The Manchester Weekender events at The Manchester Museum
10 Oct 2012
A city’s worth of art and culture in one weekend.
Big Saturday: Dogs on Show
Saturday 13 October (11am-4pm)
Drop-in (except walking tour), free (except walking tour), all ages
With live dogs in our courtyard and activities for all the family. You can meet a bloodhound, bulldog, borzoi, collie, Pekinese and Irish wolfhound and their breeders. There’s Barking Dogs Bark and Read - where children can read to dogs, Dog Detective workshops (11.30am & 2.30pm) that explore the science of smell and crime investigation and a Dog Talk on Manchester Dogs (1.30pm - see below).
To top it all off, departing from the Whitworth Art Gallery is Walkies (1-4pm), a walking tour for dogs and their owners that sniffs around the buildings, parks and stories of this part of town.
£5 - book online at:
Part of our Breed: the British & their Dogs exhibition and The Manchester Weekender.
Manchester Weekender: Speed Chess
Saturday 13 October (12-2pm)
Book on 0161 275 2648, free, teenagers & adults
Alan Turing is known to many as a celebrated Manchester genius – you may know him better for building the world’s first programmable computer, code breaking at Bletchley or even his work on the fibbonnacci sequence using sunflowers.... but did you know he was also an Olympian – a runner – and a chess player. For ‘fun’ he married these two interests in a game he called Speed Chess which we will attempt to recreate en-masse. So come along for a game of chess at 12noon with your running shoes and let’s see what happens.
Manchester Weekender: Manchester Dogs
Saturday 13 October (1.30-2.30pm)
Free, adults
The story of three types of canine associated with Manchester and its region: street dogs, Manchester terriers and the Lyme Hall mastiffs.
In the nineteenth century the city was the rabies capital of the country because of the sheer number and condition of the curs that roamed the streets. Drastic measures were enacted to control the menace and those bitten turned to local herbalists rather than the medical profession who regarded the human form of the disease – hydrophobia – as untreatable.
The Manchester terrier was, allegedly, the creation of John Hulme, bringing together the ratting skills of the terrier and the speed of the whippet, though the dog was first known as ‘the Black and Tan’. The breed was famous for providing Queen Victoria’s Royal ratter – Jack Black, but also infamous because of the many disputes within the dog fancy over its form.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the Lyme Hall mastiff was one of the largest breeds in the country and its history could traced to fifteenth century. Some mastiff fanciers regarded it as having ‘the purest and most valuable strain of mastiff blood in the kingdom’, though others said it had become degenerate due to inbreeding. We will never know who was right, as in 1914 the dogs remaining at Lyme Park were all destroyed as being too expensive to keep when the country was at war. The talk is given by Professor Michael Worboys from The University of Manchester.
Manchester Weekender: Bunford & Kashiwagi ... in the mix
Saturday 13 October, 2-3pm
Drop-in, free, adults
Huw Bunford (Super Furry Animals) and artist, Naomi Kashiwagi perform new soundscapes that tune into and crank up the volume of found sounds in the Museum. The performance will also involve reappropriated records, some tape and the collections themselves – all under the watchful eye of Stan the T.rex.
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