A Victorian Bequest

In 2018, this celebrated building closed for a six year renovation. COUNTRY LIFE recorded its empty interiors before work began and Steven Brindle tells its exceptional story.

BY the early 19th century, Manchester had emerged as one of the first true industrial cities in the world. It had a skyline of spinning mills and tall chimneys, as well as horrendous slums, but it also had an energetic middle class, dedicated to self-improvement and making money. Late- Georgian Manchester equipped itself with a number of public buildings and cultural institutions, mostly in the Greek Revival style, such as its first town hall on King Street, which was designed by Francis Goodwin and built between 1819 and 1834.

By the 1860s, Manchester had outgrown Goodwin’s building. The town’s corporation conceived the project for a new building in 1863 and decided to proceed in 1864. The corporation may have been full of hard-nosed businessmen, but where the new town hall was concerned, no expense was to be spared: they wanted it to be ‘equal, if not superior, to any similar building in the country’.

A two-stage competition was organised to choose an architect, with the 137 entries assessed by Prof T. L. Donaldson and the eminent church architect and Gothicist George Edmund Street. Eight entries went through to the second round and, on April 1, 1868, Alfred Waterhouse (1830–1905) was announced as the winner.

Waterhouse had been born in Liverpool, the son of a Quaker mill owner. His brother Edwin was an accountant and a founding partner in the firm that became Price Waterhouse and another brother, Theodore, was a solicitor and co-founder of the firm now known as Field Fisher Waterhouse.