Manchester Architecture part two

The nineteenth century is perhaps the century that most seems to define – in the popular mind anyway - Manchester's architecture. This was the age of the triumph of cotton, the making of British engineering, the century where the great urban/rural population shift took place. The following description underlines the cataclysm that for better or worse utterly transformed the United Kingdom as written in the streets and buildings of our city.

By the 1850s Manchester had changed completely from the place it had been in 1800. Industry had already arrived by the latter date but it was still recognisably a town of the eighteenth century – it was still a product of the old ways. By 1850 Manchester could not have been confused for anywhere else.

Let's start with churches.

In the first part of the nineteenth century the fashion had returned to the Gothic style, but to begin with only as a species of Gothic dreamed up in the architects’ heads without the principles developed in medieval buildings. Because of this these can be great fun, such as Charles Barry’s All Saints (1826), Stand, with its tall, Gothic-horror porch. A crucial building nationally is the much messed about with St Wilfred RC (1842) in Hulme by AWN Pugin. This was one of the first ‘archeological’ churches, harking back to the principles of the Middle Ages. After it everything with churches had to be done correctly according to the dictates of Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular architecture.

A selection of the best C19 churches are St Mark's, Worsley (1846, GG Scott), St Mary, Hulme (now apartments, 1858, Crowther), the Holy Name, University (1871, Hansom) and St Augustine’s, Pendlebury, (1874, Bodley). This last building was considered by architectural critic, Nikolaus Pevsner, to be ‘one of the English churches of all time.’ Two curiosities are Edmund Sharpe’s church, Holy Trinity, Rusholme, (1845) built entirely out of terracotta, and J Medland Taylor’s St Edmund's in Rochdale which is as much a temple to Freemasonry as the Almighty. But then again most things by the latter architect are a curiosity such as his St Anne’s, Denton described as Arts and Crafts Gothic and worth a long detour to visit.

Thomas Harrison was one of the first to bring the Greek Revival to the city with the Portico Library (1806) whilst Charles Barry added the grandest of these building with what is now Manchester Art Gallery. The most individual take on this style was Charles Cockerell’s Bank of England (1845), now offices, on King Street. But we have to return to Barry for one of the most inspirational buildings in the city’s history. This was the Atheneum (1837), based on Italian Renaissance palaces. With its dignified, grand appearance it was adopted by cotton barons as the style of choice for their warehouses and the ‘Manchester Palazzo’ was born.

Edward Walters was a fine ‘palazzo’ architect, but his best ‘palazzos’ weren’t warehouses. His masterpiece was the Free Trade Hall (1856), the main façade of which survives, in the Radisson Edwardian Hotel, whilst the Manchester and Salford Bank (1860), now the Royal Bank of Scotland, on Mosley Street isn’t far behind. Earlier JT Gregan in St Ann’s Square had built the most exquisite ‘palazzo’ of them all Heywood’s Bank (1846), a triumph of Manchester architecture, with its attached manager’s house – the first in beautiful cut stone, the second in no-nonsense brick.

The ‘palazzo’, as with all art and architectural schools soon lost its purity and became a shape to hang off a variety of designs: an essay in showmanship. This led to remarkable structures such as Travis and Magnall’s Watts Warehouse (1858), now the Britannia Hotel, the greatest of the textile warehouses occupied by a single company and a cocktail of architectural styles including Italian, French, Elizabethan and even Egyptian motifs.

Watts Warehouse, now the Britannia Hotel

By the 1850s Manchester had changed completely from the place it had been in 1800. Industry had already arrived by the latter date but it was still recognisably a town of the eighteenth century – it was still a product of the old ways. By 1850 Manchester could not have been confused for anywhere else, in effect it was city state, confident of its place in the world and attempting to control its own destiny.

This is reflected in the architecture whether in the ‘palazzo’ warehouses or in the banks. It was also reflected in the architectural practices. Manchester starts to get dynasties of designers. The most prominent nationally was that begun by Alfred Waterhouse and continued by his sons (although Waterhouse did decamp to London). In 1859, at the age of 29, the Liverpool born, Manchester trained architect, won the commission to build the Assize Courts in the city. This essay in modern Gothic was a total success. The Courts were sadly demolished after bomb damage during WWII. It was followed by Manchester Town Hall (1877) – described as ‘a classic of its age’ - and the Victoria University (1887), now the University of Manchester, both in Gothic plus numerous other buildings.

Waterhouse’s contemporary was Thomas Worthington who begun a practice which still survives in the city. His contribution straddles both buildings and monuments in a variety of Gothic styles such as the Albert Memorial (1862), the Memorial Hall (1866), and the City Police and Sessions Court (1875), Minshull Street, now Crown Courts.

The middle years of the nineteenth century have been called the Battle of the Styles in Britain, an often passionate debate between those who favoured Gothic architecture and those who favoured the Classical, and its various offshoots. In public buildings in Manchester, unlike in Liverpool, the Gothic boxed the ears of Classical. No doubt the new money industrialists and businessmen found it warmer and more charming than the colder purities of the other style. Edward Salomans, Manchester’s most prominent Jewish architect, must have felt the same, or at least his clients did. His best building the Reform Club (1871) is in splendid Venetian Gothic. Gothic still cast a shadow over the end of the century when Basil Champneys designed the last great flowering of Gothic in the UK with John Ryland’s Library (1900), a tour-de-force in red sandstone.

Manchester Ship Canal had opened in 1894 and with a general upturn in business a building boom hit Manchester. The steel framed building hit the city at the same time. The buildings in the late 1890s until the outbreak of WWI in 1914, are the some of the most bombastic in the city. This was the Imperial Age, the triumph of Pax Britannica, where the sun never set on the Empire and never set on Manchester’s cotton and manufacturing interests either. For a decade after WWI the great building programme continued with buildings such as Harry S Fairhurst's Lancaster House and India House, but they will be covered in part three of this history.

This section will be incorporated into Manchester Confidential's developing guidebook. For the first part of this architectural history click here.