Stretford House 50
Last year our good friend (and modernist lifetime member) Bill Mather came to us with the idea of celebrating his local tower block. We love anything that’s a bit niche, but Stretford House is more than just a tower block, it has become an icon of the Greater Manchester sky-scape. It’s 240 feet high, it has 23 floors, 88 flats with 2 bedrooms, 44 flats with 1 bedroom, two lifts servicing odd and even floors, and one stairwell. To celebrate its 50th anniversary we held an exhibition ‘Streford House 50’, and displayed archival photographs and footage which had been unearthed by Bill in the Stretford Local History Society’s Archives. Alongside this we released a publication, and we even did a tea-towel.
“Standing as a single solitary obelisk of hard concrete surrounded by softer sediments, the 23 storey high-rise residential block Stretford House has for fifty years acted as Stretford’s very own security guard. Scanning the busy skyline for planes at Ringway Airport, gazing over the ever meandering River Mersey flood plain, manning the historical border post between Lancashire and Cheshire, surveying the scene with its feet firmly planted in Triassic Sandstone as it watches for invaders from space with the help of Bernard Lovell’s radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, which is visible on the horizon.”
Stretford House 50 publication by Bill Mather, and designed by Wayne Fearnley