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Theatre Royal, Manchester

Grade II listed buildings in ManchesterGrade II listed theatresNeoclassical architecture in EnglandTheatres completed in 1845Theatres in Manchester
Theatre Royal front facade, Manchester
Theatre Royal front facade, Manchester

The Theatre Royal in Manchester, England, opened in 1845. Situated next to the Free Trade Hall, it is the oldest surviving theatre in Manchester. It was commissioned by Mancunian businessman John Knowles who wanted a theatre venue in the city. The Theatre Royal operated as a theatre from 1845 until 1921, when it closed in the face of growing competition from the Palace Theatre and Opera House. The building has since been converted numerous times for use as a cinema, bingo hall and nightclub. It has been unoccupied since 2009.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Theatre Royal, Manchester (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Theatre Royal, Manchester
Southmill Street, Manchester City Centre

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Latitude Longitude
N 53.4777 ° E -2.2465 °
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Theatre Royal

Southmill Street
M2 5GB Manchester, City Centre
England, United Kingdom
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Theatre Royal front facade, Manchester
Theatre Royal front facade, Manchester
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Gaiety Theatre, Manchester
Gaiety Theatre, Manchester

The Gaiety Theatre, Manchester was a theatre in Manchester, England. It opened in 1884 and was demolished in 1959. It replaced a previous Gaiety Theatre on the site that had been destroyed by fire.The new theatre was designed by Alfred Darbyshire for United Theatres Co. Ltd. and built on a plot of land near to the corner of Peter Street and Mount Street. It opened as the Comedy Theatre in 1884. On 9 November 1908, it was bought by Annie Horniman for £25,000 and reconstructed to plans by Frank Matcham, reducing its capacity from 2,500 to 1,300. The theatre reopened as the Gaiety Theatre in 1912. It was Britain's first regional repertory theatre. In 1920 the theatre was taken over by Samuel Fitton & Associates but closed in 1922. It was in use again between 1945 and 1947 but was demolished in 1959. During the time the theatre was being run by Annie Horniman, a wide variety of types of plays was produced. Anne Horniman also encouraged local writers, who became known as the Manchester School of playwrights. They included Allan Monkhouse, Harold Brighouse, writer of Hobson's Choice, and Stanley Houghton, who wrote Hindle Wakes. Actors who performed at the Gaiety early in their careers include Sybil Thorndike and Basil Dean.In 2008 Annie Horniman's centenary was celebrated by a performance of Houghton's play Independent Means, which had been recently "rediscovered" in the British Library by Chris Honer, the theatre's artistic director.

Peterloo Massacre
Peterloo Massacre

The Peterloo Massacre took place at St Peter's Field, Manchester, Lancashire, England, on Monday 16 August 1819. Fifteen people died when cavalry charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 there was an acute economic slump, accompanied by chronic unemployment and harvest failure due to the Year Without a Summer, and worsened by the Corn Laws, which kept the price of bread high. At that time only around 11 percent of adult males had the vote, very few of them in the industrial north of England, which was worst hit. Reformers identified parliamentary reform as the solution and a mass campaign to petition parliament for manhood suffrage gained three-quarters of a million signatures in 1817 but was flatly rejected by the House of Commons. When a second slump occurred in early 1819, radical reformers sought to mobilise huge crowds to force the government to back down. The movement was particularly strong in the north-west, where the Manchester Patriotic Union organised a mass rally in August 1819, addressed by well-known radical orator Henry Hunt. Shortly after the meeting began, local magistrates called on the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry to arrest Hunt and several others on the platform with him. The Yeomanry charged into the crowd, knocking down a woman and killing a child, and finally apprehended Hunt. Cheshire Magistrates' chairman William Hulton then summoned the 15th Hussars to disperse the crowd. They charged with sabres drawn, and contemporary accounts estimated that between nine and seventeen people were killed and 400 to 700 injured in the ensuing confusion. The event was first labelled the "Peterloo massacre" by the radical Manchester Observer newspaper in a bitterly ironic reference to the bloody Battle of Waterloo which had taken place four years earlier. Historian Robert Poole has called the Peterloo Massacre "the bloodiest political event of the 19th century in English soil", and "a political earthquake in the northern powerhouse of the industrial revolution". The London and national papers shared the horror felt in the Manchester region, but Peterloo's immediate effect was to cause the government to pass the Six Acts, which were aimed at suppressing any meetings for the purpose of radical reform. It also led indirectly to the foundation of the Manchester Guardian newspaper. In a survey conducted by The Guardian in 2006, Peterloo came second to the Putney Debates as the event from radical British history that most deserved a proper monument or a memorial. For some time, Peterloo was commemorated only by a blue plaque, criticised as being inadequate and referring only to the "dispersal by the military" of an assembly. In 2007, the City Council replaced the blue plaque with a red plaque referring to "a peaceful rally" being "attacked by armed cavalry" and mentioning "15 deaths and over 600 injuries". In 2019, on the 200th anniversary of the massacre, Manchester City Council inaugurated a new Peterloo Memorial by the artist Jeremy Deller, featuring eleven concentric circles of local stone engraved with the names of the dead and the places from which the victims came.

Sir Ralph Abercromby (pub)
Sir Ralph Abercromby (pub)

The Sir Ralph Abercromby, also known as the Abercrombie, is a pub between Jackson's Row and Bootle Street, in Manchester, England, named after Lieutenant-General Sir Ralph Abercromby. Built in the 19th century, it is one of the few structures remaining in the area from the time of the Peterloo Massacre. Wounded people from the massacre were brought to the pub for medical treatment. Many later changes were made to the building, both inside and outside, with no substantial 19th century features remaining. It is thought to be the inspiration for the pub in Life on Mars.The pub is owned by Enterprise Inns. It has a central bar, a function room (formerly a games room) and a beer garden. In February 2016, it won a CAMRA award for "Pub of the season".In 2014, it was threatened with demolition, along with Bootle Street police station and Manchester Reform Synagogue, to make way for the St Michael's redevelopment of the area led by Gary Neville. A Change.org petition to save the pub was signed by over 3,500 people. An application by members of the Campaign for Real Ale to list the building was declined by Historic England as the building was not of "national interest". Several applications to Manchester City Council to protect the pub as an asset of community value were also declined in 2014 and 2016. The possibility of dismantling it and doing a brick-by-brick rebuild of it in a new location was aired in 2016, but is likely to be costly.On 12 July 2017, the revised plans for the development included Gary Neville's consortium buying and retaining The Sir Ralph Abercromby. Neville was reported as saying "There’s no doubt we underestimated, not the architectural importance of the pub, but the actual social community importance of the pub".