Don't miss a thing by getting the day's biggest stories sent direct to your inbox If North Manchester General Hospital’s walls could talk, they would tell quite some tale.
Since the height of the Industrial Revolution, the infirmary’s red-brick workhouse buildings have witnessed the births, deaths, hope and loss that frame real life in this part of the city, as the world radically transformed around them.
But it would be just as these walls neared the end of their own lives, with a 21st Century rebuild finally in sight, that a devastating new chapter would start to unfold within them.
The hospital’s current generation of doctors had seen it coming. In January last year, its most senior medics sat down with public health officials at the