Waterhouse's Gothic town hall, the most confident building in the city, back after the longest restoration in its history.
Manchester was not a city when it commissioned this. It was a borough, incorporated in 1838, run by men who had made an enormous amount of money out of cotton and were extremely aware that Westminster still regarded them as provincial. So they held a competition, chose Alfred Waterhouse, and spent £1 million — an absurd sum in the 1870s — on a town hall.
It opened in 1877. It is Gothic because Gothic was the argument: this is a serious city with a long past, not a shed full of looms that appeared in fifty years.
The building
The plan is a triangle, because the site was a triangle, and Waterhouse solved it by wrapping the offices around a courtyard and putting the Great Hall on the first floor. The tower is 87 metres, which made it the tallest thing in Manchester for a very long time.
Look up at the front. The statues are not saints. They are Roman generals, medieval merchants, textile chemists and canal engineers — Agricola, who founded the fort, and John Dalton, who worked out atomic theory in a room a few streets away.
The Ford Madox Brown murals
In the Great Hall, twelve panels by Ford Madox Brown, painted between 1879 and 1893, telling the city’s history. They are strange and worth the trip. The Romans Building a Fort at Mancenion. The Trial of Wycliffe. Dalton Collecting Marsh Fire Gas, in which the great chemist stands in a bog holding a jar while a small boy jumps on the mud to release the bubbles.
No coronations, no battles, no kings. Weaving, chemistry, drainage and dissent — a city choosing to be commemorated for what it actually did.
The restoration
The building closed in 2018 for a structural overhaul that was budgeted at £330 million and has climbed considerably past that. Stonework, roofs, the tower, and the accessibility work a Grade I listed maze needs.
It is a very large amount of public money in a decade when Manchester also closed libraries, and that argument has been had loudly and locally. Whether it was worth it is a fair question; that the building would have failed without it is not really in dispute.
Seeing it
The exterior and Albert Square cost nothing and are the point for most visitors. The square itself was relandscaped alongside the work.
The Albert Memorial in front predates the hall — 1865, the first monument raised to Prince Albert anywhere.
For interiors, the Manchester Art Gallery two minutes away is free, open, and holds work by the same generation.
More Landmarks
John Rylands Library
A widow spent a cotton fortune on a cathedral for books. It is free, and it is the most beautiful room in Manchester.
Manchester Cathedral
The widest nave in England, medieval misericords with a dragon and a backgammon game, and two direct hits in one century.
Old Trafford and the Etihad
Two stadiums, two very different stories, and an honest account of what a tour gets you when there is no match on.