The cotton industry also threw up buildings that continue to retain their original functions. As Manchester’s 18th- and 19th-century businessmen grew fabulously wealthy, they wanted to glorify the city that made them rich by beautifying it with imposing buildings like those of London. Other manufacturing cities shared their civic pride, and Liverpool, Leeds and Birmingham all have marvels of Victorian architecture. But none rivals Manchester’s triangular Town Hall, completed in 1877 and rightly described by John Bright, the city’s MP, as a “municipal palace.”

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in British Heritage magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Not wanting to imitate Liverpool, long a rival for predominance in the Northwest, Manchester eschewed the classical style favored there, and chose Gothic architecture for its Town Hall. The main tower on Albert Square rises like a church spire, but instead of a saint or cross at its pinnacle there sits a spiked golden ball representing both the cotton flower that had made the city wealthy and the sun that never set on Manchester’s products. Ornate Gothic stonework festoons the exterior of the building. Statues of the city’s founding fathers, including the Roman General Agricola, line the Princess Street side, while statues of Manchester scientists atomic theorist John Dalton and physicist James Prescott Joule sit inside. Six-petaled cotton flowers bloom in tile, mosaics and carvings, pairing with bee motifs to symbolize the raw material and the hard work that made Manchester rich. More reminders come in the Great Hall with paintings by Ford Madox Brown illustrating Manchester history, and ceiling panels gilded with the coats of arms of the United States and all the other countries with whom Manchester has traded.

John Ruskin called the Great Hall “the most truly magnificent Gothic apartment in Europe.” Almost as astonishing is the John Rylands Library on Deansgate. Built by Enriqueta Rylands, it is, like the Taj Mahal, a memorial to a beloved spouse, in this case, cotton merchant John Rylands. He had amassed a collection of theological books, and Enriqueta’s aim was to expand this collection and house it splendidly. The Reading Room looks like the nave of a Gothic church, with stained glass, rows of pointed arches and gleaming candelabra. The collection includes the oldest known fragment of the New Testament, the oldest printed material from Europe, a Gutenberg Bible, most of the work Caxton ever printed, a first edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets and numerous medieval manuscripts. Much expanded beyond Rylands’ original theological treatises, the library has 20,000 Oriental manuscripts and docu­ments in more than 40 languages. Its new extension, completed in 2006, was built by the same local firm Linfords, which built the original library (opened in 1900), and much of the stone was quarried in the same places.

Manchester has a long library history. Chetham’s Library and School on Long Millgate is the oldest complete building in the city, built in the 15th century to house the clergy of the Collegiate Church, now Manchester Cathedral. Since 1653 it has offered a free public library—the oldest public library anywhere. Most of its volumes date from the library’s founding, though it still collects books of local interest. For works of every era, the Central Library on St. Peter’s Square has 20 miles of books and is the largest municipal library in Britain, while the Portico Library, built in 1806 on Mosley Street, is the country’s oldest subscription library.

These libraries witness Manchester’s interest in ideas. No­where is this better expressed than in the Free Trade Hall, the only building in the UK named after a philosophical principle.

Free Trade was the touchstone argument of the 19th-century Manchester school of economics. Businessmen argued fiercely that only by pursuing their interests unfettered by government regulation could business succeed. Richard Cobden and John Bright were proponents who led a further argument against England’s Corn Laws, which protected England’s wheat growers by excise taxes on imported grain. When the local harvest was poor, the effect was famine, and Manchester’s cotton workers were its victims—not good for business at all! After the Corn Laws were repealed in 1846, the celebratory Free Trade Hall was built to a Renaissance design with the coats of arms of all the Lancashire towns that had supported Free Trade on the exterior.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to