From Britain’s Best Museums and Galleries (Mark Fisher, 2004) p299
Manchester’s industries remembered in mighty 19th-century warehouses and market hall
In October 1829 a competition was held at Rainhill, outside Liverpool, to determine whether the locomotives that were to haul goods on a track between Liverpool and Manchester should be powered by horse, human or steam power. The challenge for each locomotive was to pull three times its own weight, seventy miles in less than ten hours. The Rocket, designed by George Stevenson, won, and within a year, on 15 September 1830, the railway between Liverpool docks and Manchester was opened, giving the docks faster access to new markets and providing Manchester with the raw materials it needed to make it the largest, and fastest growing, industrial city in Britain in the 19th century.
The line’s terminus in Manchester was the world’s first purpose-built passenger and goods railway station and is one of the five historic industrial buildings that form the Museum of Science and Industry that opened in 1983. The others are the Railway Warehouse (1830), believed to have been designed by Thomas Haigh, built by David Bellhouse and Company; the Transit Shed (1855); the Lower Campfield Market Hall (1877); and an 1880 warehouse that is now the museum’s main entrance.
The buildings are as exciting as the collections and are in effect the museum’s largest exhibits. In particular the Lower Campfield Market Hall and the 1830 warehouse are evidence of how industrial development was driven by men such as David Bellhouse. The Bellhouse family owned its own brickworks, a foundry and a sawmill that processed the timber which they imported. It is not surprising that his company was able to build the 1830 warehouse (apparently modified from designs that Haigh had drawn up for warehouses in the Gloucester Docks that had not been built) in only four and a half months.
The visitor enters the 1880 warehouse, which now holds the textile industry collection in the Fibres, Fashion and Fabrics Gallery. The noise of the machinery (Platt Brothers of Oldham) is thunderous. Fibre is woven into fabric; fabric is printed for dresses; dresses are sold from a merchant’s shop: cottonopolis in embryo.
The Power Hall (1855), once the transit shed in which goods were transferred from rail wagons to lorries for distribution, now holds the Beyer-Garratt articulated steam locomotive, made in 1930 in Beyer, Peacock’s Gorton factory and run on the South African railways until 1972. Beside it is a replica of Novelty, which was defeated by Rocket in the Rainhill trials, although it was liked best by those watching. Also here are electric locomotives and a variety of motor cars: a 1905 Rolls Royce hand built in Hulme; a Ford Model T van made at Henry Ford’s Trafford Park factory where Ford introduced British workers to the disciplines of assembly-line production in 1911.
The museum does not attempt to represent all the industries that have operated in Manchester over the past 200 years. There is no batting, no glass making, but the printing and scientific instrument industries are here, as is aerospace, in the elegant, airy space of the Lower Campfield Market Hall, the cast-iron frame of which was made at E. T. Bellhouse’s Eagle Foundry to designs by Mangnall and Littlewood (1876).
The museum manages to convey the majestic power of 19th-century manufacturing industry and something of its detail. The majesty . is in the Power Hall machinery: the hot air and diesel engines, the 1907 McNaught engine from Firgrove Mill, the looming thirty-tonne hydraulic accumulator. The detail is in the new Manchester Science Gallery (2004), in which it is possible to grasp something of the science that has underpinned industry in Manchester since the time of John Dalton, the father of modern chemistry.
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