The Glass Wedge
The Urbis building sits in Cathedral Gardens, a six-storey glass-and-steel wedge designed by Ian Simpson of SimpsonHaugh and Partners. Its facades are made up of approximately 2,200 glass panes arranged in horizontal strips, and from certain angles it looks like a ship's prow cutting through the medieval quarter towards the cathedral. It opened on 27 June 2002 as part of the regeneration of Exchange Square following the 1996 IRA bomb, which devastated this part of the city centre. The bomb wrecked the Arndale, blew out the windows of the cathedral, and forced the dismantling and relocation of the Old Wellington and Sinclair's Oyster Bar, which were moved 300 metres to their current spot by the cathedral in 1999. What grew back in their wake was new public space: Exchange Square, Cathedral Gardens, and this building.
The original concept was a Museum of the City, an exhibition about urban life. It cost £30 million, paid for by the Millennium Commission, and it opened with ambition. Its first-year target was 200,000 visitors. It missed by 58,000. By late 2003, it was attracting fewer than 200 people a day. In 2004 it was rebranded as an exhibition centre for popular culture, and admission charges were scrapped. Visitor numbers trebled. But the content never found an audience large enough to sustain it, and that version closed in February 2010. The building sat empty. Two incarnations, two failures. Manchester had built a striking piece of architecture and then spent eight years trying to work out what to do with it.
From Preston
The National Football Museum did not start in Manchester. It started in Preston, at Deepdale, the home of Preston North End, the club that won the first ever Football League title and the FA Cup in 1888-89 without losing a single match. The museum opened there in 2001, built around a collection that had taken decades to assemble.
At the heart of it was the Harry Langton Collection. Langton was a sports journalist who spent over 30 years gathering football memorabilia: programmes, boots, shirts, trophies, artwork, toys, games, equipment. FIFA recognised the importance of what he had built and acquired the collection, looking for a permanent home for it. Deepdale was that home for nine years, but the museum needed more visitors than Preston could provide. When the Urbis building became available, the answer was obvious. The museum moved to Manchester and reopened on 6 July 2012. The building that had failed as a museum of cities and failed as an exhibition space finally found its purpose as the home of the national game.
The 1966 Ball
The collection holds over 140,000 objects and archive items, making it the largest football collection in the world. About 2,500 are on display at any given time. The rest sit in storage, rotated in and out as exhibitions change.
The headline exhibit is the ball from the 1966 World Cup final. The ball that Geoff Hurst struck three times into the West German net on 30 July 1966 at Wembley, when England won their first and only World Cup. The reason it is in Manchester at all is a story in itself. After the final whistle, Helmut Haller, who scored West Germany's opening goal, picked up the ball and took it home to Germany. It stayed there for 30 years. A Daily Mirror campaign brought it home in 1996, and it ended up here. It sits on permanent display alongside Hurst's hat-trick shirt.
From old Wembley, the museum holds original wooden seats and a turnstile from the stadium that hosted the 1923 Cup final, the White Horse Final, through to its closure in 2000. The stadium is gone. These pieces are what remain.
The collection runs far deeper than 1966. There are match programmes dating back to the Victorian era, early rule books from the codification of the game, shirts worn by players from every era, and the kind of ephemera that only a journalist with 30 years of obsessive collecting could assemble. Langton's instinct to save everything turned out to be the right one. The things nobody thought worth keeping became the things a national museum was built around.
"The ball that won England the World Cup sits in a glass case in a building that was supposed to be about something else entirely. Football has a habit of taking over."
The Hall of Fame
The English Football Hall of Fame is housed here, recognising the players and managers who have shaped the game. It is not a popularity contest. The criteria are about sustained contribution to the game at the highest level, and the names on the walls are the ones that belong there.
The museum has also been ahead of the curve on the women's game. In 2005, timed to coincide with the UEFA Women's Euro championship hosted in the north west of England, it worked with UEFA to create the world's first exhibition dedicated entirely to women's football. Objects donated by fans rather than institutions sit alongside the professional memorabilia. A shirt worn in a park. A programme from a non-league game. A scarf that went to every away match for 20 years. These are not museum-grade objects by any traditional measure, but they are the reason football is the game it is. The National Football Museum understands that the story of football is not just told from the directors' box.
Free
The museum was free to everyone when it opened in 2012. In January 2019, it introduced admission charges for visitors from outside the city of Manchester, keeping it free for Manchester residents with proof of address. There is an irony there. Urbis charged from the start and failed. It went free in 2004 and visitor numbers trebled. The football museum went the other way. The building that nobody wanted turned out to be exactly the right building, in exactly the right city, for exactly the right subject.
Manchester is a football city. It has two of the biggest clubs in the world within four miles of each other. It has a club built by fans who walked away from the biggest of them. It has grounds in every borough, Sunday leagues in every park, and arguments about football in every pub. Putting the national football museum here was not a compromise because Preston was too small. It was an acknowledgement that there is no city in England where football matters more.
A six-storey glass wedge in Cathedral Gardens, born from the rubble of an IRA bomb, built as a museum of cities, reborn as a museum of football. The 1966 World Cup ball is here. So is a scarf someone's grandad took to every match for 20 years. Both belong. That's Hidden Manchester.