Tootal, Broadhurst and Lee Building, Manchester
The Tootal, Broadhurst and Lee Building at 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.
History
The warehouse 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 striped with orange terracotta, but comparatively classical". The entrance 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 the warehouse but not visible from Oxford Street is Lee House, the stub of what would have been the tallest building in Europe at, a 17-storey warehouse belonging to 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.