Posts tagged architecture

Boardman’s Entry, and other alleyways

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.

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Beneath Trafford Town Hall

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:

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Hulme Hippodrome

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.

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Lewis’s

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. 

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Great Abel

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.

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Godlee Observatory

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 

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Upper Walkways of Oxford Road

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;

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John Street Birds

On John Street in the Northern Quarter, and around the corner on Tib Street, you may have spotted these ornamental birds and their neighbouring ceramic parrots. There’s no shortage of street art to be found in this area yet it’s surprising how few people know the motivation behind each installment.

As Manchester moved into the Victorian Era this particular area transformed from a poorly maintained, muddy lane that was characterised by poverty to a much more amiable community. The cotton trade had brought some riches to the area and the radical, publisher and eventual major of Manchester, Abel Heywood, had brought education and free speech. The residents of Tib Street began to shape the trading community and, once where pigs roamed the lanes raiding side streets for discarded offal, there stood a thriving hub of enterprise. In true Victorian fashion, the shops pulled a crowd because they provided entertainment for the consumer and the speciality of Tib Street became a form of natural history. 

Almost every shop featured live animals on display inside the window or tethered outside in the street and often the shops would remain open well into the night pulling a larger crowd still as food prices dropped as the clocks approached midnight. At one point it’s believed that almost 20,000 people descended on the area in a single evening to take in the sights and pick up a bargain. 

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Pear Mill

Began in 1907 and completed in 1912 by A.H Stott & Sons, this is Stockport’s Pear Mill. The mill is Grade II listed and was one of the last cotton spinning mills to be built and to go into production. It ceased operation as a textile mill in March 1978.

Although an usual feature to gaze upon now, the pear that nestles on the water tower wasn’t particularly out of character at the time. These Edwardian mills were often adorned flaboyantly and during the design of the twenty-four A.H Stott & Sons mills, meticulous attention was cast upon the water towers and parapet of the main mill block. A signature style of the architects’ was the use of horizontal bands of yellow bricks above the windows, Accrington brick and terracotta ornamentation. 

This behemoth of a pear isn’t the only fruit you’ll find up on the roof,

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The Thomas Street Pineapple

Thanks to Sam Newiss for the image.

This old building on Thomas Street, sometimes known as the Binks Building, is on one of the busiest corners of Manchester when it comes to nightlife. The current tenant is Odd Bar and the neighbours are a collection of bars, restaurants, secret cocktail lounges and traditional boozers. But as well as all this the area is steeped in history, art and culture and the view from Binks Building is one of the loveliest in all of Manchester; the walls and gates of Speakman, Son & Hickson’s Wholesale Fish Market. 

The market entrance is, for want of a better word, entrancing but look up just a little and you might be surprised to find this pottery pineapple settled on the highest ledge of the Binks Building. The exotic finial perches on the crow-stepped gables and it isn’t as rare as you might imagine to find this particular fruit incorporated into the design of a building. In terms of carvings and architectural adornment, the pineapple, was most prevalent from around the mid 1700s to the back end of the 1800s (until the influence of Egypt and Greece set in). 

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The little men of Piccadilly

I was delighted to spot a little man, decked out in Alpine clothes and straw hat, catching some sunshine on the roof of 79 Piccadilly. Just around the corner, leaning on the balustrade, I discovered he had an identical friend. It was surprising to find that there’s no real information online about the figures and so I considered taking the story in another direction; talking about the O.K Cafe that also occupies the building downstairs and the history behind the name.

Historically the Okasional Cafes were squats, social centres for anarchists and environmental activists and in recent times a demonstration in the benefits of non-profit community spaces. In fact if you’re reading this at the time of publishing then you can go and check out the Castlefield OK Cafe right now. It seems to make a lot of sense to use an otherwise empty space for a community project, but I don’t know enough about the economy or politics to go into that and the mystery of the little men was too intriguing to leave alone.

Built in 1877, the original architects of the building were Clegg and Knowles. The duo were prolific architects who specialised in grand warehouses, the likes of which were admired by tourists who would travel to Manchester during the industrial revolution to marvel at the ornate and unusually tall warehouses of Manchester (the warehouses and mills were built upwards to offset the expensive land rent. As an indication of the success and growth of the period this was during a time in which Manchester’s population trebled in the space of 39 years. During the same time period London’s population had only doubled).

After the completion of The Atheneum, considered one of the most inspirational buildings in Manchester’s architectural history, the general building trend of the time followed suit and ‘palazzo’, an elegant Italian Renaissance style build, was born. So why then is 79 Piccadilly so different from the norm?

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Piccadilly Mirror Ball

Thanks to Ian Pattinson for the image

If you look up to the roof of what was Piccadilly 21 nightclub you might find yourself dazzled by the light. Up there is a giant disco ball. It’s mounted on a strange metal plinth that holds the surrounding spotlights steady and looks like a space age egg about to hatch.

You might also notice that of the six floors, only one storey is currently in use. The site is solely occupied by Nobels Arcade and the upper floors are as good as obsolete.

But this is an important site on the Manchester skyline with historical significance that shouldn’t be forgotten. It was here, that in 1979, a fire broke out which changed the entire UK fire regulations. The Woolworth’s store that occupied the site, at the time the largest Woolworths in Europe,

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