Manchester library gets £6 million boost

Manchester University was celebrating a windfall yesterday as its John Rylands Library received a grant of £6 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The Victorian neo-Gothic library and its collections - which include more than a million books, the papers of John and Charles Wesley and manuscripts from the third millennium BC - are to be restored in a bid to appeal to a wider audience.

The university said it would focus on generating matching funding from local, national and European sources.