Manchester Town Hall

Manchester Town Hall was designed by the architect Alfred Waterhouse in the High Victorian Gothic style and inaugurated on September 13, 1877, built to give England's rapidly industrializing city of Manchester a civic building to match its Victorian-era wealth and ambition. Its 280-foot clock tower houses a bell known as Great Abel, and the building's iron-framed construction, designed to be fireproof, was paired with advanced heating systems considered ambitious for their time. The Great Hall at the building's heart was described by the critic John Ruskin as the most truly magnificent Gothic apartment in Europe, and its walls carry the Manchester Murals, a cycle of twelve paintings by Ford Madox Brown depicting episodes from the city's history. A separate Sculpture Hall displays busts and statues of figures significant to Manchester's civic and scientific life, including the chemist John Dalton and the physicist James Joule, while the building's organ, built by the French organ maker Aristide Cavaille-Coll, contains more than five thousand pipes. Now a Grade I listed building, Manchester Town Hall is widely regarded as one of the finest examples of Gothic Revival architecture anywhere in the world.