The Portico Christmas Feast returns!
Join us for our ever-popular yearly shindig of eating, entertainment, and merrymaking.
Explore rare nineteenth-century books and illustrations on Chinese culture from the Portico Library’s extraordinary historic collection plus 200-year-old maps of Chinatown and free creative activities with the Library’s friendly staff and volunteers on Saturday 5th Feb and during a one-off Sunday opening on 6th Feb specially for Chinese New Year. While you’re here, enjoy tea, coffee and homemade cakes in the cafe; browse the reproduction prints and gifts in the Library’s shop; and learn about the history of this little corner of Chinatown. Free entry.
Get your Christmas shopping done, stock up your bookshelves, and gather your reading materials for the holidays and the new year, all while supporting a good cause and saving yourself £££s!
The Great Big Portico Book Sale is your chance to browse through hundreds of beautiful books, from second-hand bargains and rare collectibles to discounted new items selected by our staff and volunteers, plus special offers on our new Portico Library greetings cards and gift wraps. Bring your bags, baskets and forklift trucks, and if you need any extra help getting your finds home, we'll be happy to arrange delivery with you.
All proceeds go towards the Portico Library's charitable public activities and conservation. If you'd like to donate any books ahead of our sale, please drop us a line on 0161 236 6785 or at librarian@theportico.org.uk. All contributions welcome!
The Great Big Portico Book Sale will take place from 10am to 4pm on Saturday 13th November 2021 in the Portico Library. There is no need to book.
Join British Sign Language guide Jennifer Little for a free tour of Maria Nepomuceno’s stunning exhibition, Refloresta! Saturday 31st July, 11:30am-1pm.
Join award-winning guide Anne Hornsby from Mind’s Eye Description for a free audio-described tour of Maria Nepomuceno’s stunning exhibition, Refloresta! Monday 19th July from 5.30pm pm to 7pm.
Due to ongoing Covid-19 disruption, this event has been postponed. Please check this page for details of its new date coming soon. If you have already booked and would like a refund, please call the Library on 0161 236 6785. We are sorry for the inconvenience and hope to see you at the rescheduled event later in the year.
£5
Jamie Allan presents a unique programme of films exploring evolutionary hierarchies and sexual politics.
The Portico Library's inaugural wedding open day!
The Portico Library will be hosting it's first ever wedding open day on Saturday 19 June 2021. Come and see the various different wedding set-ups on offer at the Portico from intimate ceremonies in our historic Reading Room to drinks receptions and cake cutting ceremonies under our beautiful dome. Come and meet some of the florists and other local traders that help make Portico weddings such truly special occasions.
This weekend of free online events is aimed at young people aged fourteen and above. At the Portico we are passionate about literature, sharing ideas and growing a love of reading, and writing from a young age. We are excited to be hosting 17 free online events for young people to showcase the pathways into publishing to get you excited about a potential career in publishing, writing, and illustration.
Join former librarians now spoken word artists Shirley May and Mike Garry as they share with us how libraries are a cornerstone for fostering creativity across a whole range of communities, in Manchester and beyond.
In this exclusive event held for a small socially distanced audience in The Portico Library we will have conversations, laughs and performances from two of Manchester’s most inspirational poets.
Please note that this is an in person event.
Please join us by clicking on the link below shortly before 4pm today:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88070501040?pwd=MDBkV0RCL29lOWpReWtwejJ3WTJqQT09
Or use:
Meeting ID: 880 7050 1040
Passcode: 034481
#FestivalofLibraries
Alicia Sometimes is an Australian poet, writer and broadcaster. She has performed her spoken word and poetry at many festivals and events around the world. Her poetry collections include Soundtrack and Kissing the Curve, and her poems have been published in Best Australian Poems and Best Australian Science Writing. She is Director and Co-Writer of the art/science planetarium shows, Elemental and Particle/Wave. She is currently a Science Gallery Melbourne ‘Leonardo’ (creative advisor) and is a 2021 City of Melbourne Boyd Garnett recipient. Her Ted x UQ talk in 2019 was about the passion of combining art with science.
Meha Hindocha, a local artist, collaborated with a group of Portico Library users and members with Thai, Persian, Indian, Spanish, English, and Scottish heritage to create a series of collages in response to the library’s 450-year historic collection. These collages take visitors on a journey through the users’ personal memories, histories, and inspirations.
£5
Join Monique Roffey, Emma Liggins and Bidisha, three leading writers, journalists and broadcasters, to discuss the pleasures and pains of reading and rereading the nineteenth century woman.
£5
An illustrated lecture on Gustave Doré's influence on representations of Dante's Inferno. Click on this event for more information.
Pay-what-you-feel
The online premier of a Kiganda dance recording produced specially for the Portico, featuring a live introduction and discussion with Portico Library artist Birungi Kawooya and dance expert Aminah Namakula.
£5
Book online
An online lecture on the vivid history of 19th century book design. Click on this event for more information.
Pay what you can
An online talk about the extraordinary and elusive origins of chess. Click on this event for more information.
Kym Deyn leads two online workshops for The Portico using a selection of tarot decks as tools for storytelling. This one focuses on the Minor Arcana. Please click on this event for more information.
Kym Deyn leads two online workshops for The Portico using a selection of tarot decks as tools for storytelling. This one focuses on the Major Arcana. Please click on this event for more information.
Jessica Andrews discusses how identity & community influence a literary life, and the freedom she found in writing fiction.
Free online preview event: Thursday 19th November 2020, 7pm-8pm
What makes a game a game? Is it any activity with rules or contestants? Does it always include an element of fun, play, skill or luck?
After a year in which many have experienced the challenging effects of social isolation, The Portico Library invites the public to a restorative programme celebrating games and recreation through the ages. From Jane Austen’s depictions of the card-playing Georgian middle classes to Dickens’ festivals and dances, 19th-century literature describes the roles that pastimes play in our cultural lives, and the social, moral and intellectual aspects of game-playing. With Hope Strickland, Bob Bicknell-Knight, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Birungi Kawooya.
With her recent artwork Pulangkita pitjangu (When the blanket came), Rene Kulitja asks us to “think carefully” about the colonisation of her people, land and language.
10:00 GMT, 19:30 ACST
In this Saturday morning/evening online event, join Rene, live from Pitjantjatjara Country in Central Australia, and curator Helen Idle to discuss this invitation and their current exhibition at The Portico Library, What it is to be here: Colonisation and resistance.
Rene is a Director of Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women's Council and a traditional owner of Uluru-KataTjutu National Park.
This is a pay-what-you-can event. Please book online here.
An online workshop from Sophie Parkes and The Portico Library guiding you in how to write people and places for Historical Fiction.
An online talk by Jill Liddington whose research into the diaries of Anne Lister inspired the BBC1/HBO series Gentleman Jack.
Dr Amanda Claremont explores how colonial domestication of supposedly unsettled lands in Australia covered traces of existing cultures.
Italian circus strongman-turned-explorer Giovanni Batista Belzoni (1778-1823) made an indelible mark on Egyptian archaeology. Ever the showman, his finds – and their unique method of presentation to the public – created some of the mystique we now associate with ‘Ancient Egypt’. 200 years after the publication of his seminal book of his adventures, this lecture reflects on Belzoni’s methods, discoveries, and their reception in the Western World.
Single sheets have been bound together with adhesive since Victorian times through to the modern paperback . . . and they don’t have to fall apart! It’s even called ‘perfect binding’ in the trade. In this workshop, with local bookbinder Barry Clark, you will make a perfect bound book, with coloured end-papers, strengthened linen cloth covers, with a pocket inside the rear cover for tickets and ephemera, all held together with an elasticated closure. A great journal, home or away. All materials and tools will be provided. The fee includes the cost of materials, tea/coffee on arrival and a light lunch. This workshop is limited to 12 participants so early booking is advised.
These 2 hours sessions will uncover the famous and the lesser known stories behind Manchester's Radical history, exploring the lives of Friedrich Engels, Elizabeth Gaskell, Alan Turing, the Chartists and others. This series is designed and delivered by History Inc.
Led by Jennifer Little
Saturday, 6 June, 2020
11:30 AM - 1 PM
Free, drop in
April 2020 marks 250 years since Lieutenant James Cook arrived, uninvited, onto Gweagal shores at Kamay (Botany Bay) in what is now Australia. For the local Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders, this event changed everything. Dispossessing them of their homes, lands and governance for the benefit of the newcomers and those far away in Britain. What it is to be here: Colonisation and resistance considers how this process of colonisation and First Nations people’s resistance to it continue to this day.
Free public preview: Thurs 23 April, 6–8pm
Apr 24, 2020 – Jul 27, 2020
More information: https://www.theportico.org.uk/exhibitions/
Manchester residents comprised some of the first people to be sent as convicts to Australia in the 1700s. Find out if your family members were among them at this free public drop-in.
For this intimate event, The Chanteuse (Lucy Hope) performs a repertoire of songs with lyrics by authors including Kasuo Ishiguro, Arthur Rimbaud and Leonard Cohen. A buffet of selected French cheeses and wines is included.
