00:00 A popular Manchester Leisure Centre has been officially reopened with a ribbon-cutting
00:04 ceremony this morning on the 13th of September. Abraham Moss Library and Leisure Centre reopened
00:11 to the public this summer following a multi-million pound investment from Manchester City Council
00:16 and Council members gathered today to celebrate the renovated facility.
00:20 The work is part of the Council's long-term transformational strategy to renew and modernise
00:25 leisure facilities in Manchester. This follows the multi-million pound refurbishments and
00:30 reopenings of the Manchester Aquatic Centre and the National Cycling Centre this year.
00:35 The Abraham Moss renovation has significantly transformed the campus by introducing a new
00:40 modern library and leisure facilities. Facilities include a six-lane swimming pool, a learner pool,
00:46 a steam room and sauna, two squash courts, health and fitness suites including gyms and studios,
00:53 a sports hall, changing facilities and the North's very first urban cricket centre following
00:59 investment from the England and Wales Cricket Board. We went down to witness the ribbon-cutting
01:04 ceremony and take a tour of the new facilities. "Well it's definitely very exciting and there's
01:08 a lot of people here as you can tell and they're all excited including a group of local school
01:13 children who've been telling me they've already been using the facility because we publicly
01:16 opened it a couple of months ago. It's a project that we started in 2021, it's had a lot of
01:22 bumps in the road along the way with a pandemic and all the rest of it but here we are today.
01:26 The important thing about this is it's a co-located facility, it's a library and a
01:31 leisure centre. This is the fourth of such facilities that we operate in the city and
01:36 we want to bring more of those facilities so that our residents can get their mind and their body
01:42 made more active in the same place in the same facility and so that's why we've done it in the
01:47 way we are. It's a 24 million pound investment in this local community but it's also a city-wide
01:53 facility. I mean it's a good thing in itself to be physically fit and active because you can get
01:57 more out of life, you can enjoy life, you can spend more time with your kids and your family
02:00 and out and about in our fantastic city using our fantastic parks and public spaces. A more serious
02:06 point is that Manchester is a very unequal city in terms of health. The health outcomes for many
02:12 of our residents are very poor in comparison to other parts. So some parts of the city,
02:17 life expectancy, chronic illnesses are worse than they are in other parts of the city,
02:21 other age groups, demographics. So we want to tackle the inequalities in Manchester and this
02:27 is very much a strategic part of that programme about making people more active, fitter, more
02:32 able to enjoy life by being able to get out and about and use these facilities and so it's not
02:39 just about elite sport. We're very keen on elite sport. Mancunians love sport. We want people to
02:44 enjoy the facilities. In the last two months or so we've opened the Manchester Aquatics Centre,
02:49 we've opened the National Cycling Centre at the Velodrome, reopened after massive investments.
02:54 This is a serious strategy that we're embarked upon. We are serious about tackling health
02:59 inequalities in this city and this is the latest example of us doing that.
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