Repair of State Room windows at Manchester Town Hall

The State Room windows at Manchester Town Hall had been in a poor state of repair for many years and so in 2011 a scheme was proposed that would deal with health and safety issues raised by their condition.

Stockport based Cheshire Stained Glass put together a proposal that would accommodate all the problems. They would have to work on mobile elevated working platforms, from a public square, on a Grade l building whilst working around events in the state rooms themselves and on Albert Square.

The scheme focused on all defects below head height in the rooms, this fell into opening metal sash repairs and leaded light repairs.

The metal sashes had decayed and ceased to function, most of their furniture was missing and once open, their fully open position contravened regulations for opening windows. There were also many previous poor replacement sashes, not suited to the building.

Once they began to remove the sashes from the metal frames, they soon realised that they would face further difficulties. Each face of iron was not welded nor forged to the next, as would be expected, but soldered.

This formed a weak bond between the two and explained why every opener was disintegrating. This was also the case with the fixed frames. From here, the scheme was extended to repair the large metal frames in situ.

The existing sashes were repaired and welded to improve their strength, whilst new sashes were produced to replace the previous poor repairs.

Sand Cast brass window furniture was produced from casts taken from the remaining original furniture. These included handles, back plates, catch keepers, stays and pins. Further detail was added to the handles by laithe.

The metal framework was only 2.5mm in thickness, this was insufficient to tap into to fix the sashes back to the frames. Tapered fish plates were created to replicate the putty point on the rear side of the metal frames, these would give a positive fix and clamp the existing frame between the hinge and the plate.

Restrictors were designed, manufactured and fitted to the windows to limit their opening.

Once fitted, plain glazing was installed into the sashes, this was then putty pointed.

Forty two leaded lights were removed for workshop restoration. These were sectional re-builds around damaged areas. Rubbings were taken before work commenced, the lights were then “cut open” to expose the broken panes. These were replaced with matching Antique glass. Only mangled lead came was replaced, retaining as much of the original lead as possible.

In Situ Leaded Light repairs were also undertaken. These were done externally so that the disturbance to the lead came could not be seen from the function rooms.

Finally, the opening sashes and the fixed metal frames were painted internally and externally. The Plum colour was recreated to match the exiting colour of the frames.

Functionality and original features were restored to these unique frames.

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