49 Peter Street

49 Peter Street, a concrete framed building clad in polished granite. It was designed by the architectural practice of Mills Beaumont Leavey and built in 1992. It is a modern office building arranged over ground and 6 upper floors.

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This was once the site of the Comedy Theatre later called the Gaiety Theatre.

The Comedy Theatre opened for business in 1884 across Peter Street from the Theatre Royal and St. George's House, the YMCA. The architect was Alfred Derbyshire, a pupil of Richard Lane, the man who designed the nearby Friend's Meeting House. Derbyshire had an interest in amateur dramatics and through that he met Alexander Calvert who commissioned him to enlarge and equip the Princes Theatre on Oxford Street. This led to an oportunity to redecorate the Lyceum in London for Henry Irving. Derbyshire collaborated with Irving on the development of a safety plan for theatre design. This included the addition of an asbestos curtain to isolate the stage from the auditorium. He incorporated some of these ideas in the design of the Comedy Theatre.

Cecil Stewart, in "The Stones of Manchester", says this about the Comedy Theatre: "This building is almost opposite the Free Trade Hall, both in its siting and character. There is no pompous Renaissance dignity about it. There is impudence." Initially the theatre had a capacity of 2,500. It had a proscenium arch stage that was 27' deep and 31' 6" and 25' to the top of the proscenium. It had an orchestra pit.

a. The Comedy/Gaiety Theatre	b. The Friend's Meeting House
c. Central Library	d. Midland Hotel
e. St George's House YMCA	f. Theatre Royal
g. The Free Trade Hall - gutted by WII bombing

In 1908 the theatre was sold to Annie Horniman. Horniman was a theatre patron whose interest in repertory and acquaintence with Yeats led to her build the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1904. She bought the Comedy Theatre for £25,000, and commissioned Frank Matcham to redesign it. It reopened in 1912 as the Gaiety Theatre with a reduced capacity of 1,300. The Gaiety operated as a live theatre until 1922. Later it became a cinema. The Theatre was demolished in 1959.