Building Name

Manchester General Post Office, Spring Gardens, Manchester

Date
1881 - 1887
Street
Spring Gardens, Brown Street
District/Town
Central, Manchester
County/Country
GMCA, England
Work
New build
Status
Demolished
Contractor
Robert Neill and Sons

 

 

A tremendous “palazzo,” like a Ministry building in Rome. Central upper giant portico. [Pevsner 1969]

 

THE NEW MANCHESTER POST-OFFICE - The plans of the new Manchester Post-office have been approved by the Postmaster General, tenders will be invited in the course of a few weeks, and the actual work of building will commence in the coming spring. The site of the new Post-office will be a parallelogram, bounded by Spring Gardens Marriott Court, Brown- street, and a new thoroughfare to be made from Brown Street to Spring Gardens behind the Commercial Hotel. The building will be a substantial, handsome structure of pure Italian in style of architecture, and in general appearance will not be unlike the new Central Telegraph Office opposite the great Post-Office in St Martin's-le-Grande. It will however, have one serious drawback. Instead of abutting upon Market-street, it will be hidden from that thoroughfare by the truly British structures which already front that thoroughfare between Brown-street and Spring Gardens. We need not here enter into the causes which have deprived the city of an opportunity for displaying a public building which deserves to be placed in a good situation. But when the plans are published, many persons will ask how it come to pass that the Post-office has not been brought a few feet forward to the line of Market-street. Such an arrangement would have materially added to the dignity of the building, and would have been a great improvement to our leading thoroughfare.  The chief front of the new Post-office will be in Spring Gardens, with a posting lobby in the centre of the façade.  A doorway at one end of this front will give access to the telegraph rooms at the top of the building, and another doorway, an exact counterpart, at the other end of the façade will form the chief entrance to the public counters of the telegraph branch. The central posting lobby will also constitute the public entrance to the money order and registered letter departments, and to an office for the sale of stamps. The length of the Spring Gardens façade will be 245 feet. The Brown-street front will be of the same dimensions, and have a similar appearance. Its central or posting lobby will, however, be flat with the line of frontage, while on Spring Gardens side that portion of the facade relating to the Lobby will be thrown a few feet forward, thereby breaking the monotony of the architectural details There will be doors at each end of the Brown-street front, occupying precisely similar positions to the subsidiary entrances in Spring Gardens. One of these doors will be used for the telegraph staff and the other, near to angle of Marriott's Court, for the Postmaster and his staff. The two fronts will be alike in architectural detail. The doorways near each end will be square headed, massive, and highly ornamental. The three storeys will be pierced by many windows, those on the ground floor being semi-circular headed, those on the first floor pedimented, and those on the upper floor square-headed, with bold architraves. This variation of detail will lessen the appearance of monotony.  The line of the facade will be further broken by an arrangement of bold Corinthian columns, rising from the top of the posting lobby in each front. and terminating in an entablature, which runs round the whole building, above the architraves of the uppermost windows. Over the entablature will be a bold balustrading, which will almost entirely conceal the roof from public view. Little need be said about the end facades. Each will 121 feet long, and the architectural details will be similar to those in the Spring Gardens and Brown-street fronts. The building will have no entrance from Marriott's Court, save to the basement area; but there will be an important entrance from the private thoroughfare which is to be constructed parallel with Market-street behind the Commercial Hotel This road is to be 35 feet wide, and will be utilised for receiving and unloading mail carts. The vehicles will enter at Spring Gardens and passthrough Brown-street, their loads being discharged through a doorway into the large central sorting hall, situated on the ground floor between the two posting lobbies. Though the actual building will be 245 feet long by 121 feet wide, the Post-office site will be somewhat larger, insomuch as the structure will be surrounded on all sides by open area, affording adequate light and ventilation to the basement. The adjoining streets will be increased to a slight extent beyond their present width.

Having thus described the external appearance of the building, we will next deal with its internal arrangements. The basement will be sunk about 7 feet below the roadway. Those rooms along the Spring Gardens front will be utilised by the sorting clerks for kitchens and lavatories. Abutting Brown-street will be the battery rooms and rooms for telegraph linesmen. and a telegraph boys' room and kitchen.  The rooms fronting Marriott's Court will include a large delivery room for telegrams, the written messages being transmitted thither by tube from the top of the building. The telegraph lads will ascend the area by one staircase, and when their messages are delivered will return by another staircase. The rooms at the other end of the building, below the private roadway, will be appropriated to stampers, porters, mail cart drivers, and kitchens. The whole of the above will set into the building to depth of 20 feet. The central portion of the block will be divided from the rest of the basement and devoted to post-office and telegraph stores. Immediately under the roadway will be a large engine-house and boiler-room for working the pneumatic tubes connected the post-offices within the city. The only portion of the basement to which there will be no daylight, or which will have no immediate contact the outer air, will be the central part devoted to stores.

The ground floor will constitute the principal part of the building devoted to the public.  The central posting lobby on the Spring Gardens side will be 42 feet wide, and will extend int the building about 24 feet.  It will be approached by short flights of steps, and three openings, each 9 feet wide. To the right of the lobby will be the registered letter and stamp counters, occupying an apartment 37 feet long by 30 feet wide. To the left of the posting lobby will be the money order office, a spacious room 48 feet long by 30 feet wide. Behind the line of these apartments, in the very centre of the structure on the ground floor will be the large central sorting office, 165 feet long by 53 feet wide. On the Brown-street side of the building the posting lobby will be about the same as the lobby in Spring Gardens. To the left of this entrance will be the private box-office, 50 feet by 30 feet, and to the right will be rooms for the accounts' branch, and for the chief clerk of the Post-office. Fronting Marriott's Court will be the private room of the Postmaster, 27 feet by 20 feet, with a waiting room for visitors.  In the south-east angle adjoining Spring Gardens and Marriott's Court will be a large room 51 feet by 20 feet, devoted for the writing and receipt of telegrams. The public will obtain access to this apartment from Spring Gardens and after the messages have been written and handed to a clerk, they will be dispatched by tube to the instrument room at the top of the building. The sorting office being in the centre of the block, and separated by rooms or corridors from the external walls, will be lighted by large skylights placed at a level of 4 feet above the first floor. The sorting room will thus form a glazed inner court, with all the chief apartments to which the public has access grouped around it.

The first floor will consist of a series of rooms, surrounding the inner court just referred to, and occupying a depth from the frontage line of about 30 feet. The space above the skylights covering the large sorting office will thus be left open to the air, thereby affording plenty of light and ventilation to the inner portions of the building. On the Spring Gardens front of the first floor the principal room, 79 feet by 30 feet, will be used by the letter carriers. After the mail bags have been discharged into the large central sorting office on the ground floor, all the local letters will be sent by lift to the letter carriers' room in the Spring Gardens front of the building. They will be here arranged into "walks" and this process over, the letter carriers will proceed to deliver them. Another room on the same front of the first floor, 48 feet by 30 feet, will be devoted to the purposes of the "returned letter" branch, and the lost letter inquiry office, to which the public will obtain access by one of the smaller doors in the Spring Gardens facade. On the Brown Street front of this floor will be a series of rooms, 20 feet in depth, with a 10 feet corridor behind them. These apartments will be used by the telegraph engineers and their staff, for postal correspondence, retiring rooms for clerks, and one of the number will be used as a dining-room for clerks.  The apartments along the Marriott's Court front of the first floor will be used by the telegraph correspondence branch of the Post-office. The room of the telegraph superintendent will also be in this front and another apartment will constitute the retiring rooms of the principal telegraph officials The room at the other end of the building, overlooking the private road, will be used as dining rooms and kitchen for the letter carriers; and the letter carriers' inspector will also have an apartment in this part of the building. Access will be obtained to the first floor by four staircases leading to the four subsidiary entrances in Brown Street and Spring Gardens previously described.

The second floor be exclusively devoted to telegraph purposes. The central portion of the building will be open the sky, in order to give light and air to the large letter sorting room on the ground floor previously described as a glazed inner court. The rooms on each façade of the second floor will advance over 20 feet inwards from the frontage line. The chief apartment on this uppermost floor will be the instrument room. It will occupy the whole front overlooking the private road at the north or Market Street end of the building having a space along that line of 117 feet. This room will extend along the Spring Gardens front   125 feet, and 242 feet along the Brown Street front. The apartment will thus form three sides of a square, and it will be so spacious that it may be estimated to afford accommodation for 500 instrument clerks. The remainder of the floor will be devoted to the personal requirements of the telegraph clerks and staff. There will be a large kitchen, and right and left of it will be dining rooms for male and female clerks. There will also be rooms for the matron, and the superintending officer, and adjoining the large telegraph room will be a mechanics' shop for the repair of instruments. In one portion of the roof above the second floor, at the Marriott's Court end of the building, will be a large apartment for cloakrooms, etc. This apartment will be approached from a second floor by two staircases, one for men and the other for women. Access from the street to the second or telegraph floor of the building will be obtained by three staircases, one of which will be kept in reserve for such emergencies as fire or panic.  In the roof will be two large tanks, each containing 6,000 gallons of water, and every floor will be provided with hydrants and hose pipes. The ceiling above the basement will be fireproof, so that any outbreak of fire in the store department may not jeopardise the upper portions of the building. The sanitary arrangements will be made with special care and, in every case, there will be a provision of external ventilation.

The plans of the new Post-office have been prepared by Mr. James Williams, of the Office of Works, who has been advised as to details by Mr Beaufort, the head of the Manchester Post-office. The provision of refreshment rooms for all classes of employees, even to the errand boys, and the accommodation to avoid the necessity of any servant of the Post office going to a public house are mainly the work of Mr Beaufort.

The building will of Portland stone, which has been found to act very successfully in the case of the large central Telegraph Station in London. The erection of the place is expected to occupy three years, the work being somewhat prolonged through the completion having been arranged in two parts, insomuch as it will be necessary to provide for the present Post-office before pulling it down. [Manchester Guardian 11 December 1880 page 7]

MANCHESTER - -The new city post-office, which has been in course of erection for more than two years, has been completed this week. The building has frontages of 216 feet to Brown-street, and of 122 feet to Spring-gardens, and is Composite Classic in style, the street faces being of Portland stone. The chief entrance, that in Spring- gardens, is marked by a projecting granite porch, above which fluted columns of polished granite rise from the first-floor level to a height of 30 feet, and arc surmounted by a carved frieze and dentil cornice. A balustrade with turned stone balusters and heavy coping surmounts the building at a height of 78 feet from the ground. The post-office contains in the basement a delivery room 35 feet 6in. by 20 feet; two engineers' rooms each 53 feet 4in. by 35 feet 8 in.; and the storerooms are 33 feet 6in. square, the other 53 feet 4in. by 36 feet 6in.; battery room 62 feet by 19 feet, and kitchens, lavatories, and retiring rooms. All these rooms are 12 feet Sin. in height. On the ground floor is the sorting office, 165 feet 6in. by 55 feet wide, and 24 feet in height; it is entirely lighted from the roof. On this floor are also money order, telegraph, registering, and private box offices, postmaster's room, waiting-room, and bag-rooms, all having a height of 21 feet. On the first floor, reached by a broad stone staircase, is the letter carriers' room, 80 feet by 30 feet nearly; inquiry office, inspector's room, stores, dining- room, and kitchen, and engineer's and telegraph superintendent's offices. This floor is 16 feet high. On the second, the top floor, is the telegraph instrument room, 142 feet by 117 feet, and 19 feet 9in. in height, dining-rooms for telegraph clerks, mechanics' shop, etc. Messrs. R. Neill and Sons, of Manchester, are the builders. [Building News 29 August 1884 page 363]

Reference        Manchester Guardian 11 December 1880 page 7
Reference        Building News 29 August 1884 page 363 – opening Phase 1
Reference        Manchester Guardian 12 September 1884 page 5 - completion
Reference        Two Manchester Buildings - General Post Office and Free Trade Hall.  Builder 24 October 1913 Page 426 with illustrations