Manchester, Kennedy Street

 

Venice in the North

Drawn along Manchester’s Kennedy Street by the sight of an interesting looking pub, I followed my nose and ended up in front of one of the most surprising bits of 19th-century Venetian Gothic architecture I’d seen in a long while. The least Venetian part of the facade, the stone band about three-quarters of the way up, is the most informative. It bears the words ‘MANCHESTER LAW LIBRARY’, which are emblazoned across the building to tell us the place’s original purpose: it was, in fact, one of the first specialised law libraries outside London when it opened in 1885. It must have been a boon to local solicitors and barristers who needed to look up a bit of obscure law. It continued in its original use until relatively recently.

The architect was Manchester man Thomas Hartas, a young architect for whom this was his first major commission – and, alas, his last since he died in his early thirties, about a year after it was built. The front is virtually completely covered in Gothic tracery – a mixture of tall, cusped windows and roundels expressed as quatrefoils or divided up into a number of flower-like tracery patterns. At the centre is an oriel window, which lights the large first-floor space that made up the library’s reading room. 

The facade is divided vertically into three bays, each made up of trios of windows. These bays are separated by stone uprights that project towards the street, making them more substantial, as they must need to be to support this lace-like frontage and the floors behind. Within, there are no doubt various columns and load-bearing walls that hold the structure together, as well as helping to bear what would have been a considerable weight of shelved books.

As the light began to fail on the winter afternoon when I took my photograph, the interior lights shone out, revealing ceilings and supporting arches within. Back in the 1880s, the effect of the whole building lit up at night must have been striking: a beacon of law and of Venetian architecture, although no canal laps in front or behind and this mock-Venetian palace is book-ended by more conventional Victorian office buildings. A welcome sight, now and then.

Manchester, Cross Street

Steaks and ale

How good to find, in central Manchester’s Cross Street, a building that looks small but punches above its weight. It’s Mr Thomas’s Chop House, and Geoff Brandwood, in the excellent handbook Britain’s Best Real Heritage Pubs, describes it as ‘an exuberant example of fin de siècle architecture in an ornate Jacobean style’. The walls are a mix of buff terracotta and dark red brick, and the curving bow, the mullioned windows and the elaborate gable all speak of the Jacobean revival. The front of the structure was originally a shop and offices, with the chop house behind, but now the whole of the ground floor is made over to eating and drinking – and indeed must have been so for much of the building’s history, as the interior looks unified in its decoration, down to early features such as tiles.

Looking at the details more closely, a beguiling combination of Jacobean and Art Nouveau becomes apparent. The decoration above the corner entrance, for example, combines a coat of arms topped with a helmet as crest, with a lot of curlicues: so far, so traditional. The mythical birds on either side of the coat of arms could be heraldic but also fit nicely with the Art Nouveau style. So, above all, do the heart-shaped motifs higher up, with the curvaceous bands that enclose them, which curl this way and that in a style that was highly fashionable when this building was designed in 1901.

What a delicious entrance to a chop house. But what, exactly, was a chop house? The usually definition is a pub or restaurant where the main item on the menu was meat in the form of steaks or chops. Originally, there seems to have been a sense of something downmarket about such establishments. In his great 18th-century dictionary, Dr Johnson defined a chop house as ‘a mean house of entertainment, where provision ready dressed is sold’. But by the time Thomas Studd set up in business in the 1860s, things were different. Chop houses were where Manchester’s merchants and factory owners came to meet and discuss business over a nourishing meal. As a form of pub, they were very much male-only premises in the Victorian period.

By the time the current building was put up, Thomas had died but his wife Sarah carried on the business with great success. She also transformed it by admitting women – a revolutionary move which must have caused much discussion. Many women were no doubt grateful, and this has a special resonance in Manchester, home of the Pankhursts. I have read that on International Women’s Day in 2019, the building was renamed Sarah’s Chop House in honour of Sarah Studd, but when I visited last month, the original name had been reinstated. Steaks and ale, I’m pleased to say, are still on the menu.

Manchester, Oxford Road

 

People’s palace

Taking the bus from the centre of Manchester to the Whitworth Art Gallery to save time and avoid the rain, I saw this building out of the window…and of course had to walk back to take a closer look. Manchester is full of buildings clad in terracotta, but not so many in a tasteful combination of green and cream faience that catches the eye, is in theory at least easy to keep clean, and stands out from the crowd in a way that’s an effective bit of self-advertising. Perfect of course for a cinema, The Grosvenor Picture Palace no less, its Art Nouveauish lettering announcing that for a small fee, anyone can luxuriate in palatial surroundings while enjoying the latest in cinematic entertainment.

It’s an early cinema, designed in 1913 and opened in 1915,* when the 1000-seater claimed to be the largest outside London and offered, in addition to films, the opportunity to play snooker or billiards in the basement.† The architect was a local man, Percy Hothersall, who designed several cinemas and on this occasion worked with the Middleton Fireclay Works of Leeds to produce the ceramic cladding for the building. Pilasters, swags, roundels, circular oeil de boeuf windows, and a shallow dome on the corner produce an effect of decorative classicism. It’s fairly formulaic stuff that would have been bread and butter to both the architect and the ceramics company, but it must have looked sophisticated to most of the cinema’s first customers.

Cinemas like the Grosvenor were part of a swelling tide of picture houses, which became more and more popular as the film industry got going. Architect Percy Hothersall was drawn into this trend, not only designing cinemas, but sometimes taking his fee in shares in cinema companies. He seems to have made a lot of money out of this, but apparently invested his profits unwisely, and was declared bankrupt in 1926. It’s a sad story, all the more so because the popularity of cinema-going lasted until well after World War II and a wiser investor could have continued to make profits. The Grosvenor showed movies until 1968, after which, like so many cinemas, it was used as a bingo hall before it became a pub. The eye-catching exterior is no doubt just as effective an advertisement as it originally was.

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* Cinema was barely 20 years old at this point. The Lumière brothers first demonstrated their Cinematographe in December 1895. The first decade of the 20th century saw the rapid growth of film industries in many countries.

† I’m indebted to the Architects of Greater Manchester website for information about this building and its architect.