A day at the docks with The Manchester Modernist Society & the Twentieth Century Society – April 26th 2014
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In an area typified by banal, and downright bad, commercial architecture there is one building that stands head and shoulder above all others -The Lowry Centre by Michael Wilford.
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The original design competition was won by Wilford and his then partner James Stirling but on the day that Salford City Council was to announce the scheme James Stirling died suddenly and unexpectedly. Wilford and Stirling had forged a reputation of making bold public buildings across Europe, essentially in the Post Modern idiom but never sinking to the depths of pastiche that PoMO often did. Wilford undeterred by his partners death carried on and the design, coming as it did at the end of the Postmodern period of architecture, carries many signatures of that style but its sheer character and quality has meant the building has been able to ride the wave into New Modernity and not be dragged under by the undertow and now, over 20 years since the initial designs were drawn up, the building still has the power to excite and enthral.
The nautical themes are obvious but not cheesy. Portholes, prows, funnels and gangways give reference to the ships that dominated this area previously. The massing is of geometric shapes and the facade is multi layered and multi faceted. The major triumph, in this writer’s opinion, is the excellent use of colour in the interior. The exterior is all cool steel and glass but the common areas are a riot of bold colours. Blue flooring, orange and purple walls with the colours becoming warmer as you enter the heart of the building with deep blue and red for the theatre spaces. The Lowry is best seen at night, the vivid interiors glowing whilst the steel and glass exterior offer exciting sharp reflections in the dark canal waters.
Once containerisation rang the death knell for Manchester Docks (actually in Salford) a rapid air of dereliction and decay befell the area. As was common in the 1980s derelict land grants were available and cities with redundant waterside areas began to redevelopment. In 1983 Salford City Council acquired parts of the docks from Manchester Ship Canal Company (which would later metamorphose into The Peel Group) and set about redeveloping the area.
The 1980s buildings are characterised by low rise pastiche housing developments and over bearing and joyless Postmodern commercial developments such as Anchorage by Percy Thomas Partnership and Harbour City by Fairhurst’s Design Group.
Perhaps more satisfying to our eyes are some rare remaining buildings from previous eras and intrinsically linked to the history of the canal. The Dock offices are from 1925 and by Harry Fairhurst and provided all the necessary accommodation for the running of the docks and have been faithfully restored and maintained (due no doubt to a Grade II listed status)
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image from canalarchive.org
The former Manchester Liners House now Furness House is by Leach Rhodes and Walker and from 1969 – finished only one year before Manchester Liners ceased to exist. It is clearly designed to resemble the bridge of ship and, as with many other post war office buildings, has been sympathetically looked after by Bruntwood.
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image from canalarchive.org
Salford Quays struggled throughout the 1990s looking for a sense of place and identity and despite the arrival of The Lowry and, like many contrived urban redevelopment schemes, has struggled to attract any sort of life. The arrival of the BBC could perhaps have been an opportunity to actually bring some architectural quality to the area.
Needless to say – with Peel in charge – nothing of the sort has occurred. MediaCityUK (to give it is official title) is equally banal as previous Salford Quays developments and compares unfavourably to other waterfront redevelopments in the UK which are also symbolised by corporate blandness divided by featureless and barren ‘streets’ with the obligatory public spaces trying desperately hard to attract any ‘public’ outside of office hours. Don’t take my word for it – here is the description Building Design gave to MediaCityUK when it awarded it its Carbuncle Cup for 2011
On the face of it, this project had everything going for it. Its 81ha site enjoys a splendid waterfront location, alongside the Lowry arts centre and the Imperial War Museum North. There were no significant planning constraints and the site lay within the ownership of a single developer. Its programme includes the regional headquarters of the BBC and ITV, the media studies department of Salford University, a hotel, housing and a school. It had every opportunity to be a piece of city to be treasured for centuries to come.
The reality, however, is scarcely distinguishable from the Media Cities in Dubai and Qatar that the developer, Peel Holdings, has evidently taken as its model. Whatever urban aspiration may be indicated by its name, a city is the last thing one would mistake this development for. There is no urban idea to speak of whatsoever ― no space that one might recognise as a street; no common architectural language; no difference between the fronts and backs of buildings; no distinction between the civic buildings and the private ones. As Rowan Moore remarked of the university faculty’s wanly corporate expression, “One is not looking for the Gate of Honour at Gonville & Caius, but… something!”
What we are presented with instead is a crazed accumulation of development, in which every aimlessly gesticulating building sports at least three different cladding treatments. The overriding sense is one of extreme anxiety on the part of the architects ― an unholy alliance of Wilkinson Eyre, Chapman Taylor and Fairhursts ― about the development’s isolation, 20 minutes’ tram ride from the centre of Manchester. The incessant visual excitement reads as a desperate attempt to compensate for an underlying lack of urban vitality.
No-one can be too surprised that Peel Holdings ― responsible for a wretched riverside redevelopment in Glasgow and with another planned for Liverpool ― is behind MediaCityUK but quite how the BBC has stooped this low is hard to fathom. In 2003 the corporation published Building the BBC: A Return to Form, which trumpeted its newfound role as a patron of architecture. “The BBC has found its nerve again and risen to its role as national champion and patron of the arts,” wrote Dan Cruickshank in the book’s foreword. Well, it lost it pretty quickly thereafter. David Chipperfield and Richard MacCormac were ditched from their commissions mid-job, while Foreign Office Architects’ project never even got off the drawing board. Visiting MediaCityUK, it is hard to see how the corporation could set its aspirations any lower. “How uncreative can a “Creative Quarter” be? And which truly creative person would ever want to work in such a place?” asked Jonathan Glancey. Following the Blue Peter garden’s recent relocation to Salford, one can only presume that the newly reinterred Petra must be turning in her grave.
During the 1990′s The Imperial War Museum were keen to find a site outside London and after being offered a variety of sites, one in Hartlepool was found and Sir Norman Foster was selected as the architect. However, the legality of the funding package put paid to this scheme and it wasn’t until 1997, after a site on the Trafford side of the Manchester Ship Canal had been selected and a design competition ran that the Polish born architect Daniel Libeskind was selected.
The architectural and metaphorical reasoning behind the design is the idea of a globe shattered by conflict and three distinct elements or shards remain. One shard, a viewing platform would represent air, the main body of the building represents Earth and the section facing the canal and housing the cafe represents Water. The building is design to confuse and disorientate, as does war, but not in such a way as to distract one from the exhibits and internal space, which combine to make a powerful architectural and historical statement. The area and potentially create the neighbourhood feel planners had long desired.
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IWMN – concept sketch from Studio Daniel Liebeskind
Eddy Rhead
Trafford Park
Trafford Park is the world’s first industrial estate. It began in 1897 when the Trafford Estate, an open deer park, was sold, for £360,000, by the de Trafford family to Ernest Hooley who had set up the Trafford Park Estates Ltd. in August 1868. Hooley originally intended to develop the estate as an up-market, residential suburb but he was persuaded by Marshall Stevens, the general manager of the Manchester Ship Canal Company, to create an industrial estate. Its businesses were not to be traditional heavy engineering or textile manufacturing but new industries for the new twentieth century. It was to be a centre of skilled labour: capital intensive, using modern American management processes.
Typical of the new companies were Fords, who manufactured cars in, off Mosley Road, Trafford Park from 1911 to 1931 before they moved to Dagenham. They introduced assembly line systems – making a new car every 2 minutes 48 seconds – with industrial disciplines such as a one piece uniform and badge for workers, no trade unions, and strict discipline. But even a sweeper at Fords could earn £5 a week, a good wage then. Welcome to twentieth century capitalist production.
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The major company, and one of the first to move into the Park, was British Westinghouse –later known as Metropolitan-Vickers or ‘Metrovicks’.Westinghouse arrived in 1899, a subsidiary of the US Westinghouse corporation. In the largest engineering plant in Britain, arranged on American lines, they built heavy turbines, power plant equipment and traction engines. In the Second World War Metrovicks assembled Lancaster bombers. By 1960 it had become AEI (Manchester) Ltd, taken over by Arnold Weinstock’s GEC in 1967. The plant closed in 1992; now little survives, except as objects in the Heritage Centre. Metro Vicks / Westinghouse Turners Asbestos
Other major companies in the Park included ICI, Procter & Gamble, Guinness, Brooke Bond, Hovis, Kellogg’s, Geigy, Kilverts, and Turner & Newall’s asbestos works – a significant employer until the health effects of asbestos cement became better known. Warehousing, including cold storage and bonded tobacco warehouses, and food processing were important. By 1965 about 52,000 workers were employed in the Park. Some of them lived in the Trafford Park Village which was built from 1899, partly with Westinghouse money. The Village was laid out American-style in a grid of numbered streets and avenues.
This is when St Antony’s tin church was erected. The Village was an oddity since it was rather isolated, far from easy links to Manchester or Salford. Much of it was demolished in the 1970s. In 1993 Cooper’s newsagents, on Third Avenue, closed.
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A year later the Urban Development Corporation agreed with Health Investments Ltd to rebuild parts of the Village with new housing but, despite these efforts, the Village now does have a lost atmosphere, a ghost of its former liveliness. This is perhaps best epitomised by the boarded-up remains of the grade 2 listed 1902 Trafford Park Hotel.
But much of the workforce commuted into the Park every day, mainly by buses, trams and bikes until car ownership took off in the late 1960s. This was a major logistic challenge for the Manchester and Salford Corporation transport undertakings. Lines of buses and trams waited in Third Avenue and Westinghouse Road for the evening rush of homebound workers. Such was the pressure for transport that, in the 1930s, Salford Corporation ran a ‘Ladies only’ tram, to Weaste at 5pm, to allow women workers a chance to find a seat on the overcrowded trams. Policemen were on duty at the Westinghouse gates at 5pm to prevent overcrowding. Unfortunately, the women’s trams were often boarded by men in the stampede, only to be ejected by the conductor.
By the late 1960s and early 70s the first major closures began. Taylor Bros, part of British Steel, closed in1974. After GEC’s takeover of AEI, ‘rationalisation’ of the former MetroVicks plant followed with job losses. The Park’s extensive internal railway network declined as transport shifted to road. Manchester Docks lost their rail services in autumn 1972. In 1975 38,000 worked on the estate; by 1985 this was down to 24,500.
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There was some new investment such as a large oil terminal built in 1972-5. Much of the Village was demolished as a ‘slum’ in 1973 by Stretford Corporation. In 1980 the newish Thatcher Government announce an Enterprise Zone, with tax benefits for investors, in Trafford Park. Although the larger employers were closing – GEC went in 1992 – new firms moved into the vacant cleared sites. The Trafford Park Urban Development Corporation was designated in 1987 and gradually the area, including the closed Manchester Docks, was cleared and redeveloped as Salford Quays and Media City. New roads and infrastructure were built.
The Millennium saw the Lowry and the Imperial War Museum North, located in different boroughs; compete with each other across the Ship Canal, which by then had been taken over by the influential Peel Holdings. By the Centenary of the Ship Canal in 1994, Trafford Park had changed enormously. Gone were heavy engineering and similar major twentieth century industries, requiring very large skilled workforces. Now its distribution, some manufacturing, housing, leisure, retail and media, including the relocated Coronation Street set, ironically close to the former ‘slum’ Village. That’s postmodernist capitalism for you. Welcome to the 21st century.
Aidan Turner-Bishop
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