Manchester, Portland Street

One for Cottonpolis

Some of Manchester’s commercial buildings are so vast that they defeat the photographic efforts of a mere amateur with an iPhone. You really need skill and a camera with a good wide-angle lens to do justice to the 1850s monster on Portland Street that is now the Britannia Hotel. The whole thing is around 300 ft in length and the seven storeys reach about 100 ft in height. A structure with clearly palatial aspirations, it began life as a warehouse for the textile merchants S & J Watts, Manchester’s biggest wholesale drapers. It was a home trade warehouse, in other words a place where British clothing and haberdashery retailers would come to inspect and order stock for their shops. Inside were grand showrooms, where customers could examine the goods, plus floors for storage and offices for the administrative staff.

Architectural historians such as Clare Hartwell* have detected a similarity in the overall shape of the building to the Fondacho dei Turchi in Venice. That’s true enough, but let no casual user of AI be foxed into thinking that this hulk of a structure is ‘in the Venetian style’.† Apart from anything else, something as weighty as this would surely sink into the lagoon. As for the stylistic treatment, Manchester architects Travis and Mangnall threw the kitchen sink at it. Each floor is treated differently, and there is a mixture of Italian and English Renaissance detail, plus the rather baroque heavily rusticated entrance floor, where the deeply cut masonry and big voussoirs of the arches are combined with more delicate carved detail, some of which is visible if you look closely.¶ At least the detail is all classical, one muses…until one looks up to the skyline, where the four towers have wheel windows that could have come from a Romanesque cathedral.

The differences between the treatment of the floors, together with the fact that there seems to be a lot of variation in ceiling height, give the warehouse a satisfying vertical rhythm, but the overall effect from street level is the simple one of overwhelming size. It’s an enormous lump, for sure, but one that reminds us of the chutzpah of the Manchester cotton traders, of the scale of their activities, and of Manchester’s justified pride in its status as Cottonopolis.

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* Clare Hartwell, Manchester (Pevsner City Guides), 2001

† An AI-generated description saw while looking up various accounts of the warehouse online: caveat googlor.

¶ It’s worth clicking on the images to enlarge them. 

Manchester, London Road

 

When size matters

I have marked my recent visit to Manchester with a series of posts on three of the city’s small architectural gems – a cinema, a chop house and a library – structures that many people might miss in a city full of buildings that are on such a large scale that they command the view. For my next couple of posts, then, I turn to some seriously big Mancunian buildings.

Hardly has the visitor emerged from Manchester Piccadilly station than the parade of architectural juggernauts begins. In London Road, straight opposite the railway hub, is this Edwardian baroque monster, which housed police, ambulance, and fire stations, together with a coroner’s court, for much of the 20th century. It’s an enormous structure, and the part visible in my first photograph is just one facade of a building with four unequal sides surrounding a large courtyard. In 1906, when it was completed, Manchester was a prosperous city that wanted to give the emergency services a home that was architecturally magnificent and the design, by Woodhouse, Willoughby and Langham,* fits the bill. There’s the full Edwardian panoply of towers, turrets, domes, classical columns and grand entrances, all in a combination of red brick and glazed terracotta. Rows of windows are testimony not only to the various offices occupied by the emergency services and the coroner’s staff, but also to the many apartments provided. Workers such as firemen, on call night and day, often lived on site, in this case in homes that were better than most of those in the surrounding, rather poor, area. Whatever one feels about the design as a whole, the architects made a noble effort to compose the diverse elements – the large entrance arch, the rows of windows, the recessed section with its pairs of columns, the various towers – to create a convincing composition.

The decorative details, for those with the time to give them the attention they deserve, are likewise impressive. Among the best are above the largest entrance on London Road. Above the great central arch are two groups of allegorical figures. On the left are three figures representing fire: they bear torches and thunderbolts, and their hair is aflame. Opposite are three water-carriers, who offer the solution: at their feet are fishes and foliage grows prolifically above their heads, representing the life that can thrive when the danger of fire has been averted. Figures with similar iconography are set above the central window and within the arch, near the ‘FIRE STATION’ plaque.

This extraordinary building served the emergency services through much of the 20th century, most of it closing when the fire-fighters moved out in 1986. With the closure of the coroner’s court in 1998, the place was finally empty. In spite of a plan to convert it to a hotel, it was left abandoned and deteriorating until recent years and now a new scheme is underway for a mixed-use conversion. I believe work on this is still ongoing.

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* A short-lived local partnership of three architects who practised with various partners and in different groupings. Manchester, a large and growing metropolis, was able to sustain numerous architects – most of the Manchester buildings that I’m posting were designed by firms based in the city.

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.

Manchester

Throwing the kitchen sink at it

A recurring theme in posts on this blog has been the way architects and builders deal with corners. Here’s one of the most striking corners I know, the turret or overgrown oriel that takes the eye around the junction of Chancery Lane and Brown Street in Manchester. The building was designed as the offices of a bank, and, from the rusticated ground floor to the rows of dormer windows in the roof and the iron crown that tops off the structure, it’s an eye-catcher in a city of rich showy 19th-century buildings.

The architect was George Truefitt, whose buildings included the unusual circular St George’s Tufnell Park Road in London, and other bold churches such as St Mary, Davyhulme, Manchester, which has an octagonal tower, and St John Bronley, which has a big apse and a number of quatrefoil-shaped windows. Whereas these churches are unambiguously Gothic, this Manchester office building of 1868 is in a style one can only call eclectic – a mixture of classical rustication, Gothic shafts, round-headed arches, iron balconies and stone parapets. Some of the carved stonework – repeated flowers and leaves, for example – looks forward to the terracotta details on many buildings of a couple of decades later. The finishing touch, that wrought-iron crown on top of the corner turret, is a charming one-off. This kind of blend of showiness and solidity, confidence and delicacy, is typical of the Victorians. It may not be ‘proper’, but one way to make a mark on the busy, architecturally eventful streets of Manchester is, in a popular phrase of today, to throw the kitchen sink at the building. I’m rather glad that Truefitt did so.

Radisson Edwardian Manchester Hotel, Manchester

MANCHESTER VIGNETTE (3)
Before I move on to something completely different, here's the third of my trio of Manchester vignettes. It's from the building that I still think of as the Free Trade Hall. The 1853 building where the Hallé Orchestra used to play is now the incongruously named Radisson Edwardian Manchester Hotel, but the air-conditioned rooms with their Scandinavian slate bathrooms do not concern us here. The Italianate palazzo-style exterior has, mercifully, been preserved – a memorial not only to Manchester’s role in the campaign to repeal the Corn Laws but also to the design flair of architect Edward Walters and the art of sculptor John Thomas. Foliage, lovingly undercut, is the keynote of many of Thomas’s carvings, and here the leaves surround a cartouche with a relief of a medieval market hall, with an upper room above an open arcaded ground floor and a cross beneath one of the arches. The image nicely suggests that, although Manchester’s wealth as a city was in the 19th century a relatively recent development, the local concern for equitable, honest trading goes back much further.

Palace Hotel, Manchester

MANCHESTER VIGNETTE (2)
This depiction of a building on a building is a far cry from my previous Manchester vignette. We’re now well and truly in the Victorian era with a combination of tough, very red bricks and dark red terracotta courtesy of the ubiquitous Doulton’s. So what’s the castle all about? Well, this building, now the Palace Hotel, was originally the offices of Refuge Assurance. It was designed by Alfred Waterhouse in the early 1890s, in the heyday of terracotta and brick (and indeed of Doulton’s). Waterhouse’s son, Paul, did the adjacent extension. You can’t get a much better symbol of safety and refuge than the double towers of a medieval castle gatehouse. So that’s what we have on this corner – the full castle Monty, with cross-shaped arrow slits, battlements, and overhanging gallery with holes (machicolations, in castle-parlance), to allow the imagined retainers to pour boiling oil on attackers below. One hopes the insurance business was rather more laid back, but we get the idea. High security, Victorian style.

City Art Gallery, Manchester

MANCHESTER VIGNETTE (1)
There’s so much for the buildings buff to enjoy in Manchester – the city's industrial and commercial history can be traced in its bricks and stones; great architectural statements like the famous Town Hall speak of justifiable civic pride; modern regeneration unravels here, there, and everywhere… But walking around Manchester I’ve also been struck by small things, like bits of decoration, that are easy to miss in the rush. Again, many of these are bits of Mancunian myth-making, like the industrious bees and images of cotton on the Town Hall that tell us what made the city rich. So I’ve picked a few different ones. And what better for the English Buildings blog than images of buildings?

This one is a panel from the City Art gallery. It’s one of a series of allegorical figures carved by John Hemming Junior to relieve the stone walls of this very serious Classical building designed by Barry and erected in the 1830s. Presumably this is Architecture, in front of a Greek temple, appropriately on this building in the Greek Revival style. A charming personification to adorn a temple of the arts.

Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

The enormous Edwardian Exchange in the centre of Manchester was a trading centre for the agents and salesman of thousands of Lancashire businesses, especially mill owners, cotton importers, and others involved in the textile business. When it was completed in 1921, the fourth building of its type on the site, the place buzzed with activity, but by the 1960s, a combination of industrial depression, mergers, and new means of communication meant that the trade there had declined. In 1968 the vast hall, with its three glass domes and massive neoclassical columns, had to close.

When the hall was put to use in 1973 as a temporary theatre, its success set people thinking. How could a permanent theatre be built to make best use of the cavernous space? The solution, designed by Levitt, Bernstein Associates, seemed to have been made for the phrase ‘the shock of the new’: a theatre pod with a visible framework of tubular steel. With the Apollo moon landings fresh in everyone’s memory, this building-within-a-building soon became nicknamed ‘the Lunar Module’. It wasn’t hard to see that something extraordinary had landed.

Inside the little theatre in the round, every audience member is close to the stage. It’s intimate theatre at its best. Outside, the alien structure is small enough not to overwhelm the hall of the Exchange. One can still appreciate the grand architecture – the columns with their gilded capitals, the brilliant glazed domes. When Manchester was bombed in 1996, the architects came back to do refurbishment work, taking the opportunity to build in new services. Add to that a dramatic new lighting and decorative scheme in the hall and the combination is even better. Old and new contrast, but work together, an object lesson in allowing modern design and traditional architecture to coexist in symbiosis.

Memorial Hall, Manchester

All eyes in Manchester’s Albert Square turn towards the stupendous Town Hall, designed by Alfred Waterhouse and one of the biggest and most magnificent of all 19th-century Gothic structures. The other buildings on the square are apt to get overlooked as a result, so here’s one worth a lingering glance that was completed in 1866, just before work began on the Town Hall. It’s the Memorial Hall, on the corner of Albert Square and Southmill Street.

The hall was built by Manchester’s dissenters in memory of the Nonconformist clergy who were forced from their livings by the 1662 Act of Uniformity. It was designed by Thomas Worthington, an architect who was responsible for several of the city’s major buildings, as well as Manchester’s Albert Memorial. The Memorial Hall looks like a Venetian palazzo untied from its moorings and floated to Manchester, and these rectangular traceried windows on the upper floor are a typically Venetian feature. Venice and its buildings were in the air at this period. Worthington had been to Italy a few years previously, but the main influence was the writings and drawings of John Ruskin, whose three-volume work The Stones of Venice came out in 1851–3. Ruskin was especially keen on using different coloured materials and Worthington responded with a lively mixture of brick and stone.

Manchester soon had a number of buildings in this Venetian style – Worthington’s Crown Court is another one that has survived. Perhaps it’s an especially appropriate style because Manchester, like Venice in its heyday, was a major mercantile city, humming with commercial activity. The stripey polychrome masonry of buildings like the Memorial Hall seems to reflect the busy confidence of this great and successful city.