London Road Fire Station....

A project in Manchester that is going to be underway this year is The London Road Fire Station project. This is one of Manchester’s most magnificent buildings occupying an entire city block across London Road from Piccadilly Station. It’s one of the first things you see as you arrive in the city. Of late it’s not been giving a good first impression of the city. It was designed in Victorian times and built in the Edwardian Baroque style in the early years of the last century. The facade is of terracotta tiles and red brick, elaborately decorated and statued on all sides. Inside there is a great courtyard. It used the be the HQ of the Manchester Fire Service and also contained a court of law and a police station. The families of the fire fighters had accomdodation in the building.

By the 1980s it was in the wrong place and didn’t have the facilities to meet the needs of a modern city and in 1986 it was closed when the fire service moved to a new HQ in a more convenient part of the city. It was bought by a company called Brittania Hotels who said they would restore it and reopen it as a classy hotel. We are still waiting, thirty years later. Plans were made and abandoned. At one point the company wanted to erect a glass tower in the courtyard. I like a good tower but this would have been a disaster. There were broken promises and all the time this beautiful building was sliding into dereliction.

The city fathers and mothers tried to wrest control of the building from Britannia Hotels but, when it went to court, they were defeated. Concerned people in the city got together and formed an action group bringing pressure on the owners and the city went away and put together a watertight legal case to force Brittania to sell. Last autumn we got the wonderful news that the fire station had new owners. It has been bought for, I think, £10,000,000 by Allied London. £30,000,000 + will be needed to restore and adapt this building for new uses. There was dancing in the streets at this news. Allied London are the company that delivered the incredibly successful Spinningfields development and are currently in the early stages of developing the St. John’s project that will contain The Factory, a huge new arts space for the city and skyscrapers lined up along the river. We are delighted that this building has fallen into their hands. They have a reputation for delivering what they say they will do.

We are not sure what they are going to do with it. It’s all up in the air at the moment. The city is keen on having some public access and Allied London are happy about that. So I’m not sure when this project will be finished but we are sure we won’t have to wait another thirty years.