Central Station, the one I just missed

Central Station was another I just missed.  

It closed in the May of 1969, just a few months before I arrived.  And in the way these things work it was a good few years before I came across it, and by then it had become a car park, which I suppose was the ultimate form of indignity for what had once been a proud example of 19th century public transport, reduced to a storage space for a less glamorous way of travel

Still that I guess saved it and allowed in time for it to be converted into the exhibition centre, which is pretty much how I first came across it.  I had sneaked in during the late 1970s took a few pictures of the place but it was during its conversion that I got to fully explore the building.  Along with my old friend Keith Bradley and the late Labour leader John Smith we were invited to watch the progress of conversion from 19th century railway station to 20th century exhibition hall.

Now I never took any photographs which was a pity, because there was much to see.

It was built between 1875 and 1880 by the  Cheshire Lines Committee, and was officially opened on 1 July 1880. A temporary wooden building was erected at the front of the station to house the ticket offices and waiting rooms.  It was planned that these would be replaced when a much grander building including the offices and a hotel were built.  This would have been similar to the one at St Pancras Station in London, but it never happened.  The Midland Hotel was built opposite and the wooden ticket office remained.

I do have a soft spot for Central, not least because it was where trains from Chorlton would have terminated.   I would have liked to have been one of the thousands who travelled into the place every day arriving under its impressive roof of iron and glass.  These were and still are one of the marvels of the railway age.  Central’s roof was 168 meters in length with a span of 64 meters which at its highest rose 27 meters from the platform floor.

It is a graceful arch of light which must have impressed all who saw it for the first time, and showed off Victorian engineering at its best.  And if you want a contrast just across the road is the old Liverpool Road Railway Station built just 50 years earlier. There the roof of the carriage shed is a simple wooden construction resting on cast iron pillars and would not have been out of place in a building made a hundred years earlier.  Indeed remove the iron supports and substitute wooden posts and you could almost be in a medieval barn.  Not so Central Station. It was the end point in railway engineering and one that sadly I and I suppose many people took for granted.  Shame really because it is a pretty impressive place.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson and Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, Central Station in 1955 by H. Milliagan, m62751 and in 1964 by C.E. Poole m 62772,and finally in 1971, by M. Luft, m62772