The story behind Speaker's House is much more interesting than you might imagine by looking at the building in 2014.  It occupies the corner of St. Mary's Gate and Deansgate and was designed by the architectural practice of Douglas Stephen & Partners and built in 1963.  It is described as "Concrete framed of seven storeys over a two storey coarse aggregate and brick podium.

The previous occupant of that site had been two building which dated from the 19th Century.  On the corner was the Exchange Building and next to it on Deansgate was the Wards Building and next to it was, and still is, the Barton Arcade building.  In the photograph below you can see the Exchange Building, with its grand arched entrance, on the left of the image.  That entrance led to an L-shaped arcade with a glass roof similar to the one in today's Barton Arcade.  You can see the Wards Building on the right of the image with Barrs Toy Shop at street level.

The two buildings offered street level shopping with more shops and a restaurant in the Exchange Arcade.  Throughout the upper floors were offices.

After WWII the site was a bombsite and it sat like that for a number of years.  The arrow in the image below points to the location.  It became Manchester's version of Speaker's Corner so when it was redeveloped in the 1960s as the site of an office & retail building it was called "Speaker's House".