Visiting Helios at Victoria Baths: light, shadows & memories

We visited something called the Helios exhibition at the old Victoria Baths in Manchester on Monday evening. Our visit there was the day after the excitement and the noise of the cup final at Wembley.

The peace and quiet in the old swimming baths was a total contrast. If you missed the cup final post you can see it at this link.

Wembley was noisy, colourful and crowded and about 210 miles south of where we live. The Helios exhibition was quiet, peaceful and unusual and just about six miles from home.

What is Helios?

Helios is described as a seven meter illuminated sun sculpture by the artist Luke Jerram.

The sculpture is made up of finely detailed NASA imagery – 400,000 of the sun’s surface.

There is also a sound composition that accompanies the exhibition . To be honest I didn’t find that particularly noticeable and personally thought it might have been better played at a slightly increased volume.

The exhibition is already well travelled and has been in a number of UK venues during 2025/26 as well as travelling internationally.

More than Helios

It was certainly worth the effort of going to this exhibition – partly because of it’s unusual nature but also because of the venue.

Victoria Baths is a stunning building that was opened in 1906 and was described as ‘the most splendid municipal bathing institution in the country’ and ‘a water palace of which every citizen of Manchester can be proud.’

By any measure the building is magnificent – built of high quality materials, with fine decorative features that include lots of stained glass, beautiful tiles, and intricate mosaic floors. It was worth going just to wander around the building.

There was an added attraction to the visit – I swam there in the 1960s!

It also brought back many memories for me of a similar public baths (Gorton) where I swam during my school days and also for my wife who was familiar with the public baths at Barmouth Street (more properly known as Bradford Baths). Sadly the baths at Gorton despite being a Grade II listed building were allowed to fall into disrepair and the site has since been built on.

The Victoria Baths ‘timeline’ makes for a fascinating read – you can see it at this link