Staying powerStay

Does it always rain in Manchester? As a journalist, I’m obviously not in the business of glib generalisations, but I reckon the answer is: usually. I’m not alone. “Manchester weather is a popular joke,” wrote JB Priestley in his English Journey back in the early Thirties. “And I do not care what the local meteorological statistics are, that joke has a solid basis... The city always looks as if it has been built to withstand foul weather.”

Priestley was staying, as he usually did, at the city’s Midland Hotel, a glorious survivor of the days when top hotels were as big as warehouses and as plush as mansions. Round at the back, however, away from the front-of-house splendour, is a curious corridor that seems to justify Priestley’s sniping.

Opened in 1903, the Midland was originally a railway hotel, serving the Central station. To protect guests from the insistent rain, the architects created a corridor (or tunnel as it was aptly called) to a covered walkway into the station, which became the G-Mex centre and is now the Manchester Central convention centre. Very civilised – and very dry.

Paul Bayliss, the hotel’s affable resident manager, has another theory about the tunnel. He reckons it was to minimise guests’ exposure to Manchester’s polluted air in its industrial heyday.

Before I head out into the rest of Manchester, he’s giving me a whistle-stop tour of the hotel, a convivial place with comfortable, unfussy rooms and friendly staff. It’s a world of its own, buzzing as the best big hotels do.

As we leave the tunnel, Bayliss points out that Manchester Central regularly hosts political party conferences, so the Midland is a natural place for delegates to stay and to drink. “Conservatives are more likely to drink real ale,” he says, perhaps surprisingly. “Labour tend to go for lager and bitter.”

Manchester waits patiently for me outside, but first we take in the Moorish Octagon lounge – “where we serve afternoon teas, 12,000 of them a year; you get families coming in for generations” – and The French, the Midland’s opulently gilded fine dining restaurant, full of turn-of-the-century atmosphere.

“That table is where Mike Tyson sang Happy Birthday to a 95-year-old lady,” says Bayliss. “And over there is the table where Posh and Becks had their first date. If you’re here long enough, you’ll see someone famous. You’d have seen Chris Eubank this morning.”

Out in Reception, Kevin Scanlon, one of the Midland’s trio of veteran concierges – all in their 70s – remembers Tony Bennett giving an unscheduled performance. “One night after a concert, he noticed there was a wedding reception going on in the hotel. He poked his head round the door and said: ‘I can give you a few songs if you want.’ And he did.”

Some staff have family connections with the hotel going back to its opening. Others have worked here for 40 or 50 years and remember Liberace. He booked an extra room for his many suitcases of clothes and threw flowers to fans from his balcony. Another pianist, the eccentric Vladimir de Pachmann, went down on hands and knees to sniff out potential poison as soon as he unlocked his bedroom, and would eat only hard boiled eggs. Unlike Sir Winston Churchill, who ordered 18 oysters and a bottle of champagne before giving an evening speech at the Free Trade Hall. Afterwards he sat down to a five-course dinner that lasted until 3am, closely followed by a breakfast including grilled chops and kidneys. And the Sultan of Zanzibar brought an entourage of 60 staff, including bodyguards to sleep outside his bedroom door.

All this is lovingly chronicled by hotel historian Barbara Frost in her Memories of the Midland, an evocative portrait full of well-researched detail. How else would I know that the terracotta bas reliefs were created by Mr Spruce from Knutsford? Look, I really must get out into Manchester. But I’m distracted by the amazing displays along the corridors. The Midland makes a lot of its history – a pity more hotels don’t – and the loyalty it has inspired in generations of guests. There are framed postcards to staff; Christmas cards from the 1940s, found at the back of a wardrobe 20 years later; banknotes from Nicaragua, Borneo and Cambodia given as tips; drawings by the Bell Boys’ Sketch Club and a selection of “lost items”, which have included stuffed animals, false legs, a weighing machine and cases of wine. In pride of place is a pair of silk stockings reputedly left behind by a judge. Ladies’ silk stockings, m’lud. And there’s a Brief Encounterish letter to “Gordon” from “Mabel”: “We missed our moment, I know. A little hesitation and it passed us by. Our lives now run separate courses... but whatever happens, wherever we are, it will always be the 14th February at the Midland!”

And now it’s too late to go out, because it’s time for dinner at The French. All is refinement and courtesy, with bustling waiters of great character (“Thank you; thank you very much; thank you very much indeed”) and Anibal Cabral, the charming Portuguese manager, performing his party piece, flambéing Chateaubriand, at the next table. Time for bed. But there’s still bustle. Guests are coming in from the theatre. And theatre is what grand hotels are all about. And it hasn’t rained all day.

Midland Hotel, 0161 236 3333, www.qhotels.co.uk, has doubles from £119 a night, including breakfast.