Sunlight House “a modern building with the best of old standards maintained"

Sunlight House, © 2013 Peter Topping

Last month I was on Quay Street with Sunlight House which when it was completed in 1932 was seen as a building which combined “modern conceptions of architecture in its sleekness and in the vertical lines, yet [retained] the best of the old standards of design.”*

It was designed and built by Joseph Sunlight as the headquarters for his business and was a lavish and modern building as befitted a man who claimed to have created more than one million pounds worth of property in the  first fourteen years as an independent architect.

Not that that he had it all his own way.

Just a few years after the building was opened his application for a license to serve alcohol was turned down.

And in 1949 he failed to get planning permission to “build a 35 storey extension to Sunlight House and a new 14-storey building between Peter Street and Jackson’s Row [because] the premises would dominate existing and proposed civic buildings, exceed the appropriate density of the area, injure the amenities of near-by buildings, and prejudice possible development plans.”**

So, even the mighty, wealthy and influential do not always get their way.

On Quay Street in 1911

Nor was his Parliamentary career a long one.  He was elected as the Liberal MP for Shrewsbury in the 1923 General Election only to lose the following year in the subsequent General Election.***

It is one of those interesting little asides of history that had he retained his seat he might well have seen his Brick Bill for the making of bigger bricks pass into law.

It was a private members bill which had survived its reading by one vote but fell by the wayside with the dissolution of Parliament in 1924.
All of which is a long way from Sunlight House and from the properties it replaced.

Now the Manchester Guardian had reported in 1931 that before Sunlight House “was erected the site contained some of Manchester’s worst slums.”

Twenty years earlier these had consisted of a mix of shops and lodging houses and judging from photographs may well have had their time.

*Sunlight House, the Manchester Guardian, May 12, 1931

And some of those who lived on Quay Street

**No extension to Sunlight House, the Manchester Guardian, July 2, 1949

***December 6 1923, October 29, 1924

Maps & pictures, detail of Quay Street from the 1888-93 OS map of South Lancashire, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/,  and street directory from Slater’s Manchester, Salford and Suburban Directory, 1911

Painting; Sunlight House, © 2013 Peter Topping, Paintings from Pictures,
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