Proposed New Café Royal Peter Street Manchester

Messrs Slack and Cox, mineral water manufacturers, Hyde Road, Manchester, are promoting a scheme for a new four story restaurant on the site of the Café Royal in Peter Street, near the Gaiety Theatre. The plans are being prepared by Messrs Elcock and Sutcliffe F/FRIBA 21 Northumberland Avenue London WC1. [Builder 6 September 1929 page 376]

THE CAFÉ ROYAL – One would have imagined that today, where such ideas are common property everywhere, Manchester, with its frightful atmosphere to contend with on the one hand, and its reputation for business efficiency to help it on the other, would have seized the new architecture and clasped it to its heart. Instead, after a careful search, one can only find three examples of it in the centre of the town, of which the Café Royal in Peter Street by Messrs Elcock and Sutcliffe, architects, of London, is the only wholehearted one, and even this building is not entirely clothed in the hard impervious materials functionalism calls for in a town like Manchester. The Café Royal is a small three-storeyed structure with a plain polished bluish grey lower storey well suited as a background to the large silver letters giving the café’s name. Above are two storeys of lighter grey surface delicately fluted to contrast with the continuous polished surface below. When this upper fluted surface was clean and new the contrast must have been very effective. Already, however, it is so stained and dirty that it calls almost for a little of the old-fashioned ornament to hide its nakedness. One feels that this upper part, especially for a restaurant building, should have been impervious like the lower part. It is indeed already untidy-looking – the last thing modern architecture should appear, like the fabric bodies of the motor cars of a few years ago. Apart from this defect, however, the building is a direct and effective statement of the facts. One can realise at once the long horizontal windows of the restaurant floors and the vertical on of the stair. These are painted a bright green colour, and in proportion to the whole front, are larger features than windows usually are; thus the colour is more important and becomes a considerable and, in this case, an effective element in the design. The lesson of this little street front seems to be that simple modern architecture, like the modern motor car, requires the highest possible finish throughout. The interior, with its bright steel handrails and plain surfaces that can be kept clean, proves too, that modern functional forms can in themselves provide on occasion better decoration than the painter, even if he has whole walls to cover. [Manchester Guardian 11 December 1933 page  10]

OBSERVATIONS IN PETER STREET – The new Café Royal hopes to have its snack bar open in a week or ten days. The building is virtually finished, as one may judge from the outside, which is sufficiently new to have caused some comment. Some people criticise the architects, Messrs Elcock and Sutcliffe, because they have had the white cement frontage fluted. This, it is said, makes the wall look as though it is made of corrugated asbestos sheets. The fluting is, in fact a device to defeat the dismal effect which weathered cement sometimes acquires. The base below the fluting is black cement containing particles of flint. The vertical windows on the right light the staircase well. The green cellulose paint on the window-frames and revolving door look vivid at present against the black and pale grey of the wall. Those who approve of the building argue that the placing of horizontal and vertical windows and the scale of the door give the café an attractive domestic look in spite of the bareness of the wall. They add, with some reason, that the bareness is a welcome change from the adjoining elaborations of the Gaiety. Once, it appears the theatre and bar had a passage through from on to the other in the basement. This was found in the rebuilding. [Manchester Guardian 3 February 1933 page 11]

Reference    Builder 6 September 1929 page 376
Reference    Manchester Guardian 11 December 1933 page  10 - Professor C H Reilly
Reference    Manchester Guardian 3 February 1933 page  11