Record drawing of Manchester Town Hall: perspective

A big man with a bushy beard, Alfred Waterhouse designed colossal Victorian buildings. Born in Liverpool, he undertook his architectural apprenticeship in Manchester, where he started up his own practice. By opening another office in London, Waterhouse built up one of the country’s largest architectural practices. His portfolio ranged from the terracotta-clad Natural History Museum in London’s South Kensington to numerous college buildings in Oxford and Cambridge. As principal architect for the Prudential Assurance company, Waterhouse built their fiery red-brick headquarters in London’s Holborn (now renamed Waterhouse Chambers and the headquarters of English Heritage) and, like a brood of little chicks, the company’s branch offices up and down the country.

Alfred Waterhouse secured the job of designing Manchester Town Hall by winning a competition in 1868. Construction lasted a decade, so this large watercolour from 1887 is not a design but a record of the completed building. A romantically charged view, it shows the architectural centrepiece of the booming industrial city in all its gothic magnificence. The town hall’s principal front rises over Albert Square, a scene teeming with street life in the smoggy purple haze of sunset. On the left, in shadow, is a memorial to Prince Albert, designed in a complementary gothic style by Manchester architect Thomas Worthington – Waterhouse’s friendly rival. The clock tower of Waterhouse’s town hall soars above the entrance; the large windows on the raised principal storey light four great rooms: the banqueting hall, the reception room, the mayor’s parlour and the council chamber.

One of the most brilliant architectural watercolourists of his generation, Waterhouse often worked up drawings for presentation. Before adding the watercolour, he usually assigned to members of his office the tricky business of setting up the building’s perspective lightly in pencil. At an early stage of designing this building, Waterhouse and his staff made a watercolour to be shown at the Royal Academy’s Annual Exhibition. The office register records that the assistant George Steane devoted seven days to the drawing, before T. Cooper took over and spent a further five, while Waterhouse himself spent three and a half days on it. That’s a total of fifteen days spent on the drawing, which was less elaborate than this one.