ROOFTOPPING | Views From The Midland

Confidentials 23 September 2015

BURNISHED terracotta, sparkling in the evening sunshine, is one of my favourite things. So are unexpected views.

A photograph from 1905 shortly after the hotel opened shows a summer's day, a chamber orchestra, tea, cake and most of the Downton Abbey cast

Luck I suppose, but I was strolling the roof of the Midland Hotel on one of the clearest days of the year. From twelve miles I swear I could spot farmers chasing sheep on the Pennines.

I was up here because of the new book I've got coming out called Lost & Imagined Manchester, about some of the massive or the curious buildings we've lost and some of the projects that were never even started.

I had a picture of a proposal for a new 1930s Art Gallery at the back of the Town Hall drawn as if the artist were in an airship 200 metres in the sky. Since my zeppelin's broken the next thing was to ask Mike Magrane, the amiable manager of the Midland Hotel, to let me take some pictures from above and try and capture a similar view. He agreed and the equally amiable and enthusiastic Steve Cummings took me up.

The reason I was up there

I said "wow" when we emerged onto a wide flat roof. The Midland opened in September 1903 as a railway hotel for the Midland Rail Company and cost £1m (£100m or so now). The Charles Trubshaw-designed structure was huge and state-of-the-art for the time. Along with luxury rooms, restaurants and a concert hall the building also had a roof garden, hence the level of finish on the wrought iron fence with its Art Nouveau flower motifs and the burnished glistening terracotta of the the chimney pots.

A photograph from 1905 shortly after the hotel opened shows a summer's day, a chamber orchestra, tea, cake and most of the Downton Abbey cast. It's tempting to think Charles Rolls, London salesman, and Frederick Henry Royce, Manchester manufacturer, are somewhere in the picture discussing their new joint venture. The only presence at roof level now is green, this is where Midland chef Simon Rogan's herbs grow.

Rave on the roof just after opening

Herbs on high

For a while in the 1950s the way the building mixed stylistic motifs with wild abandon caused some Modernist hotheads to declare it the ugliest building in the world; the antithesis of their functional utilitarian boxes. That was then, now we view the Midland with affection, the grande dame of Manchester hotels. When we dine in the French we dine with the ghosts of Winston Churchill and General Patten. But not the Beatles. They were refused entry back in the sixties because they were dressed inappropriately. Or maybe because they were from Liverpool.