A new digital way to explore Manchester’s architecture will launch tomorrow (28th August), thanks to the Modernist Society.
The Modernists hope to take their love of all things concrete to a new and wider audience with the Modernist App, which has been supported by the GMCA Foundational Economy Innovation Fund.
The free app guides users through Manchester’s twentieth-century architecture with five curated and themed tours of Manchester City Centre. Each tour is designed to take around ninety minutes to complete. Over the next 12 months further tours will be added in Salford, Stockport and Trafford.
From there, the plan is to keep adding tours in more UK and overseas cities, so it becomes an invaluable and handy resource for fans of modernist and brutalist architecture wherever they may be in the world. The aim is to encourage people to download the app, to go out and walk in their city and to encounter the buildings in real life.
The five tours feature handy written, audio and video explainers provided by Jack Hale and Eddy Rhead, the two founders of the Modernist Society which started in Manchester, and which also now has branches in Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Huddersfield, Sheffield and Swansea.
Modernist architecture was slow to gain traction in the UK, and even slower outside London. As one of the five walking tours ‘The Early Years’ explains, that is the reason some of the most significant early modernist buildings in Manchester were created for industry, from a modest textile workshop on Richmond Street to the large textile headquarters of Tootal Broadhurst Lee.
The ‘Manchester Top Ten’ tour takes visitors around the most significant twentieth century buildings in the city centre. While post-war reconstruction accounts for the majority of central Manchester’s modernist buildings there are some notable exceptions including The Midland Bank by Edwin Lutyens, the Daily Express Building by Owen Williams and Kendals Department Store on Manchester’s Deansgate by J.S Beaumont & Sons. These buildings all feature on the ‘Manchester Top Ten’ tour along with others including the CIS Building and the Royal Exchange Theatre.
Other tours include the ‘Oxford Road Corridor’ which takes in the former (and soon to be developed) UMIST campus and includes some lesser-known stops including the Catholic Chaplaincy at Avila House, included for its striking zig zag roof and fish shaped gutter spouts.
Eddy Rhead, co-founder of the Modernist Society said: “We run a lot of walking tours at the Modernist Society and they’re always really popular but obviously we’re limited on numbers so developing an app seemed a natural extension of what we are doing already. If you’re from Manchester or live here, you will recognise a lot of the buildings on the tour, but you won’t necessarily know the stories behind them.
“The amount of care and thought that went into some of these buildings is phenomenal. We want to encourage people to walk around the city and look up and perhaps take a moment to appreciate the care and thought that went into these buildings. You never know – maybe we can even help a few people to like modernist architecture a bit more than they did before?”
Devised and written by Jack and Eddy from the Modernist Society, the app has been designed and built in collaboration with Manchester and Leeds based digital marketing agency Fablr.
Fablr head of strategy Chris Bennett said: “We have developed the app in such a way that it is fully scalable and can easily expand to take in new cities and destinations which is exciting. As you can expect from the Modernist Society one of the key tasks for us was to make it as clean and uncluttered as possible. It’s been months in development so it’s great to be at a point where people are actually going to get out and start using it.”
GMCA’s Local Industrial Strategy Policy and Programmes Lead Beth Sharratt added: “We’re delighted to have helped with the funding for the Modernist app which will encourage residents and visitors alike to walk around Manchester and understand more about the buildings which surround them, and which has helped make the city the great place it is today. We’re very much hoping other cities follow suit and create modernist city tours of their own.”
Learn more and download the app at https://the-modernist.org//
