‘Victory over Blindness’, Piccadilly Station, Manchester
If you’re running to catch a train on the approach to Manchester Piccadilly station you may have to swerve out of the path of a line of soldiers in First World War uniforms.
The seven life-sized bronze figures are blind veterans, each following the leader by placing their hands on the shoulders of the man in front. The leader wears a patch over one eye, suggesting that he may have sight in the other eye.
The group is a cast of Johanna Domke-Guyot’s statue ‘Victory over Blindness’, deliberately placed at ground level to engage the attention of passers-by, as a reminder of the sacrifices of the soldiers blinded in combat by artillery or gas.
Ms Domke-Guyot has experienced partial sight-loss since she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1994. She chose to mount the group without a plinth “…because it means that a disabled or blind person can access it. I want people to touch it; I want it to be a people’s artwork.”
The original statue, completed in 2015, is located at the Llandudno Centre of Blind Veterans UK, which subsequently commissioned the Manchester cast, unveiled in 2018.
The charity, for a long time known as St Dunstan’s, was co-founded in 1915 by Sir Arthur Pearson (1866-1921), the first proprietor of the Daily Express, who had himself lost his sight through glaucoma. Under its original name, The Blinded Soldiers and Sailors Care Committee, the charity aimed to provide sightless veterans with vocational training so they could live independent lives.
Sir Arthur’s 1919 memoir was entitled Victory Over Blindness: How it Was Won by the Men of St Dunstan’s.
The Blind Veterans UK website Blind Veterans UK, Rebuilding lives after sight loss – Blind Veterans UK portrays the continuing work of the charity in helping blinded veterans, irrespective of whether they lost their sight in action, to “regain their independence and live the life they choose”.
Castlefield, the site of Manchester’s first known settlement, the Roman Mamucium, is a cat’s cradle of canals and railways.
The Cheshire Lines Committee, a consortium of three separate railway companies, ran four tracks into the city centre, leading to its Manchester Central passenger station and the vast Great Northern Warehouse, both of which were reborn in recent times, respectively as a conference centre and a leisure complex.
The southern CLC viaduct was adapted to carry Metrolink trams in 1992, but the parallel viaduct has had no practical transport function since the track was lifted in the early 1970s.
In 2021 the National Trust announced a scheme to use the viaduct to create a sky park – an elevated green space in an urban environment ~ by making use of the abandoned transport infrastructure.
The original linear sky park was the Coulée verte [green belt] René-Dumont(alternatively called the Promenade plantée[planted walkway] René-Dumont) in Paris, opened in 1993. René Dumont (1904-2001) was a professor of agricultural sciences who began his career advocating the use of chemical fertilizers and eventually became an ecologist and an inspiration to the French Green Party.
The most famous sky park is the New York City High Line, a stretch of the New York Central Railroad’s abandoned West Side Line that was rescued from demolition and redevelopment by the Friends of the High Line. It was opened in sections between 2009 and 2014.
These and other examples have demonstrated that it’s often cheaper and more profitable to make redundant rail infrastructure an amenity than to scrap it. It’s well known that developers and property owners are attracted to inland waterways for sound commercial reasons, and it’s apparent that the effort to rejuvenate rail structures can similarly invigorate the surrounding area.
The Castlefield Viaduct is very much a temporary pilot project which is well worth visiting, a thousand-foot stretch accessible from the Deansgate/Castlefield tram stop: A fly-though of Castlefield Viaduct – YouTube. Funding for future development seems uncertain at present, and it would be a pity if the project had to be abandoned: Castlefield Viaduct | Manchester | National Trust.
Other British cities have derelict railway structures that could be potential sky parks.
Leeds has two such projects, the Monk Bridge Viaduct, built in 1846, closed in 1967 and now adapted as an urban garden, and the 1½-mile Holbeck Viaduct, built in 1882 and abandoned since 1987, for which ambitious plans exist.
Birmingham has the Duddeston Viaduct which, because of a disagreement between competing railway companies, was built and left incomplete in the late 1840s and has never carried a train.
It would be satisfying to see it eventually find a useful purpose.
Rylands Building, Market Street, Manchester (2023)
John Rylands (1801-1888) was a Manchester textile manufacturer whose name lives on in the John Rylands Library, founded as a memorial by his widow Enriqueta Augustina Rylands (1843-1908) and opened in 1900.
From 1822 his company, Rylands & Sons Ltd, occupied a site in the city’s High Street in what is now called the Northern Quarter, and replaced these premises with the Rylands Building (1929-32), a bulky modern textile warehouse on Market Street faced in Portland stone with distinctive corner turrets, in a sober version of Art Deco.
The architects were Harry Smith Fairhurst (1868-1945) and his son Philip Garland Fairhurst (1900-1987). The elder Fairhurst had already built Lancaster House (1905-1910), India House (1906) and Bridgewater House (1912), all on Whitworth Street, and York House (1910-11, demolished 1974) on Major Street – all of them to the Manchester pattern of a packing house and wholesale showroom.
The Rylands Building is prominently visible at the corner of Piccadilly Gardens, an ornamental space opened up on the site of the demolished Manchester Royal Infirmary.
In 1957 it was bought by the owners of Paulden’s department store after a fire destroyed their All Saints premises south of the city centre. The splendid architectural treatment, inside and out, and the vast amount of floor space made the former warehouse an admirable retail store, which was rebranded by its ultimate owners, Debenhams, in 1973.
The debacle that led to the complete closure of the Debenhams chain in 2021 meant that the Rylands Building suddenly became a huge void in the heart of Manchester’s retail quarter – half a million square feet of retail floor-space over ten floors encased in a magnificent and prominent building within sight of the city’s tourist hub, Piccadilly Gardens, and within reach of the nearby Northern Quarter.
The way forward is Rylands Manchester. The developer AM Alpha gained permission for a scheme by Jeffrey Bell Architects adding four storeys on top of the present roof to compensate for carving an open atrium out of the centre to bring natural light within the building from the second to the seventh floor.
The project respects the appearance of the 1929 design while observing the Manchester Zero-Carbon Action Plan which aims to make Greater Manchester carbon-neutral by 2038 [Zero Carbon Manchester | Zero Carbon Manchester | Manchester City Council]. Insulation, glazing and energy provision will conform to expected future needs, and the respect for original architectural detail includes installing up-to-date Crittall Windows units corresponding with the appearance of the original fenestration.
The finished scheme will offer 70,000 square feet of retail space at ground level, 258,000 square feet of office space above and a winter garden on the sixth floor. The atrium storeys each include open space, terraced to provide sight of the sky and sheltered by a glazed roof: https://www.maxfordham.com/projects/the-rylands-building.
Work is expected to be completed by 2025, a tribute to Manchester’s efficacy in grabbing opportunities to improve the urban environment, as it did after the IRA bomb-attack in 1996.
For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Manchester’s Heritage, please click here.
The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.
All Saints’ Church, Barton-upon-Irwell, Manchester
Edward Welby Pugin (1834-1875) was the eldest son of the better-known Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852), and after his father’s early death at the age of forty-one continued the practice until his own early death at the same age.
Augustus Pugin was inevitably a hard act to follow, and though his son’s designs are less intense Edward was prolific and his work is impressive. He designed over a hundred churches and a few secular buildings, and at the height of his powers he completed seventeen projects in the years 1865-68.
Nikolaus Pevsner identified E W Pugin’s “masterpiece” as All Saints’ Church, Barton-upon-Irwell (actually in Urmston, west Manchester). Paid for by the local landowner Sir Humphrey de Trafford, 2nd Bt (1808-1866) and his wife Lady Annette at a cost of £25,000, it was built in 1867-68 alongside the de Trafford family’s mortuary chapel (1863).
Edward Pugin had previously built another church for the de Traffords, St Ann, Chester Road, Stretford (1862-7), and within the same few years designed his Monastery of St Francis, Gorton (1866-72), larger in scale but coarser in detail because it lacked the generous funds provided by the de Traffords.
The exterior of All Saints’ echoes some of his other churches in the North West and elsewhere, with a nave and apsidal chancel and an elaborate bell-turret in the form of a flèche, set diagonally above the west front.
The interior is richly decorated and narrows towards the sanctuary, emphasising the height of the building. The nave columns are alternately banded with Runcorn red sandstone and buff Painswick stone, and the roof is made of English oak and Savannah pitch-pine.
To embellish the interior as the de Traffords required – “a grand church…erected to the glory of God” – Edward Pugin brought together craftsmen from his father’s favourite ecclesiastical artists, Hardman & Co of Birmingham, including J Alphege Pippett (1841-1903), whose ‘The Adoration of the Lamb’ on the south side of the chancel depicts the de Traffords accompanied by Edward Pugin in medieval dress holding a plan of the church.
The walls of the sanctuary are of Caen stone and the columns of Painswick stone; the floor is crimson marble and encaustic tile; the altar itself is built of Caen stone, finished with Carrara, Siena and Devonshire marble, with flights of angels standing on the alabaster tabernacle, its doors marked by a bejewelled cross.
The surviving nineteenth-century stained glass, disarranged as a result of Blitz damage, is by Powell & Hardman of Birmingham. The late-twentieth-century glass in the west rose window is unfortunate.
Sir Humphrey’s son and heir sold most of Trafford Park for £360,000 to Ernest Terah Hooley (1859-1947) who became known as “The Splendid Bankrupt”, but retained the western portion, including Barton, until 1924.
The canal bisected the parish, and the unpredictable closing of the Barton swing-bridge meant that parishioners were frequently delayed to the extent that it became impossible to fix Mass times precisely. The population gradually moved away: by the 1950s Catholic churches were opening on the new housing estates, and All Saints’ remained open only out of deference to an ageing congregation who had worshipped there all their lives.
All Saints’ finally closed as a parish church in 1961, and in September 1962 it was handed over to the Franciscan Friars Minor Conventual, who had provided priests for the parish since 1928. They renamed it the Church of the City of Mary Immaculate, but it is still commonly known by its original dedication. The church was listed Grade I on May 9th 1978.
All Saints’ isn’t easy to visit because the site is an operational friary. It’s open on an occasional basis, and it would be prudent to enquire about arrangements before visiting: https://www.nationalchurchestrust.org/church/all-saints-friary-barton-upon-irwell. Though not as heavily atmospheric as Augustus Pugin’s masterpiece,St Giles’ Roman Catholic Church, Cheadle, Staffordshire, it’s a very beautiful building by a first-rate architect whose career stands in the shadow of his father’s work.
My knee-jerk reaction when faced with an attractive or historic derelict building is to hope that someone will find a use that will pay for its upkeep.
Travelling on the Manchester Metrolink line to Rochdale, I was appalled at the state of Hartford Mill, near Werneth, and bemused by its great size.
It was built as a cotton-spinning mill in 1907, twice extended in the 1920s, and closed in 1959. It was used as a mail-order warehouse by Littlewoods until 1992, after which no-one could think what to do with it, though it was listed Grade II in 1993.
It’s a shame that this huge, magnificent building was simply left to rot.
It became a notorious focus for anti-social behaviour, including several severe arson attacks, culminating in the death of an eighteen-year-old youth in a fall in 2015.
In the end there was no alternative but to demolish the mill – no mean task. The Mill is a five-storey building 25 bays long and 12 bays wide with a corner tower.
The leader of Oldham Borough Council, Sean Fielding, told the Manchester Evening News (August 30th 2018),–
“When people travel through Oldham on the Metrolink line they don’t want a deteriorating old mill to be what they see – and it’s certainly not what residents should have to look at every day.
“Everyone deserves to live in decent areas where families and communities can prosper and feel proud.
“Oldham is an aspirational place to live, work and invest and to continue that improvement we must make full use of sites like Hartford Mill.”
It’s often forgotten that when James Brindley (1716-1772)
surveyed his canal to carry coal from the Duke of Bridgewater’s mines at
Worsley, he originally planned to build its terminus in Salford.
This was the route authorised by the first Bridgewater Canal
Act of 1759.
Almost immediately, Brindley made the radical decision to
take the canal across the River Irwell so that it could terminate at
Castlefield in Manchester.
This scheme made it practical to build an extension, longer
than the original main line, to run parallel to the Mersey & Irwell
Navigation towards Liverpool, but it depended on bridging the River Irwell with
an aqueduct, carrying canal barges above
an existing waterway, at Barton-upon-Irwell.
Despite the scepticism of other engineers and
parliamentarians, and even though the first ingress of water nearly caused the
collapse of one of the three arches, Brindley’s Barton Aqueduct proved to be practical when it opened in 1761, and it became the wonder of the age.
All the great aqueducts the canal age stem from this modest-looking structure.
Its replacement, the hydraulic Barton Swing Aqueduct (1894), is remarkable in its own way.
It was designed by the Ship Canal’s engineer, Edward Leader
Williams (1828-1910), the designer of the Anderton Boat Lift (1875), and was
constructed by the ironfounders Andrew Handyside & Co of Derby.
Watertight gates block the canal and the tank that carries
boats, as the bridge swings to lie parallel with the Ship Canal so that
ocean-going vessels can pass.
The adjacent Barton
Road Swing Bridge works in tandem with the aqueduct, and both are
controlled from the four-storey brick valve house on the man-made island in the
middle of the Ship Canal.
At one time the single-carriageway Barton road bridge was
practically part of the Manchester ring road, and the traffic delays became
notorious after the Second World War.
The traffic jams were relieved but not eliminated by the
construction of the M60 Barton High
Level Bridge (1960) to the west of the swing bridges.
Standing on the canal bank or the swing road bridge at
Barton is a reminder of how far engineering has developed since the uneducated
millwright James Brindley ventured to bridge the river with a canal in the
middle of the eighteenth century.
Former Refuge Assurance Headquarters, Manchester (now Principal Hotel): porte-cochère
The
magnificent former Manchester headquarters of the Refuge Assurance Company is a fitting symbol of the city’s
nineteenth-century prestige and prosperity, an extravagant temple to the
virtues of thrift and frugality.
The Refuge Friend in Deed Life Assurance & Sick Fund Friendly Society was founded in 1858 by James Proctor and George Robins of Dukinfield, near Stalybridge, east of Manchester. By the late nineteenth century their society based on saving for the future had expanded to the extent that it needed a prominent headquarters in Manchester city centre.
For commercial buildings the architect, Alfred Waterhouse (1830-1905), favoured the use of moulded glazed or unglazed brick to create rich decorative effects at less expense than ashlar and carved stonework. Some of his best public buildings in Manchester were built in stone – the Assize Courts (1859-64, demolished) and the Town Hall (1868-77) – though Strangeways Prison (1868) is brick with stone dressings.
Elsewhere, his attachment to terracotta, and its tin-glazed derivative, faience, gained prominence after he designed the Natural History Museum, South Kensington (1873-80) and became widely recognised by his work for the Prudential Assurance Company at their London headquarters at Holborn Bars (1895-1901) and at instantly recognisable branch offices across the nation.
These terracotta buildings were satirised as “slaughterhouse Gothic”, which is unfair, partly because most of them are in other styles than Gothic, but furthermore because, though the outside elevations were deep red, the interiors were invariably varied and colourful, and could be kept bright because they were practically washable.
Alfred
Waterhouse’s original building for the Refuge Assurance Company in central
Manchester, on the corner of Oxford Street and Whitworth Street, was started in
1891 and completed in 1895.
The architect’s son, Paul Waterhouse, continued the Oxford Street elevation, including the 217-foot clock tower, in 1910-12. Both designs are an eclectic mix of French Renaissance style with baroque features, liberally embellished with emblems such as the bee, symbolising Manchester’s industry, and the initial ‘R’ for ‘Refuge’.
The company
owned the land further along Whitworth Street, where India House (1906), Lancaster
House (1905-10) and Asia House,
Princess Street (1906-9) were built, leaving room on Whitworth Street for a
further extension of the Refuge headquarters, designed in harmony with the
existing building by Stanley Birkett (1884-1959) in 1932.
The Refuge
Assurance Company left Manchester in 1987 for a purpose-built site at Fulshaw
Hall, Cheshire. The Manchester building
was considered as a replacement home for the Hallé Orchestra but instead the
orchestra moved directly from the Free Trade Hall to the Bridgewater Hall in 1996.
Instead, the
Refuge building was converted into a 271-room hotel which also opened in
1996. It was named the Palace after the
theatre on the opposite corner of Whitworth Street. The hotel was reconfigured, with conference
facilities separated in the 1932 Excalibur Building, and rebranded the
Principal in 2016.
The main
features of the Waterhouse buildings of 1891-95 and 1910-12 are the porte-cochère,
originally open until the dome was inserted in 1996, the open-plan office space and the clock
tower, its faces embellished with the Manchester bee.
Within, the
private directors’ staircase, decorated
with Cararra marble and a bronze balustrade and embellished with stained-glass
coats of arms of the cities and boroughs where the company did business, leads
to the director’s boardroom.
The Stanley
Birkett building respects its older neighbour, but the interior colour-palette
is toned down to white, and the decorative features tend towards moderne in style.
The Refuge
building featured in the climax of the 1960 Hammer film, Hell is a City, written and directed by Val Guest. An analysis of the locations used is at https://www.reelstreets.com/films/hell-is-a-city.
Tours of the Principal Hotel are provided by Jonathan Schofield, a professional tour-guide and author who knows Manchester like the back of his hand, tells good stories well, and has a voice that cuts through the city’s traffic noise like a bandsaw: https://www.jonathanschofieldtours.com/exclusive-the-principal-hotel.html.
Rochdale Town Hall: corbel portrait of William Henry Crossland (1823-1909)Rochdale Town Hall: corbel portrait of George Leach Ashworth (1823-1873)
When I planned my 2019 Manchester’s Heritage tour I
knew I couldn’t include Manchester’s magnificent Town Hall because it’s closed
for a five-year refurbishment.
However, there’s more to “Manchester” than Manchester, and a
tram-ride away from St Peter’s Square terminates close to Rochdale
Town Hall, smaller, but hardly less magnificent than Manchester Town Hall,
with a host of entertaining stories attached to it.
No sooner had the new borough of Rochdale elected its first
Corporation in 1856 than a sub-committee began work to provide a suitable town
hall.
The committee chairman, George Leach Ashworth (1823-1873), was
originally unenthusiastic about the project.
When the Church Commissioners eventually agreed a price for land
alongside the River Roch, Ashworth tried unsuccessfully to limit the budget to
£15,000, on the grounds that it was “…only requisite that we should have a
handsome frontage.”
An architectural competition, stipulating a budget limit of
£20,000, was won by the Leeds architect William Henry Crossland (1823-1909), a
pupil of the great Gothic Revival architect, George Gilbert Scott.
Despite the budget-limit, Crossland’s initial estimate of £26,510
was repeatedly augmented at the Corporation’s request. The Great Hall was increased in area to 90ft
× 56ft, and the 240ft tower was embellished with an octagonal lantern decorated
with carved trumpeting angels and surmounted by a spire supporting a solid wood
statue of St George and the Dragon by Earp of London.
Several ancient buildings were demolished and the River Roch
culverted to provide the impressive seventy-foot-wide esplanade.
Crossland provided grand public rooms, the Mayor’s suite,
administrative offices and, initially, the public library, and the west wing
was given to the fire and police departments, together with a court room and
ancillary cells and a residence for the Chief Constable.
The building is faced with millstone grit from Blackstone Edge, generously
dignified by sculpture. The fire
department, for example, was identified with the phoenix, the salamander, the
owl (symbolising watchfulness) and the dog (indicating alarm-raising). For reasons that are unrecorded, a buttress
on the porte-cochère is ornamented
with a winged pig.
The interior was no less extravagant. The entrance hall, designed as a
wool-merchants’ exchange though never used as such, has a heraldic Minton tiled
floor. The windows of the vast staircase
are filled with lancet windows showing the arms of the counties, towns and
ports with which Rochdale traded, together with the technological marvels of
the day – the steamship, the railway and the telegraph.
The Great Hall is lit by windows depicting every English monarch
from William the Conqueror to William IV, together with Oliver Cromwell as Lord
Protector; Queen Victoria and Prince
Albert are portrayed in the rose windows at each end. On the eastern wall is Henry Holiday’s fresco
of the signing of Magna Carta, and the hammer beams support carved angels, from
which originally hung chandeliers.
The magistrates’ retiring room has depictions of nine English
figures associated with lawmaking and the English constitution. The Mayor’s Parlour is decorated with the
Garden of the Hesperides, the four seasons, the months of the year and a group
of musicians. The committee room frieze
shows animals associated, in one way or another, with primitive clothing, and the
walls of the arched council chamber are decorated with a ground of bursting
cotton pods and teasels, and panels showing weaving, spinning, textile-printing,
the plants used in textile manufacture and the inventions of Kay, Cartwright,
Hargreaves and Crompton.
In No 3 Committee Room the corbels show the supporters of the Town
Hall scheme, deftly described by Colin Cunningham, in Victorian and
Edwardian Town Halls (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1981): “…the architect wearily toying with a pair of
dividers and the mayor clutching his new town hall”.
By the time the Town Hall was completed in 1871, the final cost
was £154,755 9s 11d, and the Mayor, G L Ashworth, remarked that “we cannot have
beauty without paying for it.”
Dry rot in the spire was being treated when the tower burnt down in 1883. One local legend declares that the fire was deliberately started by the workmen, who feared for their own safety as they took apart the rotten structure. Another legend has it that the Rochdale fire brigade, which was stationed at the back of the building, was beaten to the blaze by the Oldham brigade.
The more modest but still impressive 191ft-high replacement was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, the architect of Manchester Town Hall, and completed in 1887.
The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ tour, including a section on Rochdale, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.
Church of the Holy Name of Jesus, Oxford Road, Manchester
The Church of the
Holy Name of Jesus, Oxford Road, Manchester, stands as a symbol of
permanence in an area that has seen huge changes since the parish was founded
in middle of the nineteenth century.
In the decade after the Great Famine of 1845-49, thousands
of Irish immigrants settled to the south of the River Medlock.
The first Bishop of Salford, William Turner (1799-1872), invited
the Society of Jesus to provide clergy for a new parish to be located in a
temporary church in Burlington Street.
This structure, named Gesù after the Society’s mother-church in Rome,
was opened on Easter Tuesday, April 4th 1868.
The foundation stone of what came to be called Holy Name Church was laid in June 1869.
The shell of the building without interior fittings cost
£14,000 and was opened on October 15th 1871.
The architect was Joseph Aloysius Hansom (1803-1882), famed as the inventor of the ‘Patent Safety Cab’ that bears his name. He designed Birmingham Town Hall (designed 1831-32, completed 1861). His other major churches are Mount St Mary’s Church, Leeds (1851-57), St Walburge’s Church, Preston (1854), Plymouth Cathedral (1856-58) and Arundel Cathedral (1869-73).
Built of brick, faced with Warwick Bridge stone outside and
terracotta within, Hansom’s design is in fourteenth-century Gothic style.
The façade is asymmetrical: the baptistery with its conical roof extends to the south, and because of the street-layout the footprint is trapezoidal, so that the liturgical east end (actually north-east) is wider than the entrance. This is disguised by the layout of chapels along the south aisle, which are balanced by confessionals, each with its own fireplace, to the north.
The nave is wide, light and spacious, reflecting the Jesuit
preoccupation with preaching. The
rib-vault of hollow polygonal terracotta blocks by Gibbs & Canning Ltd of
Tamworth is supported by slender columns.
J A Hansom intended a slender lantern and spire 240 feet high with twin windows and gables, but it was abandoned for fear of overburdening the foundations.
Instead, a shorter, tapered tower was designed by Adrian Gilbert Scott (1882-1963), younger brother of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the architect of Liverpool Cathedral. It was completed at a cost of £17,000 in 1928. Its carillon of bells was dedicated on October 13th 1931.
During the ministry of Fr Bernard Vaughan SJ (1847-1922,
brother of Cardinal Henry Vaughan), the church had a powerful influence on the
surrounding community.
In the year 1900 the parish, with a population of 3,500,
registered 25 converts, 125 baptisms, 2,850 Easter Communions and 32,815
confessions. A bazaar in 1893 raised £7,350,
supplemented by a donation of a thousand guineas by Sir Humphrey Trafford, then
the owner of Trafford Park, and his friends.
In 1895 the funeral of Sir Charles Hallé took place at Holy
Name Church: the cortège reached Weaste
Cemetery four hours after the start of High Mass, which included a performance
of the Mozart Requiem and Beethoven’s Eroica
symphony.
The removal of local families to outer-Manchester housing
estates from the end of the 1920s, the upheavals of the Second World War and
the post-war clearance of the surrounding streets radically changed the setting
of Holy Name Church.
The area became a collective campus for what are now the
city’s three universities – the University of Manchester (formerly the Victoria
University of Manchester), the Manchester Metropolitan University (previously
Manchester Polytechnic) and the Royal Northern College of Music (founded by Sir
Charles Hallé as the Royal Manchester School of Music).
The Jesuits moved away in 1985 and from 1992 the church was run by the brothers of an Oratory of Saint Philip Neri. In 2003 the Oratorians moved to St Chad’s, Cheetham Hill, the mother-church of Manchester Catholics, and the Jesuits were invited back to Holy Name to run the Manchester Universities’ Catholic Chaplaincy: http://www.muscc.org.
For details of Mike Higginbottom’s ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ lecture, please click here.
The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.
Manchester is not only the home of the oldest free public reference library in the United Kingdom – Chetham’s – but boasts one of the thirty-odd surviving independent subscription libraries in the country, thePortico Library, founded by a consortium of Manchester businessmen in 1802 and opened on Mosley Street in 1806.
Originally set in a fashionable part of town, the Portico
Library provided an exclusive, politically neutral meeting-place for the
professional and business communities, enabling members to read, research and
keep up with the news in quiet, comfortable surroundings.
The architect Thomas Harrison of Chester provided an
impressive entrance through an Ionic portico which led to a galleried newsroom
lit by a glazed dome, “larger by 700 square feet than the coffee room of the
Athenaeum in Liverpool”. Bookcases lined
the first-floor gallery. The total cost
of construction was £6,881 5s 3d.
By the 1830s the properties on Mosley Street were given over
to trade, as the merchants moved out to such suburban developments as Victoria
Park. Members commuted into town for
business and used the library mostly in the daytime. By 1900 most of the members were described as
“gentlemen”, though some were cotton manufacturers and merchants.
The Portico Library is rightly proud of its distinguished members. Paul Roget (1779-1869), a physician at the Infirmary and the author of the famous Thesaurus, was the first Secretary. The scientist John Dalton (1766-1844), a lecturer in a Manchester dissenting academy, was accorded honorary membership in return for “superintend[ing] the going of the clock”. The Rev William Gaskell (1805-1844), minister at Cross Street Chapel and a noted academic, was Chairman for thirty years and is commemorated in the library by a portrait and a bust.
Others included the engineer Sir Joseph Whitworth Bt (1803-1887), the cotton manufacturer, merchant John Rylands (1801-1888) whose widow founded the Library that bears his name on Deansgate, and the industrialist and politician Ernest Simon (latterly Baron Simon of Wythemshawe, 1879-1960).
Members’ families visited the Library from the outset. An irritable notice of 1817 declared
“Children should not on any account be suffered to…touch the prints, or to turn
over the leaves”. “Ladies of the
respective families of the Subscribers” were allowed to use the Library, and
one of them, Mrs Ann Frost, was allowed membership in 1853, though limited
formal membership for women was only introduced in 1873.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century the social and cultural environment in which the Library operated changed increasingly rapidly. Though the cotton trade remained robust, Manchester’s prominence in national politics had shifted to the Chamberlains’ Birmingham. Municipal free libraries, scattered across the city, reduced the need for the Portico’s book collection. The Proprietors debated at length amalgamating with the Athenaeum, selling the book-collection, or selling the entire building.
A practical solution was found after the end of the Great
War. In 1920 the ground floor and
basement was leased to the Bank of Athens, which paid for an internal glazed dome
to allow the library to occupy the first-floor level with an independent
entrance on Charlotte Street. The Manchester Evening News commented that
if the Portico “cannot claim to be rolling in money, it may claim that there
will be plenty of money rolling beneath it”.
The building was listed in 1952, which both ensured its
survival and limited the scope for adaptation.
Eventually, after Lloyds’ Bank, successors to the Bank of Athens, moved out, the internal dome was replaced by a solid floor, separating first-floor library from the area below, which became a public house called The Bank.
This transformed library was inaugurated in 1987, and its flexibility led to a rebirth of the institution, which in addition to offering books, periodicals and light refreshments as it always did, mounts exhibitions, hosts performance events, hosts weddings, awards literary prizes and welcomes outside visitors.
For details of Mike Higginbottom’s ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ lecture, please click here.
The 60-page, A4 handbook for the 2019 ‘Manchester’s Heritage’ tour, including a section on Ancoats, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
