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. 

Ilminster, Somerset

Retail therapy

The High Street, as every television pundit, every economics correspondent, every social commentator, will tell you, is not what it was. Old-fashioned small shops are closing, established chains disappearing, shop fronts being boarded up – and everyone complains about it, then goes home, fires up the laptop, and starts shopping online. Even in my own small Cotswold town ('vibrant' and 'buoyant' are the typical catch-all descriptions) another High Street business closed the other day. But it's not all gloom. I'm always visiting towns and finding old businesses surviving, against the odds, and showing us what shops used to be like and still can be. Rickard's, the ironmongers of Ludlow, are a case in point. Another is Dyer's in Ilminster.

This shop was founded in 1870 by R P Wheadon and, as Wheadon's, it expanded over a 60 year period from a small draper's into quite a large shop with several departments offering men's and women's clothing as well as the stock in trade of the draper and haberdasher. In around about 1910 there must have been a major refit – the lovely frontage with its curving centrepiece and carved swags probably dates to this time. So do many of the interior fittings – wooden counters, all sorts of shelves for bolts of cloth, drawers for buttons and bows, a curved cashier's desk with cash drawer and low glass screens. Some of the glass-fronted counters in the menswear department are perhaps a bit later, maybe after R A Dyer took over the business in 1937.

Like quite a lot of drapers in the early-20th century, Dyer's expansion from cloth to clothes turned it into a kind of ur-department store. The shop has shrunk again since then, but it's still a wonderful sight, a business from another era, still going in spite of everything the pundits say about the decline of the High Street. I hope it continues to do so.