Manchester’s Edwardian Water Palace beat off competition from nine other endangered buildings to secure funds for renovation in a public vote by viewers of the BBC television series Restoration in September. Victoria Baths, one of the most opulent public swimming pools ever built, will also receive £3m pledged by the Heritage Lottery Fund.
The Grade II listed baths opened in 1906 to serve the Longsight area of Manchester. Lavishly designed withstained-glass windows and ornate tiling, the building provided three pools, 64 wash baths as well as Turkish and Russian baths. Victoria Baths provided swimming and bathing facilities for nearly 90 years, closing in 1993 despite local protests.
Soon after the closure, the Victoria Baths Trust launched a campaign to bring it back into use as a £15m health and leisure centre. The money raised from the Restoration series will fund the first stage of the project – restoring the Turkish baths. In the final programme of the series more than two million votes were cast and more than 1.3 million phone votes during the ten programmes added £275,000 towards the Restoration prize, topped up with a £3m Heritage Lottery Fund grant.
The City Council, the Heritage Lottery Fund and government conservation adviser English Heritage are commissioning a feasibility study to see how the rest of the building can be renewed. The inclusion of bars or a restaurant has been mooted. The building would cost £15m to open as a public swimming pool complex.
Gill Wright, spokesman for the Victoria Baths Trust, said: “The feasibility study will look at all the options. The best use for a listed building is always the original use and we know we got a lot of votes because people wanted it to be restored for use as a swimming pool.
“But a use where we could keep the pool spaces open, like a bar-restaurant where people could use the balconies, would be preferable to a residential conversion.”
Construction work on the first stage of the building’s restoration will begin in October next year and a further lottery bid submitted towards the cost of restoring the rest of the building.
The Victoria Baths Trust runs an arts programme, supported by the Arts Council, the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund and Awards for All. There will be arts activities at Victoria Baths throughout next summer as well as regular public open days.
For more information about the Friends of Victoria Baths call 0161 224 2020, email victoriabaths@aol.com or visit the website at www.victoriabaths.org.uk
VICTORIA BATHS – 100 YEARS OF HISTORY
* The plan to provide baths to serve Longsight, St. Luke’s and Rusholme was first considered by the Baths & Wash-houses Committee of Manchester Corporation in 1897
* Original estimates for the construction of the baths were £57,000 in 1902, almost twice the usual cost of building public baths.
* By 1905 the cost of completing the building had climbed to over £59,000.
* When the baths opened in 1906 few people had a bathroom at home, so the slipper baths or wash-baths provided the first real bath for many.
* Men and women bathers were segregated until 1924 when mixed bathing was introduced with great trepidation.
* Channel swimmer Sunny Lowry began her career at Victoria Baths. She successfully swam the channel in August 1933.
* Olympic swimmer John Besford also trained at the baths.
* In 1952 England’s first municipal aerotone therapeutic bath – a prototype jacuzzi – was installed.
* Victoria Baths closed in 1993. The Victoria Baths Trust carried out a £244,000 programme of emergency work in 2002 with funding from English Heritage and the A6 Partnership.
BUILDING ON SUCCESS
After Victoria Baths’ TV success, two more local landmarks are to be put under the spotlight in a new documentary which will exploit the new craze for old architecture. Historic Rose Hill in Northenden, which was built by Absalom Watkin and developed by his son Edward, has suffered years of dereliction and despair, but is now being transformed into apartments. The building will appear in a new Granada programme called Derelict Discoveries.
Also featured will be Hugh Mason House swimming baths in Ashton under Lyne. Mason, MP for Ashton in the 19th century, was a social reformer who regenerated the area and was the first to give workers weekends off.