The Free Trade Hall played an important role in 19th Century Manchester. It was built in its original form as a temporary wooden hut, in St. Peter’s Street, to hold protest meetings against the Corn Laws imposed in 1915. The Corn Laws were imposed after lobbying from influential farmers against the cheap import of foreign corn. The British public began their protest when the British monopoly on corn pushed the price of bread up to unaffordable rates.
As support grew for the abolishment of this law, a stone building replaced the temporary wooden original. The third, now permanent stone building was built after the two major leaders of the Anti-Corn Law movement, Richard Cobden and John Bright, forced the Tory government to repeal the law. Thereafter, Manchester has been associated with Free Trade.
More recently the Free Trade Hall was home to the Halle Orchestra for more than a century. It is famous for hosting guests such as the Dalai Lama in 1998, Bob Dylan 1967 who played to an audience from across the globe, as well as other leading names in the music industry; Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, BB King, Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd to name but a few.
The building is once again a topic of keen discussion as it is being redeveloped retaining some of its original features.
Bagnall Demolition worked with McAlpine Laing Joint Ventures to redevelop the Free Trade Hall. Bagnall has carried out a major asbestos removal strip out from the building prior to starting a complex demolition contract on this very confined site. Artifacts were recovered from the inside of the building to be included in the new development and 8 large stone statues, located on the rear external wall 30m above the highway, were carefully dismantled and placed into storage for later use in the new development.
The confined nature of the site and the complexity of the demolition involved many detailed planning meetings between Bagnall, structural engineers and the Joint Venture team.
Principal findings included; large areas of basement soffit sprayed with asbestos; loose-fill asbestos to the wall cavity between the main Auditorium and Lesser Free Trade Hall; substantial ventilation ducting consisting of asbestos cement and loose-fill asbestos on several levels; several hundred metres of heating pipework insulated with canvas-wrapped sectional asbestos, which had to be traced through many closed ceiling voids, risers and ducts. All of the asbestos materials were removed under fully controlled conditions.
The contract was successfully completed on programme. The building will soon be better known as the Radisson Edwardian Hotel as a successful transformation has recently been completed.