellery design workshops alongside a display inspired by the Museum’s collection, as well as a scientific “micro-lecture” series and tours of the exhibition All Other Things Being Equal. Discover more about the natural world and meet the Museum’s own ornithologists (and their stuffed charges). Manchester Art Gallery runs its Thursday Lates series,where the Finders Keepers DJs will be in the house (or, in this case, in the gallery atrium), providing the soundtrack to the surrender of your object. Rather excitingly, alongside the white-gloved curators guiding you through the various stages of donation/acquisition, Richard Wentworth will be on hand – for part of the night, at least. So you might get the chance to find out what he makes of your donation. There’s even a Museums at Night game, which you can play via your Smartphone – find out how to play by Tweeting @mynightmuseum and wait for a special “museum guide” to get in touch with details. There are apparently “spiritual rewards and actual prizes” on offer for players.

Over at the Whitworth on the Friday night, meanwhile, enjoy specially-produced live performances from electro blues outfit, WALK, and the electronic, improvised and mashed-up, beat-boxing and multi-layered mastery of Denis Jones, a musician whose latest release has been described by The Guardian as “scuzzy Mancunian blues at its richest and most intriguing”. Scuzzy and intriguing? That sounds like our kind of night.

The reopening of The French this spring sent ripples of excitement around the city. A hard-boiled professional food critic I know was in girlish raptures. Another foodie told me the chestnut bread was “bangin’”. By the time I sat down to dinner, my expectations were higher than the cheap seats at Old Trafford. And still chef Simon Rogan and his talented team completely topped them.

Rogan has built up a devoted following at the Michelin-starred L’Enclume in Cartmel, where he’s put a British spin on the fiercely local hunter-gatherer cuisine practised by chefs such as René Redzepi at Noma in Copenhagen. In The Midland Hotel he’s got a perfectly central city location. The oval room has been reinvented with warm green walls, light wood table tops and woven placemats, the only glitz provided by two striking chandeliers. The overall effect is like green buds opening on a long-dormant tree. Very fitting for a meal that was close as you can get to eating springtime in England.

The French’s six-course tasting menu is an evening of food so interesting, so thoughtful and ultimately so satisfying that eating it probably raises your IQ and boosts your standard of living. Even after six courses, three amuse-bouches, bread, wine, coffee and chocolates, you don’t feel like you’ve overindulged, because the food is clean and wholesome. Rogan has sourced the best native produce, cooked each ingredient in a way that individually brings out its essence, and then masterfully combined them to create a surprising and inventive interplay of tastes and textures. Some of the produce is really local: a kitchen garden has been installed on the roof.

For as long as I’ve been here we haven’t had fine dining that could stand up to London. Now we do.

The standout was sole bathed in a rich onion broth with truffles, crisp brown little onion rings and delicate wild garlic, sweet and light and umami all at once. Or maybe it was briny crabmeat with crunchy sheets of chicken skin and caramelised cabbage in a pool of horseradish cream. But I’d hate to imply I found anything lacking in the pillowy hake with toasted buckwheat and pea shoots, or the wizardry of ox with coal oil; ruby morsels of raw beef bearing the smoky kiss of an imaginary grill. And that chestnut bread – chewy crust, nutty bittersweet insides – was completely bangin’.

My friend had the vegetarian tasting menu and it was a pleasure to see each dish put before her had been given just as much thought as mine, if not more. This is a kitchen that profoundly understands vegetables. Light-as-air truffle dumplings, complex vegetal broths, and salads of virginal freshness proceeded in a dreamlike procession. The few wines we sampled were unusual, favouring off dry whites, with a complex Saint-Émilion the notable exception. Service overall was frank, friendly and assured. By the time we had reached the pear poached in its own juices with meadowsweet and the sarsaparilla meringue ice cream sandwich, we were both dedicated Roganites.

Offering three, six and ten-course menus at relatively reasonable prices makes The French unusually accessible for a great restaurant – of course, you have to get a table (try lunch if you can’t wait). Rogan’s second restaurant at The Midland, the larger and more casual Mr. Cooper’s Garden, will open in September. Manchester is much the better for Rogan’s arrival. We have solid mid-rangers, a good mix of ethnic places and marvellous old pubs, but for as long as I’ve been here the city centre hasn’t had a fine dining restaurant that could stand up to anything in London or New York. Now things are different. This is a situation that Mancunians are much more comfortable with, and we can settle into doing what we do best: bragging about our city. Because let me tell you, we unequivocally have something worth bragging about.

“Electric voice phenomena” – depending on one’s suggestibility, it either constitutes evidence of the afterlife, or the capacity of the human brain to discern patterns in stray radio transmissions and white noise. It was an idea first mooted by Konstantin Raudive, whose 1970s experiments created the “proof” that the voices of the dead could be heard in electronic interference and the crackling static of the radio. And it was an idea later mined by 1980s partworks such as The Unexplained, a hugely popular magazine whose pages detailed, well, the “unexplained” (spontaneous human combustion, demonic possession, that sort of thing), and to whose cover was often attached a flexidisc purporting to have captured the discarnate voices of the dead in its audio tracks.

In this instance, however, “electric voice phenomena” is the organising theme for a group of new media artists inspired by Raudive’s experiments. In an evening of sound art, digitised speech, field recordings, performance poetry and sampled music at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, these performers will walk the line between reality and the occult, via the alchemy of art.

Is that crackling static evidence of the afterlife, or just how suggestible the human brain is?

Writer, poet and performer Hannah Silva references Stan Gooch’s 1972 book The Total Man, a volume that spanned politics, art, magic and morality, and sheds light on a man who was both medium and psychologist. Outfit, meanwhile, are inspired by the once notorious, now half-forgotten trial of heavy metal progenitors Judas Priest, in which a “subliminal” message, purportedly concealed within the band’s recordings, exhorted two young American teenagers to “do it” and end their lives. The case proceeded, regardless of conclusive evidence for either the efficacy of subliminal communication, or – indeed – the alleged message itself. More tangentially, the evening is rounded out by S.J. Fowler channelling Dada’s metaphorical ghost, and Ross Sutherland, who combines “reclaimed” video footage with the spoken word; his looped clips of The Crystal Maze will doubtless summon some unpredictable manifestations. All in all, it promises to be a strange, unnerving and probably fairly noisy affair, though if you listen close, you might hear the voice of the now-deceased Raudive, vindicated at last.

A mystery tour, a people’s museum: an exhibition in a night. What links them all, we hear you ask? This May, Manchester takes part in Museums at Night. With Richard Wentworth leading proceedings, the city’s museums and galleries stage a series of events over two evenings that celebrate the depth and diversity, the weirdness and the wonderfulness of the things that people are compelled to collect.

On Thursday 16 May, you’re invited to bring something curious to a collections booth at either Manchester Museum or Manchester Art Gallery, and in so doing create a people’s museum – your object will be “acquired” by the institution. On the same evening, take a mystery bus tour of Manchester. You won’t know where you’re going or why; all you need to know is that your bus follows a circuitous route devised by the artist Richard Wentworth. On Friday 17 May, see the fruits of your collective labour. Richard Wentworth creates an exhibition in a night at the Whitworth; the objects donated the previous night acting as the raw materials for Wentworth’s show here. There are other events, too, with both the People’s History Museum and National Football Museum also taking part.

We can’t tell you exactly how things will unfurl as Museums at Night progresses, but we can tell you that you will be with like-minded souls. Like them, you might collect things in order to make sense of the world – or to find your place within it. You might be cynical. You might be curious. You will be lost, you may be found. Intrigued? Read on for our listings of what’s on and when.

Wednesday 1 May 2013

In the run-up to Museums at Night, we launch #lovecollecting. Share your images of curious and lovely objects, or those that you’ve found in museums and galleries that particularly inspired you. Museums and galleries across Manchester are taking part and you can too.

Thursday 16 May 2013

Build a cabinet of curiosities at Manchester Museum and Manchester Art Gallery. Donate your own object at special collections booths set up in both venues; it will be given an acquisition number and used the following night by the artist Richard Wentworth. Your object won’t be returned so it has to be something you’re willing to part with (or leave a photograph or representation of it instead), and the museum and gallery are particularly interested in curious, strange and unusual objects, as well as things that you think should be in a museum but perhaps aren’t. 5pm-9pm, Manchester Museum & Manchester Art Gallery, free.

Richard Wentworth’s mystery bus tour of Manchester. Bus tours run between Manchester Art Gallery and Manchester Museum on Thursday night, and follow a circuitous route devised by the artist Richard Wentworth. Buses leave from both venues at 5.30pm, 6.30pm and 7.30pm, are free and available on a first come, first served basis – just wait at the special bus stops outside both institutions. 5.30pm, 6.30pm, 7.30pm, Manchester Museum & Manchester Art Gallery, free.

Thursday Lates. Manchester Art Gallery will run another edition of its hugely popular Manchester Lates series, which involves music, performance and its galleries, shop and café open until late into the evening. 5pm-9pm, Manchester Art Gallery, free.

After Hours at Manchester Museum. To celebrate the opening of the museum’s new Nature’s Library gallery, and running alongside the bus tours and “collection station”, this After Hours event is all about nature. Sip a glass or wine and explore the gallery, take an artist’s tour of the All Other Things Being Equal exhibition or see a jewellery display by Jade Mellor, inspired by the museum’s collection. 5pm-9pm, Manchester Museum, free.

Friday 17 May 2013

An exhibition in a night with Richard Wentworth. The Manchester International Festival artist uses the objects donated the previous night to curate an exhibition in a night at the Whitworth. Watch one of Britain’s most successful artists at work; see how he uses the raw materials you supplied to create something entirely new. 7.30pm-10.30pm, The Whitworth, free.

After Hours at the Whitworth. In a continuation of its successful late night series of openings, expect live performance, art and music from the Whitworth. 7.30pm-10.30pm, The Whitworth, free.

Fanatic Live: Football and Fashion, An Audience with Cass Pennant. Ever since the 1960s, fashion, youth culture and football have combined. Cass Pennant, a former member of West Ham’s notorious Inter-City Firm in the 1980s, was a significant figure in the Casuals movement that defined what became an internationally-recognised style. Pennant has since turned novelist and filmmaker and can claim to have a unique understanding of the relationship between football and fashion. Join us for an after-hours look at the exhibition Strike a Pose, followed by a screening of Pennant’s extraordinary feature documentary, Casuals – plus an exclusive Q&A with the man himself. This event is run by Ear to the Ground as part of its Fanatic Live series. 6pm-9.30pm, National Football Museum, free (but booking required).

Luke Fowler’s new film at The Working Class Movement Library. This gem of a library opens late on Friday and from 7pm you can browse its exhibition the marks the 50th anniversary of E.P. Thompson’s seminal text, The Making of the English Working Class.  At 7.30pm, watch Luke Fowler’s new film (inspired by Thompson’s life), The Poor Stockinger: The Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott. Fowler is a Turner Prize-shortlisted artist and this, an hour-long film, mixes archive footage with newly-shot material to create an evocative video essay about E.P. Thompson.  It captures a moment of optimism, in which Thompson’s ideas for progressive education came together with political resistance and activism. The film was originally commissioned by The Hepworth Wakefield, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Film and Video Umbrella. 7.30pm, Working Class Movement Library, free.

Saturday 18 May 2013

Protest Music Festival. Taking its inspiration from The Art of Protest exhibition, the People’s History Museum stages a protest music session. Kicking things off is singer-songwriter Quiet Loner, whose performance includes songs from his album, Greedy Magicians, along with performances from acclaimed poet Longfella. Later, NOISE introduces NOISEstock, an interactive “sit-in” within the exhibition itself, complete with many musical acts. 3pm-5pm (Quiet Loner/Longfella); 5pm-8pm (NOISE stock), People’s History Museum, free. Tweet your contributions using #ProtestFest

Anguish & Enthusiasm Film Forum at Cornerhouse. As usual, the Cornerhouse galleries are open until 8pm, giving you a chance to see its current exhibition – plus, on Saturday 18 May, it hosts an Artists’ Film Forum. Watch three films, including John Lalor’s Incident Urbain (2012). In it, two men stroll around the French National Library, engaged in an increasingly intense conversation about the environment around them – a conversation that builds to a dramatic end. The artist and filmmaker John Lalor takes part in a post-screening Q&A. 6pm (Artists’ Film Forum, plus galleries open until 8pm), Cornerhouse, £1.50/£3 for the forum, galleries free.

Some things are kept hidden away. Kept behind closed doors, marooned on dusty shelves, “archived” for so long that no one remembers they exist. You could blame private collectors. You could blame government cuts and the slow closing of Britain’s library doors. Or you could quit moaning and discover some of the lesser-known museums and archives, places that contain objects and artefacts that are not only incredible for the fact that they exist at all, but for the fact that you can go in and have a look pretty much whenever you like.

One such place (we hesitate to use the hackneyed phrase “hidden treasure” – oh, OK: hidden treasure) is Manchester Metropolitan University’s Special Collections archive. To our deep and possibly permanent shame, we didn’t know anything about it until a friend took us to one side not long ago and whispered its existence into our ear. Tucked inside a fairly nondescript university library off Grosvenor Square, this tiny museum has its origins in the Manchester School of Design (the precursor to Manchester School of Art); today’s archive includes books, prints, objects and ephemera that have been collected over the course of 175 years.

It is a million miles from the roaring traffic of the Oxford Road visible from its windows

Everything contained within relates in some way to the students and academics who have called the various incarnations of MMU their scholarly home. Its glorious Children’s Book Collection, which spans 10,000 books and two centuries, was originally amassed as a resource for trainee teachers. Now, the heavily embossed and illustrated tomes are used by social historians interested in how attitudes to children have changed over the years, as well as by art and design students. Close by are some 2,500 artists’ books (the largest publicly accessible such collection outside London, fact fans), around 1,300 photographic negatives belonging to the former Cotton Board, Colour Design and Style Centre (a centre designed to raise the style bar within the post-war British textiles industry) and a wonderfully-titled collection of Victorian Ephemera.

This latter collection is a delight. It features 276 albums and “commonplace books” once owned by Victorian and Edwardian women and collected by former city councillor Sir Harry Page. He stumbled across them in the dusty corners of second hand bookshops, unloved by book dealers who in turn had only encountered them as part of job lots and house clearances – and thus saw little value in them. “They are scrapbooks containing watercolours, poetry, prose, pencil sketches, postcards and things cut out of newspapers,” says MMU Special Collection’s Louise Clennell. “We don’t know a great deal about them but they’re fascinating. They were sometimes made by one woman and other times a group of women, and passed from friend to friend. They were made to be seen but we’re not entirely sure what purpose they served.”

The books were perhaps part diary, part records of social aspiration (who hasn’t ripped things out of magazines that they liked the look of?), but Page’s collection has had an unusual legacy. “A woman called Laura Seddon went to a talk by Sir Harry about his collection and was so inspired that she decided to start her own,” says Clennell. “She went on to amass 32,000 Edwardian and Victorian greetings cards.” You can probably guess who now owns those cards, of which one in particular stands out: Britain’s first commercially-produced Christmas card. Which must have been some find.

There is much else in this museum and, with the university still actively collecting, the promise of more to come. But we like MMU’s Special Collections not only for its books and artworks. We like it because it is a quiet, scholarly sort of place. It is a million miles from the roaring traffic of the Oxford Road that’s visible from its windows. We like it because, for all its stillness, it is open to anyone with a passing interest. Sit inside and listen close. You’ll hear, along with the turning of pages, the murmur of history. Listen again and you’ll hear the thrum of new ideas a-whirring. This is one place where the doors have been left wide open.

At a time when many of us are forced to campaign against the closure of our local libraries, it’s refreshing to report better news from book loan land. And that news comes from two cities. Manchester’s Central Library re-opens next year after a huge revamp, while Liverpool’s version is about to do the same. The latter’s much-loved Central Library suffered the plight of many such historic venues: it gradually fell into disrepair, its leaking roof the most visible sign of widespread decay. But now, after more than two years of intensive restoration, its £50million facelift is about to be unveiled.

Located in Liverpool’s architecturally-stunning “cultural quarter” (its neighbours include St George’s Hall, the Walker Art Gallery and the World Museum), the library is the last of William Brown Street’s World Heritage Site venues to be revamped. Described by Mayor of Liverpool Joe Anderson as “one of the city’s jewels, and one of the most significant and prominent libraries in the country,” it is set to become a major tourist attraction, with one million visitors expected in the first year of its re-opening.

It’s a nod to Liverpool’s literary past & its status as one of the world’s great port cities

And why not? Sections of the building, such as the colonnaded façade and the Picton, Hornby and Oak reading rooms, are Grade II-listed. As part of the overhaul, they’ve been restored to their former glory, with contractors matching materials as close to the originals as possible. For the echoing Picton Reading Room, for example, that has meant a meticulous restoration of the 30 metre-high polished wood bookcases that line its circular walls. Other parts of the library have been swept away, notably the 1950s and 1970s extensions thrown up following WW2 bomb damage, and replaced with open and inviting spaces, while the library has been brought up to date via state of the art IT facilities, full WiFi, climate-controlled storage and a games and music area called Imagine. There’s a new children’s library, too, a café that opens onto William Brown Street and – best of all – a rooftop terrace that overlooks the statue and rose-filled ornamental St. John’s Gardens below. There’s even a room dedicated to John James Audubon’s Birds of America, an amazing tome owned by the library that features now-extinct birds such as the Carolina Parakeet and Pinnated Grouse. Audubon, an American ornithologist, sailed from New Orleans in 1826, landing in Liverpool with a portfolio of some 300 illustrations under his arm – his British fans came to include King George IV and Charles Darwin. This particular room, then, is a nod to both Liverpool’s literary heritage and its historic status as one of the world’s great port cities.

“The historic parts of the building are magnificent, and this much-needed scheme gives us a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to transform the building into one of the best libraries in the country,” says Joyce Little, Head of Liverpool’s Libraries and Information Service. Visitors now enter via a “Literary Pavement” covered in book titles, while other bibliographical features include a four-storey wall of inspirational quotations. The library has been in safe hands during the rebuild: it was handled by architects Austin-Smith:Lord, whose cultural track record in Liverpool alone includes Tate Liverpool (its top floor restoration in 1998), FACT and the Bluecoat.

As you might expect, the library’s re-opening will get its fair share of celebration, including In Other Words, a one-off literary festival curated by Culture Liverpool and Writing on the Wall. And aptly, given that the Picton Reading Room was the first electrically lit library in the UK, the re-opening has also been timed to coincide with this year’s Light Night, a nocturnal celebration of culture in Liverpool. From dusk until late on 16 and 17 May, the library’s bookshelves will be brought to life via an interactive light and sound projection onto the exterior of the building. Books have never been so cool.