Ralli Quays is an office complex made up of two buildings, known as the East and West Blocks, designed by Fairhurst Architects for H. M. Customs and Excise.  The buildings were erected between 1991 and 1993 and according to the governmentbuildings.co.uk website the occupants of the buildings include HMRC, the Crown Prosecution Service and the UK Border Agency.

According to John J Parkinson, writing in his "Manchester - An Architectural History" this was one of the first buildings to actually face the River Irwell rather than turning its back to it.  I have a suspicion that the name Ralli Quay may derive from the famous Ralli Brothers, merchant traders who had their Manchester headquarters in Harvester House on Peter Street.  The brothers traded in a wide variety of cargo shipping it to and from bases in Constantinople, Romania, Egypt, Russia, London, Trieste, Marseilles and Vienna.  The Ralli family had a talent for foreseeing problems in world trade. In 1851 they opened a branch in India at the ideal moment to be able to take advantage of the need for a substitute for Russian hemp when it became scarce as a result of the Crimean War. Then, in 1861 a Bombay office enabled them to provide Indian cotton to Liverpool to replace the cotton from the US southern states when the Union Army blockaded the Confederate ports.



The building skirts the Irwell but it also sits on the edge of what was once the New Bailey Prison.  The 1844 map of Manchester and Salford shows the prison and, in the location of Ralli Quays, a building that contained the Irwell Foundry and the Irwell Marble Works. 

After the prison was demolished the land became a large railway goods yard occupying most of the area between the railway viaduct and the river.  In the aerial photograph below from the 1940s, you can see the building that occupied the Ralli Quays site indicated by a white arrow.

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