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Text-only version of these pages for regular e-updates and ticket booking |
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 Click image to see larger view Facts and figures Construction Plant tower Artworks Auditorium Organ Exterior Interiors |
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| A rare and visionary gesture The Bridgewater Hall was officially opened by Her Majesty The Queen accompanied by His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh, on Wednesday 4 December 1996. With the opening of this magnificent venue, Manchester's civic and cultural history entered a dramatic new phase. This great city, cradle of the Industrial Revolution and prodigy of the nineteenth century, has survived late-twentieth century industrial decline to re-invent itself for the new millennium with a confidence others must envy. For over 150 years it has had an unrivalled tradition of fine civic building, of architectural and artistic patronage and of amateur and world-class professional music-making. The Bridgewater Hall continues and consolidates these traditions, as well as being a prestige flagship for Manchester's overall regeneration and a splendid symbol of its artistic health and enterprise. The need for a concert hall, purpose-built to the highest international standards, had been felt almost since the 1950's, when the Free Trade Hall, best-loved memorial of Manchester's 'golden age of manufacture', was reconstructed after wartime damage. Notwithstanding the deep affection in which it was held and with which it will always be remembered, the Free Trade Hall was hopelessly ill-equipped to respond to the ever-rising standards of service and acoustic excellence being demanded by the concert-going public and musicians alike. During the 1970s and '80s several schemes and solutions were proposed. Despite Manchester's cultural vigour, they were all doomed to remain mere aspirations until imaginative partners could be found to help fund and execute such an enormously complex and expensive enterprise. The creation in 1988 of the Central Manchester Development Corporation provided the missing ingredient; an organisation which could match the City Council's vision and energy and which could act as the catalyst for a viable and unique financial solution. This partnership would not only give the City the concert hall it deserved and had earned, but would also stimulate the regeneration of the whole G-Mex area. In 1989 a competition was held, to a brief devised by a representative group of Manchester's major musical organisations. The eventual winners, architects RHWL, distilled from their unrivalled experience as designers of buildings for the performing arts a wonderfully simple and elegant concept which relates well both to the overall fabric and texture of the City and to its immediate historic surroundings. The design of the building was informed at every stage by acoustic considerations and a large part of the building's success is due to the real creative collaboration between the architects and acousticians, Arup Acoustics. In early 1993, after the design had been considerably refined and many difficulties overcome, the building contract was awarded to Laing North West. On March 22nd, excavators took their first slice through two hundred years of history. Where once there had been open fields crossed by a long-since vanished tributary of the River Tib, successively followed by dye-works, chemical factories, a bus station and a car park, The Bridgewater Hall rose in exactly three and a half years. |
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