I like the Place Hotel. Formerly an enormous warehouse next to Piccadilly Station it took many months to dry out before the developer could begin converting it into an apartment hotel. The hotel front is on Ducie Street and now includes a restaurant.

Piccadilly Station’s covered platforms can be seen from the top of The Place hotel where there are some rather delightful penthouses.

In its earlier days I went along to a Simply Networking session (business networking meetings run by Mark Greenwood) which was at The Place hotel.

The then marketing manager, Clare Johnson, did a presentation on the hotel and gave out some nice little cameras that we all started to flash around. I used mine to take some photographs of the hotel and of some of the people at Simply Networking.

In fact all the photos on this post were taken courtesy of The Place’s own camera. The picture to the right shows another view from the penthouses at The Place. It’s towards East Manchester and in the distance you can see The City of Manchester Stadium - home to Manchester City. Speaking of which,  good luck Sven, and also to new incumbent Mark Hughes!

And of course photographs during a networking meeting wouldn’t be complete without a photo of the organiser, Mark Greenwood.

So the final photograph shows a group of Simpler Networkers with Mark grinning away on the right of the photo.

Just to explain a little further about The Place hotel. It seems as though it was originally developed as apartments that people could buy, because it was so close to the city centre.

And renting the apartments out was meant to be a short-term measure until they were all sold.

In the end though The Place is in the right place for a lot of business and professional people (close to the communications network and Manchester’s city centre). So it is doing well as a hotel.

And to round it off there’s a nice roomy underground car park!