Manchester’s Architecture: The Honest Version
Manchester was the first industrial city. That fact shaped its architecture more than anything else: buildings went up fast, in brick, to house the cotton trade and the people who ran it. The civic buildings that followed – built with cotton money, designed to assert the wealth and ambition of the commercial middle class – are among the finest Victorian public buildings in England. The industrial heritage of Ancoats and Castlefield is internationally significant. The modern stuff is, to be honest, mixed.
This is a walking guide to the best of it. The route starts at Albert Square and works outward, covering the civic core, the commercial district, Castlefield, and Ancoats. You can do the whole thing in three to four hours; you can also do sections of it independently if you have less time.
The Victorian Civic Buildings – Start at Albert Square
Manchester Town Hall is the beginning and the end of any architecture conversation in this city. Alfred Waterhouse designed it, construction ran from 1868 to 1877, and the result is one of the great Gothic Revival public buildings in England. The exterior is best appreciated from Albert Square: stand in front of the statue of Prince Albert and look at the elevation properly. The clock tower, the carved stone detail, the way the building handles its triangular site – it’s extraordinarily good. Tours of the interior are available (check availability as restoration work has been ongoing) and worth doing: the Great Hall with Ford Madox Brown’s murals depicting Manchester’s history is remarkable.
From Town Hall, walk south down Peter Street to the Central Library. The circular, columned building in the Pantheon style, opened in 1934, is a confident piece of neo-classicism that shouldn’t work given it’s placed next to a Gothic Revival town hall but does. It’s a proper library, free to enter, and has been recently restored to excellent condition.
John Rylands Library, Deansgate
Walk west along Peter Street and south to Deansgate. The John Rylands Library is the best individual building in Manchester. Enriqueta Rylands commissioned Basil Champneys to design it as a memorial to her husband; it opened in 1900. The exterior – red sandstone Gothic, designed to resemble a cathedral more than a library – is astonishing from Deansgate. But go inside. The reading room is one of the finest Victorian interiors in England: carved stonework, stained glass, the gallery above the main floor looking down onto the reading tables. It’s free to enter. Most people walk past it on Deansgate without going in. Don’t be one of those people.
Castlefield – Industrial Heritage
Castlefield is where Manchester began, at the junction of the Bridgewater Canal and the River Irwell. The remains of the Roman fort are here (the Mamucium reconstructed section). More importantly architecturally are the warehouse structures along the canal basin and the remarkable viaducts. The Castlefield viaduct – now extended as a public elevated park – runs above the canal and provides views of the brick warehouse architecture that characterises the area. The mid-nineteenth century warehouses, most now converted to bars, restaurants, and apartments, give a clear picture of how the canal trade shaped the built environment.
The G-Mex building (now Manchester Central convention centre) on Lower Mosley Street is the former Central railway station, and its iron and glass train shed – visible from the outside – is one of the best Victorian engineering structures in the city. The contrast with the Town Hall nearby is instructive: two completely different architectural traditions, both rooted in the same Victorian period, both excellent.
Ancoats – The Mills
Ancoats is described as the world’s first industrial suburb, which is accurate and remarkable when you walk through it. The early nineteenth century cotton mills – Murrays Mills, Sedgwick Mill, Royal Mill among others – are what makes Ancoats architecturally significant beyond regional interest. These are not small buildings. They’re multi-storey red brick structures covering substantial footprints, built to contain the cotton spinning machinery and the workers who operated it. Many have been converted to apartments and offices; several are accessible or visible from the street.
Walk along Redhill Street and the canal basin at Ancoats. The scale of the former mill buildings in the context of the surrounding streets – narrow, brick-built, industrial – is impossible to replicate and nowhere else in Manchester looks like this. The restoration work done over the last 20 years has been mostly respectful. It’s one of the few parts of Manchester that genuinely justifies the overused word historic.
The Modern Buildings – Beetham Tower and Others
Beetham Tower (2006, Ian Simpson Architects) is Manchester’s one genuinely distinctive modern landmark. The 47-storey glass tower with the cantilevered section near the top – the Hilton Hotel above, apartments below – is striking from most of the city and has a confidence that the other glass towers in Manchester largely lack. It doesn’t try to contextualise itself with the Victorian brick around it; it simply asserts that it’s a tower and gets on with it. From across the city centre it marks the skyline clearly. Cloud 23, the bar on the 23rd floor, gives access to views that justify the building’s dominant presence.
No.1 Spinningfields (2009, Ian Simpson again) is the other significant modern commercial building, though far less familiar. Aviva Studios – Factory International’s new cultural building on Quay Street, opened 2023 – is the most interesting new building of recent years: a genuinely large, flexible space with ambitions that match the City’s claim to be a serious cultural centre.
The Failures
Manchester’s city centre was devastated by an IRA bomb in 1996. The subsequent reconstruction produced some good public realm – the pedestrianisation of Exchange Square, the new retail layout – but the buildings that replaced what was destroyed are not always convincing. The Arndale Centre’s exterior is no better than it was before the bomb, and some of the glass-fronted retail units on New Cathedral Street represent the least interesting version of early 2000s commercial architecture. The various glass residential towers appearing along Deansgate and Great Jackson Street lack the confidence of Beetham and the quality of the Victorian buildings around them. Manchester is not alone in building mediocre tall residential blocks during a housing boom, but it could have done better.
