Back view to the future

Here’s a view not seen for several years that shows off the geography of old Manchester.

It’s the view from Victoria Station, south, over Walker’s Croft to the fifteenth century rear wall of Chetham’s Library and School of Music.

The view has come about through clearance associated with the building of a new Chetham’s School of Music (click here). Ironically when the new building rises this will disappear but a better view of these late medieval gems of northern architecture will result from clearance of the redundant Palatine Buildings on Victoria Street and Hunts Bank.

Tree huggers will hate the fact that we have lost several nearly mature sycamores and plane trees during this process. But it must be remembered that the area in question was until the last couple of decades a place that was covered in layers of buildings for hundred and fifty years – part of the site was even an overspill cemetery for the Cathedral. More particularly since 1844 when George Stephenson’s Victoria Station was built (there’s still part of that old building left between the MEN Arena and the grander Edwardian structure the taxis park outside) the area was associated with shipping agents and warehouses.

Chetham’s Library and School began life as priests’ quarters in 1421 for the then Roman Catholic Collegiate Church now the Church of England Cathedral. For the first four hundred and fifty years of existence the view of the rear of these buildings would have been similar to the one seen today.

Well, with one major exception: a small river.

The cobbled, curving road in the picture follows the course of the River Irk which lies in a tunnel underneath the carriageway. It was locked away in the mid-nineteenth century because it stank, having in unregulated times, become an open sewer full of human, animal and industrial effluent.

It’s interesting to compare the print from the early 1820s shown here with the pictures taken this week. Look at those Jane Austen characters, ladies in bonnets, strolling the original Walker’s Croft on the right, whilst urchins mess about in the water. On the right in the distance factories of the new industrial age belch smoke, in the present view the Spectrum apartment scheme in Salford can be made out.

You can also see how Chetham’s has been remodelled over the last hundred and ninety years, but not so much as to make a radically different impression. In fact the additions and so on seem to have been inserted with a care not usually associated with the Victorian Age. The school extension, on the left of the long view of the buildings in these pictures is a good example. Although the lighter sandstone has not been matched with the pale red older buildings, in scale and balance it's a good fit. This was probably by John Gregan in the 1850s - he also designed the Mechanics Institute on Princess Street and the gorgeous Heywood's Bank, now RBS, on St Ann Street. Talented man

The older print also shows the stairs from what is now the Library descending to the water's edge. Before all life was expunged from the River Irk it was famous for ‘eels remarkable for their fatness’. Eels were a bit of delicacy back then – still are.

And why were the buildings built here? It’s hard to see now but this was an area of strategic importance. Chetham’s was built at the confluence of the River Irk and the River Irwell as shown on one of our photographs here. It stood on a sandstone outcrop and was the first area of post-Roman occupation in Manchester. As a place of human occupation it no doubt goes back fourteen hundred years. As the most important site in Manchester, aside from the sacred ground of the church, it attracted the best buildings. And for many years after these buildings were completed in 1421 they were the largest, most significant non-religious buildings in the region.

This view captures some of that.