Gaskell Memorial Tower and Kings Coffee House

I travelled to Knutsford this morning, to visit one shop and one supermarket.

Whilst there I tried to take a few photos of this extraordinary building - impossible to get a good representative shot as the street it sits alongside is so narrow. So it’s a montage of “ bits and bobs” (an architectural term).

For me, part of Knutsford special character is created by the buildings of Richard Harding Watt. Some have not been impressed with what he created - “any Royal Fine Art Commission now would veto such monstrous desecration of a small and pleasant country town”. I like them. RHW was widely travelled - he produced nine volume of sketches of Australia in the 1860’s, spent time in Syria, and loved northern Italy. He wasn’t an architect, but used a variety of architects to produce buildings which reflected his fanciful ideas. He was very much into reusing materials. And he must have been extremely wealthy to be able to indulge his fanciful taste in building styles on such a scale.

This building, completed in 1907, is a complete mish-mash of styles. The tower is a memorial to the novelist Elisabeth Gaskell, who lived in the town and referenced it in her novels. Her bust looks down on the street. The rest of it was built as a coffee house (to attract people out of the many pubs to live a more temperate life reading journals available there), and the town council offices. More recently it was a smart restaurant (partly founded by Manchester United footballer George Best) but that closed in 2019 as a result of a dispute between the restaurant and the building owner, the town council. These days it’s a major pigeon roost - there are droppings everywhere.

Last of note in the montage - the large white columns were relocated to the buildings courtyard from St Peter’s Church in Manchester, demolished in 1907 because of of a falling city centre population and greatly reduced congregation. A memorial to the vanished church now sits in St Peter’s Square, which I have blipped several times.