The Whitworth Hall
Susie Stubbs
The University of Manchester’s Alfred Waterhouse campus is always worth a wander around, and this rarely-opened building, part of a complex of buildings around the Old Quandrangle (which includes the Manchester Museum) shows why: it is a neo-Gothic masterpiece complete with a steep tiled roof in fishscale bands, towers with polygonal turrets, soaring buttresses and tall, thin windows. To put it another way: you can imagine Harry Potter feeling right at home here. Waterhouse was responsible for Manchester’s Town Hall; taken together, the Quad and the Town Hall, surely these are one of the best example’s of Waterhouse’s ‘modern Gothic’ style (also seen in the Natural History Museum in London).
