Bloom Street: 39 apartments in Manchester

Bloom Street, Manchester

Asset Type

Residential

Quantum

39 Apartments

Status

Pre-planning

Architect

Fletcher Rae

Structural Engineers

Renaissance

Planning Consultant

Ashton Hale

One of Manchester’s last remaining examples of Venetian architecture, the former textile finishing factory at 42 Bloom Street and 8 Minshull Street is being given a new lease of life as unique, well-designed residential apartments.

Embrace the elegance of loft living, with original features lovingly preserved whilst designed with the conveniences of modern living in mind.

Site Story

Dive into the local site story

Modern Manchester is an acropolis of skyscrapers.

The shimmering glass residential towers are not the first architectural fashion the city has tried on.

“All European architecture, bad and good, old and new, is derived from Greece through Rome, and coloured and perfected from the East.”

So wrote John Ruskin in 1853. He was looking across the Grand Canal in Venice at the time. In Manchester he might have been looking across Canal Street. John Ruskin was a nineteenth century influencer. A philosopher and art critic, keen to tell people what to think, paint and build. He was a big fan of Venice, and in Manchester his fashion sense went viral.

Ruskin hyped the style he called “Venetian Gothic”.

He talked about it a lot in lectures he gave at the “Art Treasures Exhibition” in Manchester in 1857. This big art show took place over the summer in a temporary exhibition hall built at White City near Old Trafford. 16,000 works of art were seen by 1.3 million people in 142 days. That was four times the population of Manchester at the time.

Cotton made Manchester rich. It wasn’t just the huge spinning mills that crowded Ancoats and the surrounding boroughs, but the garment and finishing workshops, the all-important showrooms and shipping warehouses where samples were displayed, business was done, orders made up, packed and shipped. The shipping warehouses, lined the streets at the city core, north and south of the Rochdale canal, and across Portland Street.

The global cotton business eventually left Manchester for cheaper production centres around the world.

By the end of World War II, once-grand shipping warehouses, in their Ruskin-inspired Venetian Gothic robes of redbrick, cream sandstone and sequined ribbons of arched windows, were soot-black and crumbling.

Like Venice a century before, the palaces of commerce and cotton were largely abandoned by the princes of business.

Chinatown and the Gay Village moved in, north and south of Portland Street, at first because accommodation was cheap. In the mid nineteen-eighties the “Manhattan Loft Corporation” (a London start-up busy making Clerkenwell’s abandoned industrial buildings the cool place to live in the capital) looked at a decaying Venetian-style warehouse at 42-44 Sackville Street, on the Rochdale Canal, and decided it would give Manchester a go.

They stripped out the building, threw a launch party, and woke up the next day to the news from their accountants that they couldn’t see much of a profit in Manchester property values at that time. They put their hollowed Venetian Gothic warehouse back on the market, and sold it, cut-price to Carol Ainscow, whose bar, the openly gay-friendly “Manto”, looked at the abandoned loft development across the Rochdale canal.

42-44 Sackville Street was the first Venetian Palazzo-style warehouse to set the pace for loft living in city centre Manchester. 42 Bloom Street + 8 Minshull Street might well be the Grand Finale. The building is Grade II listed, recognising its high architectural merit. This classy architecture is dressed to impress. Sitting on a prominent corner with a prestigious address, opposite architect Thomas Worthington’s grand Police Courts (now Minshull Street Crown Courts).

Like eighteenth century Venice, the scene was set for year-round Carnival.

The Gay Village became Party Central.

“Essential” was the decadent nightclub opened by Nigel Martin-Smith in 2000. Martin-Smith was the man who brought “Take That” to millions. His all-night Carnival, on three floors of this Bloom Street palazzo lasted fourteen years and told the world that Manchester had the style, glitz, wit, flare and flares to be the global mirror ball.

Not many people question residential values in Manchester today. And not many Venetian Gothic warehouses will have doubts about their survival through the next one hundred years.

Views can help see to that.