Skyliner

Great Abel - the bell of Manchester Town Hall’s clock tower.

Autumn in Manchester is one of my favourite times of the year for one reason only and that is the calendar of events. The Science Festival, Literature Festival, Food and Drink Festival, Comedy Festival, the Manchester Weekender and preceeding all of those, there’s the nationwide, National Heritage Open Days. And it’s that particular event which leads me the Town Hall. 

There are 14 million bricks in the Town Hall and delicate images of cotton flowers and bees are set into the mosaic floors to signify the origins of our wealth and the industrious nature of our people. In the Great Hall there’s the famous Ford Madox Brown’s Manchester mural complete with a depiction of a tee-total Bridgewater glugging wine and the dark, gothic courtyard has been the set of many a London street, most recently in Sherlock Holmes and The Crimson Petal and the White. But of all the wonders of the building there is one we don’t even see from street level.

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The Godlee Observatory makes up part of the Sackville Building of UMIST on Sackville Street. It’s quite a large spectacle to overlook yet so many people are  unaware of this treasure in the centre of the city.

The Sackville building itself is one of imense beauty, with fine details like intricate glass etchings of the building itself carved into the grand doorways. 

The building is by Spalding and Cross and was completed in 1902 with further extensions beginning in 1927 by Bradshaw, Gass and Hope. The interior of the building mirrors the splendour outside and there are a series of outdoor sculputures in the grounds reflecting the scientific theme of the site, notably a sculpture of Archimedes arising from his bath beneath the viaduct archway.

The site is divided from the more recent UMIST buildings by

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This time what we see when we look up isn’t so much an architectural quirk, nor is it an example of street art but it’s the ghost of an idea that was never executed.

At various points along Oxford Road, the education mile, you can find recesses at first floor level that were intended, one day, to be the connecting points of pedestrian walkways. Pedestrians were to be put up in the air with a system of interconnecting overhead walkways linking the main buildings with their entrances at first floor level. Oxford Road, effectively, was a road atop a set of concrete stilts.

Wilson & Wormersley’s Oxford Road plans, 1960s

The image below is part of the MMU at the corner of Oxford Road and Cavendish. What was once intended to be a walkway

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