Today is 'Heritage Sunday' - the one day of the year when loads of buildings across the country that you don't normally get to see open their doors to the general public. When I mentioned to Chris (one of my closest friends from university) that I was thinking about popping down to Manchester to do some shopping he suggest I join him and Audrey on a tour of the clock tower at Manchester's Town Hall.

Now, I don't really have a head for heights - so a tour of a clock tower might not have been the best way to spend a Sunday morning, but it was absolutely fantastic.

Manchester is a really great city - and to see it from so far up from an angle the general public don't get to see that often was something else. The weather helped - you could see the entire city right up to Heaton Park and down way past the university. There's been lots of new building in the city centre since I left in 1999 too, and we got to see buildings which don't look as good from ground level.

The building itself is fantastic. Manchester's Town Hall is defintely in the gothic tradition, and the clock tower follows the rest of the building in this respect. The staircase up is a very tight spiral one, but closed in enough not to cause me problems with the height. The bells are massive, and make a fair bit of noise (they were a set of bell-ringers in the tower while we were there). The scary bit though was being right at the top as the bells were being rung - the movement of the bells causes the tower to sway just a little, but it's very off-putting when it's such a long way down!