A sneak peak inside the Town Hall’s £430m restoration

The white sheeting around Manchester Town Hall has become a familiar Albert Square sight.

The Our Town Hall project, a £430 million refurbishment of the grade-I listed Victorian hall, is of enormous scope.

Council-employed teams have to do everything from dirty work like digging new trenches in the basement for pipes, to the ever-so-delicate job of reapplying gold leaf paint to 150-year-old murals.

Once it’s complete, the resplendent Town Hall will retain its original feeling – more cathedral than civic centre – whilst retaining its important civic functions.

Our Town Hall project

This will be where baby Mancunians are registered, where we can marry, and where our loved ones will tell society we’ve passed away.

But the project has hit problems. This week, council chiefs announced it’s £76m over-budget and it’s now expected to complete in July 2026 and open to the public in early autumn. The original date was 2024.

They say delays have been caused by the sheer complexity of the renovation, comparable only to restoring ‘Big Ben and the Elizabeth Tower’.

To see how complex work is, I Love Manchester went behind the white sheeting and scaffolding for an in-depth look of the Town Hall.

Inside Manchester’s ‘civic cathedral’

The first impression one has stepping inside the building site is the Town Hall remains a grand Gothic masterpiece. That’s most evident in the Great Hall.

It’s where the most prestigious weddings will take place, and where banquets will be held for visiting dignitaries.

The floor is up because cabling and pipes are going to be re-routed through an old horizontal chimney flue.

Above the floorboards are several murals bearing the coats of arms of the city’s most important trading partners when the Town Hall opened in 1877, a recognition this room was built ‘to put Manchester on the map and make a statement’.

The same can be said of the clocktower, which is only 11 metres shorter than the Elizabeth Tower and Big Ben.

A tight spiral staircase climb into the Town Hall spire leads to a clock now telling the correct time via a temporary mechanism. The only thing restorers Cumbria Clocks need to do is re-connect the original mechanism to the gears which drive the hands.

The clockface has been completely refurbished. Panes of glass damaged over the years by WWII, weather and birds, have been replaced with only those in the minute dials still original.

The bells are now hooked up to a digital control system, meaning they could chime to play almost any song, even The Stone Roses’ ‘I Am The Resurrection’, as was suggested on the tour.

On the roof, lead workers are beavering away on the largest non-industrial scaffold in Europe. When they’re finished, the slate roof tiles will reveal a pattern which can be seen as either an M or W. It’s thought M is for Manchester and W is for Alfred Waterhouse, the Town Hall’s architect.

The costs adding up

Where work has been completed, the craftsmanship is impressive. However, work is only three-quarters done. It should be finished now, according to the original timetable, which was outlined in 2018. Predictably, Covid-19 caused delays. But the biggest cause of disruption is the building itself.

While refurbishers have Waterhouse’s original architects’ drawings, they don’t have structural plans from when it was built which contain necessary detail. That means they’re constantly discovering new problems, with project directors claiming they’ve found at least one new issue every week since last summer.

And because the Town Hall is grade-I listed, many off-the-shelf building products don’t meet conservation standards. Meanwhile, it’s often the case that renovators don’t know how those products will interact with existing building materials in a fire. Meaning a bespoke, engineered solution is often required, project managers say.

One such example is the risers — the shafts throughout the building which carry essential services like plumbing, cabling, and heat pipes. Many risers are not ‘consistent in size’, the project team say, so the ‘holes’ in the floor they pass through change shape.

As such the team has to engineer new routes for pipes and cables, creating delays. It’s those delays which have added £76 million to the budget, according to Coun Garry Bridges.

“All throughout we’ve been learning more, and quite often it’s only when you’re on-site that you discover some of those,” he said. “That has built in additional costs as we’ve gone through that, largely to do with the sheer scale and also the complexity of the programme.”

Council bosses also cite £1.6m of previously unseen issues in the building’s roof as a discovery which caused unexpected delays. But the biggest cost comes from ‘financial claims from contractors’, they add, although the figure has not been disclosed.

It’s understood sub-contractors can claim for compensation with delays, arguing they incur extra costs on equipment hire and lose the ability to work elsewhere. The council says it’s ‘robustly negotiating 80 such claims to ensure a fair outcome’.

There’s also no guarantee more money won’t be required, with around two years of work remaining. Project managers accept they ‘face a lot of potential risks’, which could create more delays, and therefore lead to more compensation claims. Nevertheless, they are hopeful work will speed up and finish in July 2026, rather than September as the schedule suggests.

You can find out more on the council’s website by clicking here