A group of retired staff members from Manchester’s Town Hall recently went back in time to revisit their old stamping ground as they gathered earlier this summer at Manchester Central Library. The group enjoyed a VIP viewing of archives from Manchester’s historic Town Hall.  

Manchester’s landmark Town Hall is currently closed as it completes a huge transformation and refurbishment process, part of which is to discover, preserve and celebrate the history contained within the building. Over recent years, curatorial manager Meg McHugh and her colleague Sue Kent have been working hard to showcase the Town Hall’s treasures and engage with stakeholder groups across the city and former City Council employees to help us celebrate our rich civic heritage.  

Meg and Sue joined colleagues from Manchester Archives+ to host the group of former staff, with a look at some historic items. They also enjoyed a heritage talk about the Town Hall Project.  

First stop was an informal session in the Archives Searchroom on the ground floor of Central Library in St Peter’s Square. The group of former City Council employees saw original architectural floor plans by the architect Alfred Waterhouse. These technical drawings in ink are all hand-coloured, and are very beautiful, as well as being a contemporary record from 1867 of the planned layouts of Manchester Town Hall. 

Amongst the range of items on display were papers from the W E A Axon collection (M78) relating to the Town Hall, and from the collection relating to Joseph Thompson (M79), who was a member of the New Town Hall Sub Committee in 1865. The group was particularly fascinated by a photo album and scrapbook (Archives+ ref: MISC/381) of photographs taken in the 1950s by the Manchester Town Hall photographers, which captured colleagues and friends from the Treasurer’s department in which many of our group of former City Council staff worked. This intriguing item also contains photographs of the punched card computing machinery used by the Treasurer’s Department – a glimpse of very early technology! Browsing through these really brought back memories of faces and personalities from their busy working days.  

Next up was a chat with Our Town Hall project curators Meg and Sue over a light lunch in the impressive Chief Librarian’s Office, where they introduced the plans for the forthcoming Town Hall Visitors Experience. The group was shown some exciting early images of how the rooms will look, as it showcases portraits and objects from the Town Hall and re-tells stories about events and personalities from its rich past.  

This friendly group are led by Brian Duckworth, who worked in the City Treasurers Department during his long working life in Manchester. Bryan and his wife were kind enough to give us some lovely feedback, saying that the whole group had a really enjoyable visit and had been very impressed by the archives capturing the history of the Town Hall and its staff.  

Artefacts from the Our Town Hall project are currently on display at Manchester Central Library in the Exhibition cases outside the first floor Reading Room. 

For more information about the history of the Town Hall, please look at the link below: 

The building | History of Manchester Town Hall | Manchester City Council 

For more about the Our Town Hall project, see https://www.manchester.gov.uk/ourtownhall