MANCHESTER’S role in the Industrial Revolution has not only given the city a rich economic and cultural history but also left a lasting architectural legacy. Most of the warehouses and factories built at the time have since been converted for other uses but, where possible, the external structures have remained the same.
While the warehouse facades preserve the city’s commercial character the churches continue to offer much needed beauty and calm even when they have outlived their original purpose.
It’s not only industry that has fallen away since the Industrial Revolution as the decline in faith and ever shrinking congregations has led to hundreds of churches also closing.
During the Victorian period churches were built at such breakneck speed that even in their time they were not fully filled. What remains of that period is a number of extraordinary buildings appreciated not so much for the spirituality they once provided but for the beauty of their architecture.
The histories of these churches are inextricably connected to the social and demographic changes that have taken place in Manchester over the last century.
While the warehouse facades preserve the city’s commercial character the churches continue to offer much needed beauty and calm even when they have outlived their original purpose. The architecture demands that new uses are found for these churches to prevent them from turning into crumbling ruins.
People who prefer to live somewhere with a bit more character find churches an attractive alternative. Planners seem to convert any disused building in Manchester into apartments but the difficulty of converting a church (as anyone who’s ever seen Channel 4’s Grand Designs can testify to) has lead to a variety of interesting new uses.
Of course there have been complaints about this trend of church conversion. But usually from highly selective sources.
Conversion into mosques has seen the British National Party and English Defence League self-position themselves as the last defenders of the Christian faith. The upsurge in Far Right piety that followed St John’s Church in Longsight being converted to a mosque would be understandable if the BNP also lamented the loss of Sunday worship or the loss of numerous other churches that have become restaurants and nightclubs.
But that’s another story. Sadly inevitable as well.
From potential rehearsal space for world renowned orchestras to a community outreach centre, we take a look at the new uses for some of ecclesiastical buildings in Manchester no longer used as a place of worship.
St Peter’s Church, Ancoats
One of Ancoats’ landmarks, St Peter’s (main picture above) was the first Anglican church built in a community that was predominantly comprised of Roman-Catholic Italian immigrants. Built in 1859 by Isaac Holden on a budget of just £4,500 the designs involved the use of brick instead of stone to keep costs down. The church is a rare example in this country of the Romanesque revival style developed in Germany.
The population of Ancoats, along with the rest of East Manchester, declined from the 1950s with the collapse of industry and the church closed in 1960. For decades the church suffered vandalism and neglect with the roof and interior being stripped by thieves.
In the last ten years the area surrounding the church has gone through a process of gradual redevelopment and renewal and St Peter’s has not been left behind. After a £3m English Heritage funded facelift the future of the church was secured when the Halle Orchestra agreed a deal to move into the church to use it as a rehearsal and performance space. It will be the first permanent rehearsal space in the orchestra’s 154-year history and they expect to move into the church by early spring 2013.
John Summers, Chief Executive of the Halle Orchestra, explained that they have been given £1.5 million in grant funding which is being spent on building a new floor, a heating system, lighting and acoustic treatment, as well as costs on staging to seat the orchestra in the same configuration as the Bridgewater Hall.
Summers said: “Under advice from one of the foremost acousticians in the world we have invested in baffles, curtains and sails across the auditorium which will give us the ability to vary the acoustics for different uses such as rehearsal and recording.”
Phase Two of the development will be a new building to house the education and ensembles departments.
St Peter's
South Manchester Synagogue, Fallowfield
The South Manchester Synagogue on Wilbraham Road is one of the most significant early 20th century synagogues in the country and was built in 1931 by architect Joseph Sunlight. It was built for Ashkenazi families from South Manchester who lived too far from the Great Synagogue in Cheetham Hill to worship there.
The inspiration for the synagogue was St Sophia of Constantinople and the Byzantine/Turkish mosque look was achieved with a 35ft diameter dome and minaret. Sunlight, only 23-years-old at the time, used German architectural innovations to build the dome without using column supports and used reinforced concrete for the lattice girders carrying the gallery.
Sunlight went on to design and build a number of properties in Manchester including the art deco masterpiece Sunlight House on Quay Street. The reputedly haunted Sunlight House, near neighbour to Manchester Confidential, was the city’s tallest office building when it was built in 1932 and is now used as offices as well as housing a Bannatynes Health Club at ground level.
South Manchester SynagogueIn the 1930s the synagogue helped refugees escaping Europe integrate into the community, people who often identified themselves more as German and Austrian than Jewish, and the congregation reached its peak in the 1970s with over 800 members. Declining numbers and demographic changes meant that in 2002 the congregation moved to a new building in Bowdon.
Makin Architecture, who also converted St George’s Church, see below, took advantage of its location on Wilbraham Road near the universities to convert the synagogue into a Jewish student centre.
Andrew Burns, Managing Director of Makin Architecture, said: “The congregation had fallen to just 20 people and was mainly populated by students from Manchester University. When we looked at it we saw that the internal space was far too big so we put a new floor in. The upper space became a function floor while students could still worship on the lower floor. When you see it from the lower floor you can see that the floor has been added as it doesn’t reach right the way across. We always try to make sure that anything we add is clearly and legibly a modern addition.”
Financial constraints have meant that plans to include an accommodation block of 65 single bedrooms have been put on hold.
South Manchester Synagogue
St John the Apostle and Evangelist, Longsight
St John’s was built in 1846 by architect J E Gregan and was able to house 900 worshipers during its active years. Gregan went on to design the Mechanics’ Institute on Princess Road where the Trade Union Congress (TUC), UMIST and the Co-operative Insurance Society (CIS) were all founded.
In 1979 the church combined with the now demolished St Cyprian’s Church on Stanley Grove but a shrinking congregation meant it fell into disrepair and when it closed in 1999 the statue of St John the Evangelist was moved to the nave of nearby St Agnes’ Church.
An Islamic charity saw the church as an ideal home for a mosque to service a culturally diverse Longsight population which is now one third Muslim. The BNP have since pointed to this as evidence of the ‘Islamification of England’ and made a provocative video claiming that graves were ‘desecrated’ during the building of a 16-space car park.
The Dar-ul-Ulum Qadria Jilania Mosque and Islamic Centre have spent £50,000 on repairs and restoration work and were granted planning permission in 2007 to build the car park on the church garden. When work began diggers unearthed gravestones that had at some point in the past been laid down flat to use as a path. Developers stopped work on the project until the planning order was updated by council planning officers. No graves were affected and graveyard upkeep is done by the mosque.
Upper Brook Street Chapel, Ardwick
Built in 1839 by Sir Charles Barry, who went on to design the Palace of Westminster (he'd already designed Manchester Art Gallery), Upper Brook Street Chapel is one of the earliest examples of a Gothic nonconformist chapel.
The Chapel was used by Unitarians until it was sold in 1928 when it started being used as a Welsh Baptist Chapel. In the 1970s the building was bought by Manchester City Council with other land along the side of Upper Brook Street with the intention of building a motorway into the city. The plans were abandoned and the chapel continued to fall into disrepair as the council failed to find a permanent occupant.
It has since been used as a Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall, an Islamic Academy, and a community outreach centre but after decades of neglect the council was forced to remove part of the roof on safety grounds.
In 2010 the Victorian Society placed the building on a list of the ten most endangered buildings in the country and the removal of the roof means the interior is now open to the elements and to further decay. There have been rumours that the council had agreed a deal with a developer to convert it into student accommodation but a council spokesperson said there are no live planning applications for the church at present.
St George’s Church, Hulme
St George’s church was built at a time when the British Empire had become the world superpower following the Napoleonic Wars. In celebration the Church Building Act of 1818 granted £1 million for the building of churches know as Commissioners’ churches and St George’s Church, one of nine Commissioners’ churches built by architect Francis Goodwin, was built in 1828. Like many of Goodwin’s churches it was built in the Gothic revival style. Goodwin is probably more famous for building the old Manchester Town Hall on King Street.
One of many churches built to meet the spiritual needs of a rising population it closed in 1984 when the inevitable population collapse occurred during the 20th century. It outlasted many of the surrounding churches but became a derelict shell after being unoccupied for years.
Work began in 2000 to convert the church into 25 apartments by inserting self-supporting pod-like structures between the arches of the nave. Architecture firm Makin Architecture, see synagogue story above, renowned for their church conversion work, won a number of awards for this project.
Andrew Burns again: “We were seeking to retain the vastness of the nave so that it still felt like a church from the inside. In the past architects would look at the nave and think ‘we can get three storeys in here’ and they’d install big flat floors so that the apartments would end up looking like little boxes. The corridors were narrow and the apartment roofs were only 2.4 meters tall. We put pods into the recesses so that from the hallways you would know you were in a church but once you got inside your apartment you would have your own private space.”
Makin focused just as much on retaining the internal features as the external architecture. Burns said: “We like to express the elements of the buildings even within the flats. So if there are any ornaments or gargoyles we’ll retain them. Every apartment has a stained glass window with a balcony internally set back from the window. As some of the windows do not open we installed a mechanical ventilation system.”
The last apartment to be built was the extraordinary conversion of the clock-tower into a nine-storey unit that developers claim is one of the tallest living spaces in Europe. Each storey is linked by a spiral staircase from the bedroom on level one to the sauna and steam room on level six through to the cinema room on level nine.
Burns said: “That apartment is unique because most churches don’t have a clock tower as tall and narrow as St George’s. It’s like living in a lighthouse.”
St George's
St George's
St George's
