A guide to the venues of Sounds From the Other City 2012, featuring tales from a Chapel Street crypt, a time capsule, the smallest listed building in Salford, William Mitchell’s Minut Men and a very special wall!
Photography by Jennifer Brookes
Please click the image to read the brochure in full screen
I have a small request of you, my lovely readers, and that’s to help me spread the word about a project.
It’s all explained in the link but basically I’m trying to raise some funds so that I can try to turn my site, associated projects and tours into something more than it is. Something of a higher quality, more frequent, with more purpose, the chance to expand nationally and become a database of memories we could otherwise lose, and maybe to pay the occasional bus fare along the way too.
I already hit my initial target which is really like a deposit, you have to set a reasonable target because if you don’t hit the full amount you get a big fat zero, so now I need as much help as I can get to help me raise more. Click here and read my plan and if you like the idea then perhaps share the link, or even donate a £1. There are rewards for donations too!
Any help is hugely appreciated.
The wonderful Documentally came to visit to help out with the Northern Quarter Stories project.
The project is about collecting peoples stories of the area through a variety of ways, many of which includes pub interviews, like mine. There are lovely beer mats distributed around the area with details of the project and how to contribute and a group of reporters will be out on the streets over the coming weeks.
He interviewed me at The Castle yesterday and you can listen to it below.
By a nicely-timed coincidence Mark Kennedy, the man who made the mural I mention during this, wandered into the pub and agreed to be interviewed too. Do look out for that on the audioboo channel that has been set up for the project here
Whilst the point of the project is to share stories from the area then I thought this is a nice opportunity for me to write about my most recent Northern Quarter story.
A few days ago whilst gazing at rooftops and sneaking around buildings I perhaps shouldn’t be in, I found some treasure.
For a short stretch of the city centre it’s possible to bypass the crowds and the traffic and to walk across several pedestrian areas and finally down a series of alleyways. In fact you can walk almost traffic-free from Victoria station all the way to Lloyd Street, and in doing so you might spot some rather unusual artwork.
To walk this route you begin at Cathedral Gardens, down Cathedral Street and New Cathedral Street then cut through St Ann’s Square. At the heart of St Ann’s Square stands the only surviving 18th century church in the city (celebrating 300 years in 2012), the tower of which is said to mark the geographical centre of the old city and the surveyor’s benchmark can be seen carved into the stone by the tower door.
The connecting road from the church to Deansgate was once known as Toll Lane as this is where the lord of the manor would collect tolls for the animals on their way to fair after they had gathered here and been pelted with acorns by the locals!
From the back of the church the route through the city continues in a relatively straight line from here. First you cut through St Ann’s Passage, built as a temporary home for the Corn Exchange and then you meet with King Street. In 1976 King Street became the first city centre street to be pedestrianised and it’s here that you find yourself opposite Boardman’s Entry.
inthemindofthebourgeoisreader asked: Hello Hayley, what happened to the piece you were writing about the post office murals? I've been waiting ages for that to pop up! :)
Blimey, tell me about it! I’m still researching it!
I’ve had trouble getting a public appeal published in the paper and still trying. There’s someone I’m waiting to hear back from about one element of it and I might give the papers one more try but if I’ve not had any luck in the next month I’ll write about what I know - which I’m 99% is the correct answer. I just don’t like having the 1% doubt - I want to be sure I have the facts.
Two more articles to come this week though in the meantime…
with photos by Andrew Brooks
These days a modern urban environment often makes it difficult to realise the origins of a town, of how it was formed, why its location was vital to its survival or even to properly step back and see the lie of the land. Stockport thrived because of the standstone cliffs it was formed around and there’s plenty of evidence of this all around you to this day.
At one particular location on the edge of town there’s a sandstone cliff face and if you’d peered through the trees here until very recently you’d have also noticed there was once a door.
That was until now - the doorway has been sealed up and what lies behind it is documented here for the very last time. This is Dodge Hill.
For thousands of years Stockport has made use of the soft rock faces by inhabiting caves and tunnels. The sandstone here has been deposited over millions of years and is the legacy of ancient riverbeds and desert plains.
But there’s a more recent history to discover than that because behind the door at Dodge Hill is a tunnel system dating from World War II.
Stockport lay on one of two main assault routes into Manchester so was at constant risk and this particular location is one of five war shelters in the area that were formed as part of nationally coordinated scheme of Air Raid Precautions.
There’s rumoured to be a sixth shelter although no one has ever located this and none of the sites are physically connected.
The shelters have been regularly accessed over the years, after the war these visits have mostly been by members of the public whose curious nature got the better of them. To keep the public out of danger the council have instructed these particular shelters be sealed and prior to doing so we took a trip inside with Urban Search and Rescue, and with Stockport’s authority on tunnels and shelters, Phil Catling from Hatworks.
There are two things of interest on this aerial shot of Ship Canal House on King Street. The first is one you can see quite clearly from street level if you crook your neck enough, and it’s a rather grand sculpture of Neptune.
Neptune, being the god of water and sea, is clearly a symbolic choice for the premises but it’s also a practical one. Neptune’s three-pronged fork that he holds domineeringly above the street below is a rather fanciful disguise for the building’s lightning conductor. If lightning ever strikes the building it should hit the rod and be conducted to the ground through a wire rather than passing through the interior and risking fire.
The figure and sea-horses that surround it was said to be ‘the finest group of sculpture to be seen in Manchester’ and was designed by H R Bond with work carried out by Earp, Hobbs and Miller
Regardless of the craftmanship behind this lovely sculpture, it’s not actually Neptune that interests me, rather it’s what’s set back from the main street, just above the upper levels and visible on the aerial shot - there once was a little house.
Something exciting this May comes…
Stay tuned for an alternative guide to this year’s Sounds From the Other City
with photos by Andrew Brooks
If you’d ever looked closely enough at the shrubbery around Talbot Road you may just have uncovered an emergency entrance to Trafford Town Hall’s cold war bunker.
The entrance, pictured above, led to a series of rooms and passageways with concrete walls and steel doors but is now just an open space devoid of any fixtures or fittings and, at the time of our visit, flooded.
In November 1980, Manchester City council declared the city a nuclear free zone, and when this bunker was proposed a few years later, despite Trafford itself not being part of the zone, the anti-war feeling amongst the community led to opposition from the residents of Trafford borough.
When it was announced in October 1982 that the bunker, “an underground protected communications emergency centre”, would be going ahead at a cost of £2.5m it took only two weeks for a petition signed by 10,000 Trafford residents to be passed to the council requesting to end construction. The petition stated:
What on the face of things is a small commercial site on Deansgate, you’ll find a beautiful building complete with wrought iron balcony and decked out inside with personalised bottle green ceramics. Look above Topkapi and the model shop on the corner of Bootle Street and Deansgate and not only will you spot the golden sign bearing the name ‘Onward Building’ but below a tiny, ornate white balcony and above the entrance are the words ‘Band of Hope’ enscribed on a keystone above the face of a cherub.
The site of The Onward Building was previously Number 1 Court and just next-door, 201 Deansgate, had been the site of a Quaker burial ground. Finished in 1904 by architect Charles Heathcote, this building was occupied by a federation of temperance societies. This particular temperance movement was started in Leeds in 1847 and aimed to save working class children from the perils of alcohol.
The Band of Hope society published a paper aimed at children under the title Onward, hence the name of the building. The paper warned the readers to be on constant guard from temptation, and promoted the temperance movement by publishing moral tales and poetry. It’s perhaps easily forgotten that children were also the victim of alcoholism in these times of poverty and child labour, the movement became hugely successful with 2 out of 8 million children of Band of Hope age taking “The Pledge” in the last decade of the 19th century.
If you step back a little and look further upwards, you’ll notice the third floor windows are all porthole style. Behind these is a most splendid room, with the air of a Victorian bath, a raised stage at one end and ceramic tiles all around the room bearing the inscription of all the people who contributed in some way to the erection of this particular office of the Band of Hope.
With photos by Andrew Brooks
Although you’d never know it from the rather dowdy, reclad exterior, inside this Hulme building you can time travel.
On October 10th 1901, exactly 110 years prior to our visit, the Hulme Hippodrome as it is now known opened its doors as a spectacular melodrama venue. Originally named the Grand Junction Theatre and Floral Hall (which explains the neighbouring pub; the Junction Hotel, which has an unexplained missing third floor as illustrated in the video below), this building hides beneath modern cladding, and you’d never guess that such a grand venue was right there before your eyes, in plain view from a busy road and bus route.
A year after the hippodrome was built, next-door the Hulme Playhouse opened. Both buildings are by architect J J Alley, and were connected by an arcade.
The Grand Junction Theatre and Floral Hall, with a capacity of 3,000, was built for melodrama, with the Playhouse next door designed as a music hall. In 1905 the two venues changed names and the newly christened Hulme Hippodrome with its larger auditorium became the new music hall. Later on, the playhouse was taken over by the BBC, and it was here the first radio recording of The Beatles was made.
(Image courtesy of Manchester Library and Information Service, MCC, Local Image Collection )
Inside, the hippodrome is an explosion of reds, purples and gold gilded Rococo plaster.
What we now know as the premises of Primark was originally built to house a Lewis’s Department store. By virtue of housing such a spectacular venture the building has some wonderful features that you wouldn’t expect to find when you’re fighting through the crowds on a sticky Saturday.
What’s hidden on the rooftop isn’t actually visible from the street but you can see on the Google image above there’s a large glass dome, an ornate feature that is no longer in view whilst in the building but once was an integral part of the magic of the Lewis’s store.
On the corner of Market and Moseley Street this particular branch opened in 1877 and closed as a Lewis’s in 2001 (though Lewis’s had actually gone into adminstration ten years prior to this). The building is by architects Horton and Bridgford and is built in a French renaissance style with a grand corner tower.
The shop applied for an extension in 1915, buying up the Royal Buildings (the site of the Royal Hotel, where the football league was founded in 1888) and with the expansion two back streets were absorbed into the buildings and covered over by a glass archway. This was the Lewis Arcade and is briefly featured in the film ‘Hell Is a City’. These days, the Mosley Street entrance has become nothing more than a rubbish bay, although what little is left of the passageway does retain the original glass roof. The other end of the arcade, on Market Street, is obscured by Cafe Nero - if you stand back and look at this you can see it’s actually a free-standing shop located in a street and not actually part of the Royal Building’s nor Lewis’s).
The new site was over twice the size of the original and it was during this extension that the glass dome in question was erected. From the dome down to the ground floor was an atrium which would house the Christmas grotto where a steeple jack dressed as Santa would climb a golden ladder towards a crowd of excited families on the upper floors as a circus was held on the ground floor.
Immediately below the dome was, and still very much is, the ballroom complete with a sprung dancefloor.
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.
Designed by Alfred Waterhouse, although his original proposal was heavily altered from a dowdy little structure to the much grander one we see today, the town hall and its tower are a wonderfully clever use of the triangular space given to work with. Not content, however, that they were celebrating Manchester’s city status quite as dramatically as they could; six years into the project Waterhouse called for suspension of the building works and added an additional 16ft to the tower. So today the clock tower stands 288 feet high and from 1877 - 1962 it was the tallest structure in Manchester.
Taking the lift six floors up as far as we can there’s still a long climb up a dark, stone spiral staircase to reach the tower.
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 the Manchester, South Junction & Altrincham Railway (MSJ&AR) which ran a service between the then London Road (Piccadilly) station and Altrincham and famously ran three different systems of electronics within a 60 year period. Since 1992
Wilson & Wormersley’s Oxford Road plans, 1960s
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.
The image below is part of the MMU at the corner of Oxford Road and Cavendish. What was once intended to be a walkway from here to neighbouring buildings is now a rather ugly looking, boarded-up, dead end.
An earlier image of the same building show the walkway unboarded (but unconnected) with a car entering the ground floor level. This was taken in 1974.
(courtesy of Manchester Archive Plus)
The walkway notion didn’t completely fall flat on its face as upper level commercial ventures and some existing paths are still to be found above the street level;