The tower that hums in the wind, the cluster that overtook it, and the awkward fact that Manchester has no proper viewing platform.
For a decade Beetham Tower was Manchester’s answer to the question of whether it was a real city. Finished in 2006, 47 storeys, 169 metres, designed by Ian Simpson, who then moved into the flat at the top and planted mature trees in it.
The famous feature is not the height. It is the hum.
The noise
A glass blade projects about four metres above the roofline, purely for looks. In a strong south-westerly it resonates, and the whole city centre can hear it — a low, unhappy moaning that carries for a mile and shows up on the local news whenever a storm arrives.
Engineers have been at it repeatedly with rubber shims and other fixes. It has been reduced. It has not been eliminated. On a wild night in Castlefield you can still stand in the street and listen to a skyscraper complaining.
What overtook it
Manchester has built upwards very fast since 2016.
Deansgate Square, four towers on the southern edge of the centre, includes the South Tower at 201 metres — comfortably the tallest building in the city and, for now, the tallest in the UK outside London.
Beyond that: Viadux, the Renaker cluster at Great Jackson Street, and a steady run of consents that keeps the skyline moving. Manchester’s centre had almost no tall buildings in 1995. It now has a recognisable cluster, and whether that is an achievement or a planning failure is one of the city’s permanent arguments.
Where the views actually are
Cloud 23, on the twenty-third floor of Beetham Tower, is a cocktail bar with a very good westward view towards the Pennines and the Cheshire plain. Booking is essential and there is a spend.
20 Stories at No.1 Spinningfields has a terrace, which on the ten good evenings a year is the best seat in the city.
Castlefield Viaduct, the National Trust’s sky garden thirty feet up on a disused Victorian railway deck, is free with a timed ticket and gives a low, strange, green view of the basin. It is nothing like a tower and it is much more interesting.
For a proper high panorama without a bar tab, the honest answer is to walk up Werneth Low or take the train to Edale and climb. Manchester is a city best seen from the hills it was built to trade with.
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