manchester

mancunians

expats

Email to a friend | Read later | Your comments

Wednesday, 5th May 2004

Every storey is a picture

IT'S par for the course now for old industrial buildings to be transformed into swanky homes or hotels. But almost 25 years ago, when the Britannia Hotel got off the ground, such reincarnations were pretty much unheard of.

It was in the dark days when Manchester was at the height of economic recession, with many people out of work and much of the city centre in a pretty parlous state. This particular Victorian building, on Portland Street, had lain derelict for some years when Britannia Hotels bought it from its then owners, Manchester city council.

At one point, it was almost demolished, no doubt with the plan of replacing it with a functional office block. But, after a year spent revamping the building, it partially opened in May, 1982, with 25 bedrooms on the top floor and a nightclub.

Advertisement your story continues below

The revamp continued, and for many years now it has been a 363-bedroom hotel, on five floors, offering bargain rooms, and lots of bars and places to eat and relax.

Heyday

Tourists and visitors should note that, in its heyday, this was one of the most impressive textile warehouses ever built. And that's quite an accolade - Manchester is famed in the architectural world for its unique style in warehouses.

They were deliberately grand, designed to highlight the city's growing wealth and status. Places of beauty, often ironically, masking deep despair within, on the part of those compelled to work for long hours and short wages.

S and J Watts, however, was a tribute to the textile trade at the height of its fame and fortune. Grade II listed, with lots of original architectural features, including a balconied stairway throughout the building, what is now the Britannia dates back to March 16, 1856, when it opened as the world's original cash-and-carry.

The vast warehouse was designed for S and J Watts by the architects Travis and Magnell. It housed the largest wholesale drapery business in the city. Its owner was a self-made businessman and entrepreneur, whose family had started out from a small weaver's cottage in Didsbury. In keeping with their new-found wealth and lofty status, money was no object for the Watts, and each storey was therefore built in a different style: if you look closely you can see gothic, Italian Renaissance, Elizabethan, French Renaissance and Flemish - and as if all that weren't enough, each corner of the building was topped by a large tower.

James Watts, like most of the industrialists of the day, was a powerful cove who numbered the rich and famous among his friends. Politicians and clerics all dined regularly at his sumptuous home in Cheadle, and Prince Albert chose to stay with him when he visited Manchester to open the Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857.

These were heady days for the rich and famous in the city. Cotton, textiles, spinning, weaving and dyeing were the staple commercial enterprise of Manchester and the host of small mill towns that surrounded it.

Indeed, the city was so powerful that it became known as "Cottonopolis". Built in the overall style of a Venetian palazzo, the Watts warehouse was its flagship.

It was here that thousands of pounds changed hands every day, as wholesalers came to look at goods.

Emphasis was on display and good lighting, for viewing the "pieces", and there was an impressive foyer and showrooms with mahogany counters beneath the windows, where goods could be inspected. The industry encompassed made-up clothing, haberdashery and a wide range of fancy goods.

For decades, S and J Watts was the hub of things, but times eventually changed and, over the years, the textile industries declined.

By the end of the 20th century, the building's fate hung in the balance - and it is a tribute to the foresight of Britannia Hotels that their work in helping secure its future also served as something of a prototype for the safekeeping of the rest of Manchester's Victorian heritage.

A few years after the Britannia's opening as a hotel in 1982, the Central Manchester Development Corporation, backed by the then Tory government and Manchester city council, began its mission of finding imaginative new uses for the grandiose buildings in the surrounding area, left largely redundant by the demise of much of the north west's manufacturing industry.

The Britannia, a private development by a hotel chain, in many ways had shown them the way forward.

And, more than 20 years on, the redevelopment and redeployment of "heritage buildings" in our great city continues to confound the critics. Next in line is Ancoats, also in the running as a World Heritage Site. So watch this space.