Indigo Hotel - Former City Buildings



On January 12, 2012, the Manchester Evening News announced that approval had been granted for the construction of a £23m, 178-bedroom hotel on the site of the grade II listed City Building.  "Developers aim for the hotel to transform the City Buildings site, on the corner of Todd Street and Corporation Street, into a four-star boutique venture, with a Marco Pierre-White restaurant underneath."



A document on the "http://www.publicaccess.manchester.gov.uk" website, entitled "City Buildings Corporation Street/ Todd Street, Manchester. Design & Access Statement - October 2011"  outlines plans for the proposed hotel.  It says that, "The proposals presented in this document are for the renovation of City Buildings through the incorporation of Intercontinental Hotel Group’s Indigo Brand Hotel and Marco Pierre White Restaurant. .....



...... The utilisation of not only this usage but brand allows for the re-use of City Buildings in a sensitive way. Indigo’s flexible brand standards and the design standards for the Marco Pierre White Restaurant allow for the retention of far more existing features within City Buildings than might otherwise be possible if either another use or even another hotel brand was proposed for usage on the site."



The document adds that, "It is clear that the building was designed as a purpose-built commercial premise, with retail use at the street frontage. The “City Buildings” name indicates that it was a speculative or intended multiple-occupancy building. The building clearly complies with the design of commercial warehouses post 1840’s ....  City Buildings can be dated with reasonable certainty to 1869 to the designs of Thomas Bird."



**********************

Images from the construction phase.






















**********************

City Buildings occupied part of this roughly triangular site adjacent to Urbis and Victoria Station.  As you can see from the image below, taken in March of 2014, the building was swathed in scaffolding at the beginning of the construction phase for the hotel. 






City Buildings had been unoccupied for a number of years.  The image below shows what it looked like before the construction began.













**********************
An 1888 map shows the whole block was made up of offices for the Cooperative Insurance Company, a Temperance Hotel, a Public House and a portion of the Cathedral School.



The building below appears to be what was the public house shown in the plan above.



If the surviving buildings are remnants from that day, it would appear that the Cathedral School and Temperance Hotel portions are the ones that have been demolished.

Below is an earlier photograph of the site.  At that point in time a Lloyds Bank occupied the corner of Victoria Station (in 2017 that space was being used as a Marks and Spencers Simply Food) and the building that was a Cathedral School in 1888 was obviously a florists called Victoria Flowers.