Tootal, Broadhurst and Lee Building, Manchester


The Tootal, Broadhurst and Lee Building at No. 56 Oxford Street, in Manchester, England, is a late Victorian warehouse and office block built in a neo-Baroque style for Tootal Broadhurst Lee, a firm of textile manufacturers. It was designed by J. Gibbons Sankey and constructed between 1896 and 1898. It has been designated a Grade II* listed building.
Nikolaus Pevsner's The Buildings of England describes the warehouse as "large, in red brick stripped with orange terracotta, but comparatively classical". It has a "massive central round-headed doorway with banded surround and cartouche dated 1896, set in architrave of coupled banded columns and broken pediment".
The interior has been redesigned, but a First World War memorial by Henry Sellers has been retained, being "marble, with a niche from which the figure stolen".
Behind it and not visible from the street is Lee House, the stub of what would have been the tallest building in Europe at 217 ft., a 17-storey warehouse of the same firm. Both Churchgate House and Lee House are on the north bank of the Rochdale Canal; Great Bridgewater Street is immediately to the north of them.