Environmental Pressures on Building Design and Manchester's John Rylands Library

Journal of Design Hutory Vol. 13 No. 3 © 2000 The Design History Society Environmental Pressures on Building Design and Manchester's John Rylands Library Catherine Bowler and Peter Brimblecombe The enormous growth of the Victorian city and its parallel pollution problems confronted architects with great problems. Environmental pressures included denial of light, overcrowding, awkward sites, noise, accessibility and visibility of buildings, and air pollution. Corrosive pollutants were especially damaging to the minutely detailed Gothic architecture popular in Victorian Britain. Dense smoke made cities dark, coated the windows and penetrated inside damaging their contents. Basil Champneys, in designing Manchester's John Rylands Library, responded to these problems in an imaginative way that reflected the best of late nineteenth-century solutions. His thoughtful design made the most of available light and the crowded site. He used durable materials and colours that could resist the polluted air, while adopting electric light and air filtration inside. Valuable books and manuscripts were protected with carefully designed cases. Although not everyone was happy with the building, it has remained as an example of a determined attempt to cope with a very aggressive urban environment. Champneys confronted the conflict between design and the urban environment to produce a durable but pleasing library that proved suitable for users and provided secure accommodation for its contents. Keywords: air pollution—architecture—environmental design—interior design—library— urbanism Introduction continued to form the focus for many historical analyses of society in Victorian England. The environmental damage generated by the Indus- The environmental impact on die built environ- trial Revolution in England from the late eighteenth ment was also profound. Although an awareness of century was profound. The harmful impact of rapid damage to buildings by atmospheric pollution was urbanization and industrialization was widely not unique to die nineteenth century, it was through- acknowledged. Human and social costs, manifested out this era of accelerated degradation of die environ- physically, for example, in high mortality rates ment that the problem took on a new dimension. amongst the urban poor, provoked some consterna- Damage to the built environment was recognized and tion and desire for change. Those charged with confronted by contemporaries but has tended to be improvement focused predominandy on ameliora- ignored by later historians. This paper discusses the tion of public health through the sanitary reform of architectural responses to building widiin an urban living and working conditions of the labouring location in die nineteenth century. It focuses parti- classes. This was implemented through local and cularly on Victorian Manchester and on die con- national legislation, which increasingly provided for struction of architecturally significant secular the local administration of sanitary affairs. This activ- buildings including the John Rylands Library ity generated a vast body of literature, which has (1890—9), one of die last secular Godiic buildings in 175 Catherine Bowler and Peter Brimblecombe the city. The architect Basil Champneys was particu- central Manchester was comprehensively rebuilt from larly sensitive to the environmental problems in the early 1800s onwards, using innovative building designing urban buildings at the end of the nine- techniques, novel materials to create unique build- teenth century, and has left us with a fine and detailed ings.6 Visitors acknowledged that despite its polluted record of his responses. appearance, it possessed many of the finest and most advanced Victorian secular buildings in the country: 'one can scarcely walk about Manchester without Victorian redevelopment in an coming across frequent examples of the grand in architecture. There has been nothing to equal it industrial city since the building of Venice.'7 Local architects were A result of the mechanization of the cotton industry concerned enough to advocate smoke abatement and and the adoption of steam was the establishment of a incorporated 'the most scientific kinds of fire places factory system from around 1750. Thus by the time flues and furnace and inventions for the avoidance of Victoria became monarch, Manchester had become a smoke.'8 prosperous textile-manufacturing town. The cotton industry stimulated the growth of the engineering and chemical industries and the evolution a regional 1 Designing for the urban financial centre. environment Social conditions worsened with the development of slums and industrial chimneys created intense Within an urban environment, awkward sites, over- smoke pollution. By 1808, Manchester was 'abom- crowded surroundings, lack of light and the presence inably filthy', its steam engines 'pestiferous' and by of noise and pollution influenced the design response. 1834 that the town was 'often covered, especially Such problems were particularly acute in Victorian during the winter, with dense fogs . there is at all Manchester. Here, buildings were constructed in a times a copious descent of soot and other impurities.' congested environment undisciplined by any attempt Foreign observers expressed amazement at 'the pecu- at comprehensive planning. Space was at a premium, liar dense atmosphere' of the town, its 'incomplete' land prices soared and important buildings were often daylight and the 'curious red colour' of the sky.2 sited in cramped and ungainly surroundings. Corner Manchester's first Medical Officer of Health cam- or irregular-shaped plots caused by the frequent paigned vigorously over the public health implica- intersecting streets meant that many structures (e.g. tions of coal smoke pollution as 'positively injurious Manchester Town Hall, 1868—77) effectively had no to health'. He claimed that sulphurous acid existed in 'back' on which to economize in design.9 Conver- such quantities in Manchester's air that it rapidly sely, some buildings situated on corner plots had only tarnished silver exposed to it in the streets, and the two 'free' sides and combined ornate stone facades sulphuretted hydrogen had a depressing effect leading with rear plain brick elevations.10 Most were over- to intemperance amongst the labouring classes.3 shadowed by surrounding buildings and visible only This urban environment might inhibit the creation from oblique angles in the narrow streets. of architecturally significant buildings. Indeed, many In response, building designers resorted to a Victorian writers caricatured the northern middle- number of devices, which combined both practical class industrialists as uncultured, bluff and concerned and aesthetic considerations. Iron-framed construc- primarily with personal wealth—a sort of 'bourgeois tion allowed commercial and office buildings to reach philistinism': 'civic pride and civic rivalry among the eight or more storeys in height. Towers were fre- industrial towns of the north was almost entirely quently employed not only in an ornamental capa- materialistic and not aesthetic. The pall of smoke city, but also to provide a varied skyline to the roofs and smuts in itself was enough to discourage any that were frequendy the only visible part of a effort after beauty or joy in the visible aspect of life."* building, to give height and visibility to a confined However, northern industrial towns were not structure and to disguise technical innovations. culturally impoverished and Manchester developed Thomas Worthington's Manchester Police and Ses- a distinct cultural identity.5 In architectural terms, sions Court rose sheer from the pavement and was 176 Environmental Pressures on Building Design and Manchester's John Rylands Library designed to be seen obliquely. It had a tall clock Buildings constructed on cramped inner-city sites tower at one corner, a steep pyramid roof at its centre had to be designed to achieve maximum natural light, and a tall chimney concealed as a minaret tower. but not to deprive older buildings of light. Nine- Alfred Waterhouse incorporated a tower into his teenth-century English common law recognized no design for the Manchester Assize Courts. Although general right to light for existing buildings, except he acknowledged that this was not an indispensable where the right (ancient lights) had been acquired by part of his design, he argued for its inclusion on the prescriptive use over more than twenty years.15 grounds of its multiplicity of functions.11 Nevertheless Manchester architects complained that The John Rylands Library, commissioned and the right to light issue constantly interfered •with their financed by Mrs Enriqueta Augustina Rylands as a practice and submitted them to 'frequent amounts of memorial to her late husband, was designed by Basil difficulty and annoyance and expense of their Champneys (1842—1935) and constructed on Deans- employers.'16 gate in the centre of Manchester. The rationale The John Rylands Library site was surrounded by behind Mrs Rylands' choice of site remains obscure. tall warehouses, derelict cottages and narrow streets. She wanted to provide a library that would be Some adjacent windows were within four feet of the unsurpassed in the north of England.12 Perhaps, boundary and the site was awkward in shape and therefore, Deansgate offered a central position orientation [1]. Contemporaries criticized the plot for within an increasingly fashionable part of the city its lack of surrounding space, which

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