Blog archives for June, 2009

Manchester is renowned as a centre of sporting excellence. Whether it’s football, swimming, cycling or squash, the city has hosted or given rise to countless sporting success stories.

The town is home to many sporting landmarks and famous venues. Indeed, the City Of Manchester Stadium was built especially to host one of the pinnacles of sporting achievement, the Commonwealth Games. Since then, the stadium has become home to Manchester City football club, who moved there from their Maine Road base after the games.

Over on the other side of Manchester resides one of the world’s most famous sporting venues, Old Trafford, home to Manchester United, and scene of much sporting history made not just in football but also rugby league, which is regularly hosted there.

Nowhere is the relationship between Manchester and sport more evident than at the aptly named Sportcity, the sprawling development that lies to the east of town. The area was built around the world famous Manchester Velodrome and the City Of Manchester Stadium in order to provide the city, and indeed the north west of England, with a hub of sporting excellence.

At Sportcity you will find the English Institute of Sport, which provides training facilities for world class athletes and potential future stars. Nearby is the National Squash Centre and the Regional Tennis Centre, both of which are famed for their outstanding racquet sport facilities.

Finally on the roll call of sports venues is the Manchester Aquatics Centre, which was built at a cost of £32million and today provides athletes and the public with world class swimming facilities.

Nestled at the heart of Manchester’s ‘Educational Quarter’ – a mass of university buildings, colleges and offices which starts at Piccadilly and sprawls across Oxford Road towards Hulme and Moss Side – is the Manchester Aquatics Centre.

Like many of the city’s finest sporting venues (including the City Of Manchester Stadium), the Aquatics Centre was built especially for the 2002 Commonwealth Games, which saw more than 3,800 athletes from 72 nations converge on Manchester for 10 days of world class sport.

Manchester Aquatics Centre was constructed on waste ground that lay empty as a result of old terrace houses being demolished to make way for the relentless spread of business and education in the city, making it an emblem not only of sporting excellence but also urban regeneration.

Inside the centre are two 50-metre pools, both of which can be altered to varying depths and lengths with the use of moveable floors and partitions. The ‘main’ pool is the most impressive, capable of being configured in a vast number of ways to allow for training sessions or top level sporting events. Overlooking both swimming pools is a bank of 1000 spectator seats.

Downstairs in the basement is a dedicated 16 x 50 metre training pool, which lies beneath a curved ceiling designed to convey the effect of waves on water. The Aquatics Centre’s impressive facilities are completed by a dive pool, leisure pool and a health suite (including sauna, fitness centre and sunbeds), all of which make the centre a focal point of local pride.