Our Town Hall Project on Display
Leah Finch, a Construction Manager for Lendlease, in one of the Town Hall basement corridors.
We’re keen to make sure that we share as much of the ongoing project work as we can, and part of this work will see public displays and exhibitions across Manchester. In addition to the brilliantly informative hoarding panels around the whole site (with the most detailed elements around Albert Square), there are other public displays and plans for more.
We're arranging a series of Heritage lectures at Central Library, at which you can find out more about some of the skilled and artisan trades involved in the project.
New exhibition: Our Town Hall – Portraits of a Workforce
This new exhibition at Manchester Central Library focuses on some of the skilled craftspeople behind the current transformation of the Grade I-listed Manchester Town Hall and Albert Square.
Extraordinarily little is known about the artisans who built the Town Hall between 1868 and 1877, and certainly no photographs exist. But fast-forward 150 years and today’s skilled workers are no strangers to the lens of Manchester City Council photographer Barrie Leach. As well as physical progress, Barrie’s been capturing portraits of those working on the Town Hall since the beginning of the project to repair, restore and refurbish this much-loved building.
As well as modern construction workers and behind-the-scenes staff, there are some incredible heritage trades involved. Stonemasonry, mosaic making, stained glass repair and manufacture, horology: these are all crafts that would have been widespread in the 1870s but are now very much specialist – and rare – trades. They are, however, critical to our restoration project.
Thirty large portraits and 60 smaller contextual images in the exhibition show the pride that the modern team have discovered in being able to lovingly restore, and give new life to, the work of the forgotten workforce who went before them.
As work on the Our Town Hall project continues to bring it up to modern safety standards, improving access to the building and its artefacts, and creating a new visitor attraction, the photographic record is also ongoing: only a small selection of the images is on show in this first exhibition. The full collection will form part of the historical archive, telling the stories of the people who lovingly restored the Town Hall for all to see.
The exhibition will be on display from Friday 18 October 2024 until June 2025.
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