Angel Meadow

Submitted by Alan Marsden on Mon, 22/07/2024 - 00:00

Angel Meadow: is it possible to conjure a more delightful name?

Manchester’s Angel Meadow, however, was anything but. Along with St Michael’s Flags, which covered the ‘meadow’s’ gigantic graveyard (in receipt over 40,000 bodies), it was a place of Victorian gang crime, appalling poverty, cock fighting, the selling of stolen goods and the distribution of unlicensed liquor. A parish church was consecrated there in 1789, which a newspaper correspondent described in 1808 "the ugliest in Manchester”. The twenty-first century Angel Meadow is probably as peaceful and pleasant as it has been since the seventeenth-century.

Meadows are not always idyllic and charming; soon the mowers come and make bald the grasses. Angels are not all sweet and beautiful; many rebelled against God, creating an unsurpassed ugliness and horror in God’s good creation. More beautiful than angels and meadows was Christ’s garden at Gethsemane, wherein He laid down His life for the world ahead of the rough wooden cross.

The Lord knows the days of the upright,
And their inheritance shall be forever.
They shall not be ashamed in the evil time,
And in the days of famine they shall be satisfied.
But the wicked shall perish;
And the enemies of the Lord,
Like the splendor of the meadows, shall vanish.
Into smoke they shall vanish away.