Manchester Town Hall, the Free Trade Hall, Midland Hotel, City Tower, the Britannia Hotel… These are some of Manchester’s best-known buildings, yet none of them can be said to be original in design. All are based, architecturally, on an existing building, mostly in Europe, but also occasionally in America, and more recently, astonishingly, from nature. 

For instance: 

•  Manchester Town Hall resembles Ypres Cloth Hall in Belgium.
•  The Athenaeum bears much similarity with the Travellers’ Club on London’s Pall Mall, and is by the same architect, Charles Barry.
•  82 King Street, a late 20th century towering office block, looks like a smaller version of the Chase Tower in Dallas.

These are not coincidences. Manchester’s leading architects, such as Thomas Worthington, Edward Walters and Charles Barry, deliberately used famous existing buildings overseas as their models to give Manchester the same status as older cities.  

Ed Glinert of New Manchester Walks, author of the epic history “Manchester: The Biography” and a Riba judge, leads this tour revealing the secrets of Manchester architecture, starting from the Midland Hotel (Thomas Hamilton’s Hamilton Grand, St Andrews) to the Tower of Light (nature’s sea sponge).

Location

6pm – Tour Begins: Outside the Midland Hotel 16 Peter St, Manchester M60 2DS