Midland Hotel, Manchester

Manchester Central Library is the headquarters of the city's library and information service in Manchester, England. Facing St Peter's Square, it was designed by E. Vincent Harris and constructed between 1930 and 1934. The form of the building, a columned portico attached to a rotunda domed structure, is loosely derived from the Pantheon, Rome. At its opening, one critic wrote, "This is the sort of thing which persuades one to believe in the perennial applicability of the Classical canon".The library building is grade II* listed. A four-year project to renovate and refurbish the library commenced in 2010. Central Library re-opened on 22 March 2014.

The Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre is "one of Europe's leading specialist libraries on migration, race and ethnicity" open to members of the public as well as to students and researchers. It increases access to and visibility of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) histories with a growing archive of material relating to the local area. Its sister organisation, the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Education Trust offers advice, training, networking opportunities, project support, exhibitions, publications and events to help community organisations to record and share their heritage. The Centre is part of the University of Manchester and is located in Manchester Central Library, where it is part of the Archives+ partnership. The current head of both the Centre and the Trust is Dr Safina Islam, who was appointed in March 2019.

The Peterloo Memorial is a memorial in Manchester, England, commemorating the Peterloo Massacre. Designs for the memorial by the artist Jeremy Deller were unveiled in November 2018. It is sited close to the site of the massacre and was unveiled on 14 August 2019. It comprises a series of concentric circular stone steps engraved with the names of the 18 victims and the places the marchers had come from, rising to 6 feet (1.8 m) at the centre. The lack of disabled access to the monument has been criticised.The Peterloo Memorial Campaign Group had been lobbying for a fitting memorial to The Peterloo Massacre for over ten years.

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.

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.

The Prince's Theatre in Oxford Street, Manchester, England, was built at a cost of £20,000 in 1864. Under the artistic and managerial leadership of Charles Calvert, "Manchester's most celebrated actor-manager", it soon became a great popular success. The theatre's first production, Shakespeare's The Tempest, took place on 15 October 1864; Calvert himself played Prospero and his wife took the role of Miranda. The Times newspaper of 18 October reported that the 1,590-seat theatre "was exceedingly well filled", and declared the evening "a brilliant success". The theatre subsequently became synonymous with Calvert's elaborate and historically accurate Shakespearian productions.The theatre's interior was extensively rebuilt by Alfred Darbyshire in 1869. The work included the addition of 300 seats, and featured a frieze over the proscenium painted by Henry Stacy Marks showing Shakespeare flanked by muses and his principal characters. The Prince's was the first theatre to introduce tip-up seats and "early doors" tickets, which for a premium allowed patrons to enter the theatre early, to avoid the usual opening-time crush. In 1874 the theatre was the venue for the premiere of Alfred Cellier's comic opera The Sultan of Mocha. The years after the First World War saw a decline in the theatre's fortunes, and by the 1930s the increasing competition from cinema was threatening its viability. The final performance took place in April 1940, after which the building was sold to the ABC cinema company, who intended to replace it with a large cinema complex. Although the theatre was demolished shortly afterwards, the intervention of the Second World War meant that the cinema was never built; the site is now occupied by Peter House, a large office complex completed in 1958.

Lawrence Buildings in Mount Street, Manchester, England, is a Victorian office block constructed for the Inland Revenue in 1874–6 by Pennington and Bridgen in the Gothic Revival style. It is a Grade II* listed building as of 3 October 1974.The building is of sandstone ashlar with a slate roof. Its skyline is dramatic, with "tourelles and slated spirelet, tall crocketed gable(s), low dormers and tall chimmneys". Heavily decorated, it displays a statue of Queen Victoria beneath a canopy on the central front, together with a doorcase flanked by "a lion and a unicorn on pedestals, with an elaborate two-storey oriel window above".Lawrence Buildings forms a group with St Andrew's Chambers, to the right, in a similar style.The ground floor is a cafe, and the remaining building, floors 1-5 are occupied by flexible office space company, incspaces.

Manchester Town Hall Extension was built between 1934 and 1938 to provide additional accommodation for local government services. It was built between St Peter's Square and Lloyd Street in Manchester city centre, England. English Heritage designated it a grade II* listed building on 3 October 1974. Its eclectic style was designed to be a link between the ornate Gothic Revival Manchester Town Hall and the Classical architecture of the Central Library.

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.

The Intercontinental Tower, Manchester is a cancelled landmark skyscraper that was proposed in Manchester city centre, England. The building would have been a five-star luxury hotel run by InterContinental Hotels Group, and developed by Northern Irish development firm, Benmore. The skyscraper was proposed in a press release by developer Benmore in May 2009 and discussed with Manchester City Council in summer 2009. In 2010, the tower was part of the city council's preliminary plans to regenerate the surrounding civic quarter, and opposition to building a skyscraper in the heart of its historic district had been minimal.The tower would have featured a helipad and two decorative spires, much like the Willis Tower in Chicago, which would have taken its pinnacle height to approximately 200 m (660 ft), 30 m taller than Greater Manchester's tallest skyscraper at the time, the Beetham Tower. The plans for the 48-storey tower were drawn up before the Great Recession but were abandoned when the financial market crashed. Planning negotiations resumed and architect Roger Stephenson designed a 25-storey tower to contain 270 hotel rooms and a presidential suite at the top. The theatre façade was to be retained to become the entrance to the hotel foyer. The structure was intended to be created behind the theatre's façade.

The Memorial Hall in Albert Square, Manchester, England, was constructed in 1863–1866 by Thomas Worthington. It was built to commemorate the bicentennial anniversary of the 1662 Act of Uniformity. One of the best examples of Venetian Gothic revival in the city, the hall is a Grade II* listed building.

One St Peter's Square is a high-rise office building in Manchester, England. It is situated in St Peter's Square in the city centre.