20th Century Manchester & NorthWest England

Modern Manchester Buildings (1)

20th Century Buildings in Manchester

Manchester suffered like many UK cities from the excesses of high rise building in steel and concrete in the 1960s and 70s, (the Crescents in Hulme, now thankfully gone, being possibly the most infamous examples), and some of the city's best buildings were demolished to make way for many of these 20th century monstrosities. Fortunately, there were some excellent buildings to offset the others - here are the best and a few of the worst.

Gateway House

Station Approach, Piccadilly Rail Station, Manchester
Running along the whole length of Piccadilly Station Approach, Gateway House is one of the visitor's first views of the City of Manchester. It was carried out as part of a greater improvement and refurbishment of Piccadilly Station in the 1960s, and was actually completed in 1969. Designed by Richard Seifert & Partners, its sweeping curved glass frontage adds a somewhat baroque sense to the old London Road approach to Manchester. At ground floor level are shops. The site formerly houses several derelict warehouses of the old Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway (the MS&LR). Only one, the London Warehouse, still survives, nowadays as a new high class luxury apartment block.

See Also: Railway Stations

Gateway House, Piccadilly Station Approach

Marks & Spencer Department Store

Corporation Street, Manchester.
On 15 June 1996, a 3,000lb terrorist car bomb exploded in Manchester, ripping into the fabric of the city's main shopping centre - among them the original Marks & Spencer Department Store. See IRA Bombing. In the aftermath, the old store had to be completely demolished, but M&S decided to rebuild - bigger, grander and better. What resulted was the largest M&S department store in the world, measuring over 32,500 square metres of space on four floors. The designers, Building Design Partnership, conceived a monolithic concrete form, poured on-site, covering a footprint measuring 65 metres by 100 metres. Reinforcement of the concrete took 4,200 metric tons of steel, erected by the Bovis Company. Most of the exterior is covered by glass curtain walling, with masonry in Jura Limestone cladding. The whole project, computer designed had to be constructed and completed over a two year period. The new building is umbilically joined to the Arndale Shopping Centre by a superb glass suspended walkway bridge to replace the original which was fatally damaged in the bombing. The new building presents essentially glass wall on all facades and has a major access point at the newly created Exchange Square side to the north.

The original M&S Store -
now demolished

The new M&S Store

Piccadilly Plaza

Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester
Designed by Covell Matthews & Partners and built between 1959 and 1965, this was, from the outset, one of Manchester's most controversial buildings. Its sheer size out of all proportion to its architectural merit or importance. Dominating Piccadilly Gardens on the south side, it was remodelled and refurbished in 2001 by Leslie Jones Architects. The complex is effectively four discrete units, the horizontal podium block, the Piccadilly Hotel block, Sunley Tower, and Bernard House, (currently under demolition and replacement). The ground Floor of the podium contains shops, and there is underground car parking. For many years the Plaza been home to Manchester's Piccadilly Radio.
For much of its life, the Plaza's untreated concrete has grown ever more shabby, and in such a high profile central location, nobody quite knew what to do with it.
In many ways, however, it is architecturally quite daring. The hotel slab, with its cantilevered block overhanging Portland Street below is initially quite breathtaking. Conversely, the office slab, Sunley House, rises 24 storeys above the podium showing a rather blank concrete side face to Piccadilly Gardens and the bus station below. This aspect is actually surface decorated with concrete printed circuitry motifs standing out in relief - a detail that has always failed to be recognised by passers-by, and none but students of architecture have ever identified them - a complete waste of time and effort.
The Plaza is a good example of the" Good, the Bad and the Ugly" and Mancunians tend to either love it or hate it.

Part of Piccadilly Plaza showing the Hotel Piccadilly.

Sunley Tower/Piccadilly Plaza

Arndale Centre

By the mid-1960s, the inner city area lying between Withy Grove, Corporation Street, Shudehill and Market Street, was ready for some serious redevelopment. It had grown up haphazard and hotchpotch, many of its old cobbled streets were shabby and congested.
Begun in 1972, by Arndale Property Trust, headed by Sam Chippendale, on completion in 1979 it was the largest covered town shopping centre in Europe, encompassing some 30 acres in the old city centre, with over 200 shops, major department stores, restaurants and fast food outlets. It has become a busy and active shopping arcade with over 75,000 shoppers a day!
The Centre also houses an 1,800 space multi-storey car park, shopping malls on two levels, office space in the tower, residential flats at roof parking level, and the Arndale Centre Bus Station at Cannon Street, (closed by the IRA bombing of Manchester in 1996, and not yet reopened - its future somewhat uncertain).
The design for the Centre was made by the architects Hugh Wilson and Lewis Womersley, who had already redeveloped the University Precinct on Oxford Road, as well as a considerable involvement in the redevelopment of housing in the Hulme area.
It was a controversial development, obliterating some of Manchester's old streets and alleys, and stubbornly defying all the old Victorian grandeur surrounding it, with its massive monolithic concrete forms and unrelieved ceramic cladding. The whole project cost some £100 million - a then unthinkable sum.
The land earmarked for rebuilding had been designated as a "Comprehensive Development Area" by the City Council. Many different companies had bought and owned the land through the 1970s, but it was eventually to be built by Town & City Properties, who, in the face of mounting financial difficulties and substantial underwritten loans of over £16 million, sold the lease to P&O Properties, who managed the complex until 1998 when it was taken over by the Prudential.
The Centre houses many major department stores and famous High Street names, including W.H.Smith, BHS, Littlewoods, Mothercare, Tandy's, etc, as well as innumerable other smaller concessions.
It's very large beige coloured tiled cladding is looking a little tired nowadays, despite having been designed as "self-cleaning" - an experiment that clearly failed! The whole northern frontage in Corporation street has been completely rebuilt in the aftermath of the bombing, and presents an altogether more attractive aspect to the newly created Exchange Square.
Generally, though its interiors provide a pleasant enough shopping environment, the exterior is widely disliked for its blandness and scale: there are many (residents and visitors alike) who feel that this mid-1960s concept is too gargantuan an edifice to dominate the city centre, surrounded as it is with so many other fine period buildings.

UPDATE
A complete renovation of the much-hated exterior of the Arndale Centre has recently been completed as well as revamping Market Street. Work began in February 2003. Its infamous yellow tiles have disappeared! A new entrance atrium, Cromford Court, has been created and floodlit at night. Further redevelopment is currently in progress at the Cannon Street-Shudehill end of the complex.

Above and Below: exterior and interior of Manchester's Arndale Centre

The Arndale Centre Tower

The CIS Tower

The Co-operative Wholesale Society,
Miller Street, Manchester
Probably the best of all the 1960s high rise Manchester office blocks - it rises some 25 storeys, over 400 feet above ground level. Building began in 1959, and this tall tower dominates the approach to Manchester from Bury and Cheetham Hill in the north.
It was to be the Co-operative Society's flagship head office and administrative centre in Manchester.
The design team, who included the Co-op's own G.S.Hay and Gordon Tait of Burnett, Tait & Partners, had actually visited Chicago in the USA to study the Inland Steel Building by celebrated architect/engineers, Skidmore Owings & Merril to gain inspiration for the project - a fact, no doubt, that explains the outstanding quality of the CIS building, which still holds its own among later more high tech city centre buildings today.
Three aims had been dictated by the owners - 1) the building should create prestige for the company, 2) it should complement and improve the skyline of Manchester, and 3) it should provide a first class working environment for the staff. It was deemed to have fulfilled all three requirements on completion in 1962.
The building is really two stuck together - one a steel and glass tower, which is the working offices area of the building, and the other adjoining as a windowless mosaic covered concrete service tower. No expense was spared on quality - all steel was black enamelled, and the mosaic covering, though expensive, was designed to protect and render the concrete virtually maintenance-free. Both materials have withstood the subsequent 40 years of Manchester grime, and the building still looks relatively smart after four decades of exposure to the worst that Manchester has thrown at it.
The spacious entrance hall carries a fibreglass mural by William Mitchell. The interior cherry and teak veneers were researched and recommended by Misha Black and the Design Research Team.

Former National Westminster Bank

55 King Street, Manchester
In its time this National Westminster Bank building was the most expensive in Manchester, costing over £12 million. Designed by Casson, Conder & Partners between 1966-69, it is a fortress-like edifice, purposely built in black stone to resist the (then) notorious Manchester soot which covered virtually all the buildings in the city centre. This sombreness was also thought appropriate for the bank's former northern headquarters, overseeing 700 branches throughout the northwest of England.
Eventually to be knighted, Sir Hugh Casson was senior member of the design partnership - it had been he who had laid out the Festival of Britain in London in 1951. Later he was to become President of the Royal Academy.
The bank was constructed in situ of monolithic poured concrete with steel reinforcement, as an all-concrete shell with transfer beams and external voids for window apertures - a simple elegant design solution.
It's rough hand-tooled vertically ribbed dark cladding of Swedish granite is perhaps its most distinctive external feature, apart from its great bulk as it dwarfs other commercial buildings around it - though only six storeys above ground it has an outstanding massiveness which dominates King Street. There are also 3 basement storeys below street level.
The building's ground floor is now a small retail shopping complex.

See also:

• Debenham's Department Store (the Rylands Building)
• Kendal Department Store, Deansgate
• Midland Bank, King Street
• Bridgewater Hall
• Manchester Evening News Arena
• The Lowry Exhibition Centre
• National Cycling Velodrome, Eastlands

See also:

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