Manchester Central Reference Library St. Peter’s Square Manchester

On 17 July 1934, King George V officially opened Manchester Central Reference Library and laid the foundation stone of the Town Hall Extension. The following day he was in Liverpool to open the new road tunnel under the River Mersey.

Manchester Central Reference Library was the result of a competition held in 1927 for a new library and extension to the town hall. The competition was judged by T.R. Milburn, the architect for LCC County Hall, and attracted 64 entries. Six were selected as finalists. Eventually, Vincent Harris, an architect who had previously won several important commissions for civic buildings, was declared the winner. This was not the first attempt to secure a purpose-built central library in Manchester. In 1907 a competition had been held for a combined art gallery and library, probably intended for the site of the former Infirmary in Piccadilly. The winning design proposed a classical building with central entrance but the opportunity was lost and the scheme was never carried out. Unlike Liverpool and Birmingham, Manchester had never previously created a prestigious civic area for itself. Although it had been one of the first local authorities to set up a municipal free library in 1850, the Corporation had consistently failed to provide enough money for a new building. The first library had been set up in.... at Castlefield. When this building became unsafe, it was transferred to the old Town Hall in King Street. When this building too was demolished in 1912, the library transferred to a group of temporary buildings in Piccadilly Gardens.

Stanley Just, the Chief Librarian, had prepared an initial sketch scheme for a square library with two domes. Harris's desire for an impressive building led him to a circular form, his justification being that servicing it would be easier. However, such a design was not without historical precedence for the Library of the British Museum, the Library of Congress and the Pantheon in Paris had all been designed round a domed reading room. To progress matters, Harris, Stanley Just and the Chairman of the Library Committee set off for America where they visited Yale, Columbia and the Library of Congress. From the United States came the idea of a theatre in the basement better to integrate the library with the community.

Harris determined that the new building was to be a prestigious addition to central Manchester. He chose a Roman Classical style, probably to distance himself from the Gothic style of Alfred Waterhouse's Town Hall. Rather, the library looked to Lutyen's War Memorial in St. Peter's Square both in style and in the choice of Portland stone as the facing material. The result has been described as "neo-Georgian Revival, Classical Survival", a style regarded as unfashionable by many at the time. However, there were some supporters. Reilly, writing in the Manchester Guardian compared the partially completed building with the Colosseum in Rome. To emphasis this sense of scale, Harris provided a double height portico with a giant order of Corinthian columns leading to the two storey  Shakespeare Hall with stained glass donated by the widow of Leo Grindon. Each side, the stairs to the first floor reading room lead off. Below the main reading room are four floors of stacks, each of which was 7 feet in height. These are an integral part of the structure of the building and represent a departure from previous practice. Behind the classical facade was concealed an essentially modern building. Of steel-framed construction, it contained some of the most up-to-date equipment then available, including the largest high-voltage electrical heating plant in the world. A central vacuum system was installed, with 260 points around the building. Lighting was integrated into the columns and freestanding uplighters incorporated. Harris also designed some of the furniture.