Fire Brigade Headquarters


This building sitting at the corner of London Road and Whitworth Street was designed by Woodhouse, Willoughby & Langham and was built between 1904 and 1906. It provided a fire station for The Manchester Fire Brigade and on-site apartments for 40 firemen's families. The building also contained a police station, a coroner's court,

a stables, bank and a gymnasium.


(The remnants of the "BANK" sign still hang on above the corner doorway)

The facade of the building is clad in Accrington bricks and Burmantofts terracotta. The block is triangular in shape with an interior courtyard. There are two dome-topped moorish towers on the London Road side and a taller separate tower that was probably a hose drying tower.






The fire brigade left the building in the 1980s and it has remained unoccupied ever since. There have been a number of plans to redevelop the site usually into a hotel but to this point it remains unoccupied.







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Inside the Building


The Inner Courtyard






Below: The fire-engine bays that initially held horse drawn vehicles.




Below:  One of the police cells.







Below:  The Laundry Room with pull-out drying racks.





Below:  A corner cupboard that actually housed the fireman's pole.










December 2010


















In July of 2017 Paul Britton wrote an article for the Manchestrer Evening News under the headline, “The long-awaited rebirth of London Road fire station has been confirmed”. The article said that the council had approved plans that, “… will see the former fire station transformed to host an array of attractions, including a boutique 91-room hotel, offices, apartments, a cinema, a luxury spa and bars and restaurants.”  The article claimed that, “… The development could open as early as summer 2019.”  This timeline was clearly optimistic but there are signs that the project is underway because when I visited in August of 2019 the building was swathed in scaffolding.








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