Within the city’s Science and Industry Museum, a whirling, spinning array of engines are still the stars of the show in a fine £18.9m makeover
The site of the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester is, as the official blurb puts it without undue hyperbole, a place that “changed the world”. The first purpose-built passenger railway, the Liverpool and Manchester, started running from here in 1830, and over the next century or more it helped fuel the industrial and commercial beast of the city around it, its trains running in and out to feed factories with cotton, and people with imported food. It is, according to the former Science Museum director Neil Cossons, the “Stonehenge of the Industrial Revolution”.
Now it’s a 2.6-hectare (6.5-acre) zone of heritage and open space, standing amid the real estate explosion of modern Manchester, whose shiny towers pop up in the background. Iron and brick structures, originally arranged according to the hard functional logic of gradients and track radiuses, are honoured with Grade I and Grade II Iistings. Layouts dictated by the needs of machines are gradually being turned over to gentler uses, as open spaces accessible to the growing population of central Manchester. The museum, first installed here in 1983, is in the middle of a comprehensive makeover of the whole site, planned for completion in time for the bicentenary of the railway in 2030.
In the middle of it stands the Power Hall, a 108-metre-long (about 355ft) shipping shed where, from 1855, goods trains were once unloaded by men and cranes. It now houses a whirling, spinning, chuntering array of machines that previously performed tasks as diverse as powering hundreds of looms in a Rochdale mill, a dough mixer in a bakery, church organs and chip shops.
There are the kind of engines that stand still in a factory, and locomotives: a grey, 2 8-wheel monster that hauled long coal trains across the hilly terrain of South Africa; and a tank engine that pulled holiday trains on the Isle of Man, now partly cut away so you can see its inner workings. There’s a replica of the Planet, a tall-chimneyed yellow teapot of a vehicle that, when it ran on the newly opened Liverpool and Manchester railway, was cutting-edge technology.
Most were powered by steam, some by gas or oil or electricity, and there’s a pumping engine from Manchester’s Victorian hydraulic power system that, until 1972, lifted grain sacks in warehouses and safety curtains in theatres with pressurised water run through pipes under the city’s streets.
Almost all were made in or near Manchester, many of them rescued by enthusiasts from the once proud businesses that ran them when they fell victim to new technologies and overseas competition in the second half of the last century. Many are kept running by the museum, so you can see and hear their different speeds and rhythms, and smell their oil.
This week a rejuvenated version of this temple of manufacture reopens as Power Hall: the Andrew Law Gallery, named after a Manchester-raised hedge fund manager whose foundation has helped fund the £18.9m cost of the project. It’s an undertaking where a problem – the shed’s leaking roof needed fixing – was made into an opportunity, which was to present the industrial ballet of the engines better than ever before.
There was also a wish – superficially oxymoronic – to make this commemoration of fossil-fuel machinery, with the help of the engineers Max Fordham, as sustainable as can be. For if, as the museum says, these machines helped make the modern world, that includes pollution and the climate crisis, as well as mass-produced clothing. Factories ran off arrays of boilers that each consumed about three tonnes of coal – the weight of a male white rhinoceros – every day. Average life expectancy in Manchester in the 1850s was 31, partly as a result of respiratory diseases caused by all the smoke.
Then again, science and industry move on, and the ingenuity that once went into steam engines now goes into less damaging alternatives. So the new Power Hall is run off a heat pump that draws its energy from an aquifer 90 metres below ground. The old machines are now powered by steam heated from this source, and the three-dimensional labyrinth of silvery pipes and boilers that help to make this happen is on public view – an exhibit in itself.