'Unique' - We're trying to save Manchester's oldest building from falling into the wrong hands

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Manchester’s oldest building is up for sale — and now a group of amateur historians are rallying to ‘save’ Wythenshawe’s ‘unique’ 700-year-old Hall.

Baguley Hall was put up for sale by Historic England in May, on the condition that it ‘requires that the public is able to access the building at least occasionally’ and the new buyer ‘restores and operates the building in a sympathetic way’. Now, the Friends of Baguley Hall group has formed a committee to ‘save it from unscrupulous developers’, according to chair Mathew Hopkins.

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That’s because there’s more than meets the eye to this 1320-built Hall, which was a working farm until the 1930s, when much of Wythenshawe started to be built. Behind the chain link fencing and warning signs to keep out on Hall Lane lies a ‘nationally and internationally important’ building.

Baguley Hall in Wythenshawe (Photo: Historic England)Baguley Hall in Wythenshawe (Photo: Historic England)
Baguley Hall in Wythenshawe (Photo: Historic England) | Historic England

That’s according to chartered building surveyor and committee member Matthew Williams. The 42-year-old from Chorlton added: “It’s not just a nice building. It’s technically a unique building with the timber frame system.

“If you go inside and look how its structured and how the timber frame is put together, it’s nationally and internationally important .It’s a plank construction rather than a box construction. These are bigger sections and the pattern is different to a normal timber frame mediaeval building. That’s why it’s grade-I listed.”

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Adding to the allure of the building is the fact that there are rumours it might be the last Viking-built structure still standing today, anywhere in the world. But Colin G. Piggott, another committee member who’s researched the Hall extensively, doesn’t buy it.

“There’s a story to suggest it might be the only viking structure in the world left,” he explained while pointing to a hand-made model of the building. “But the timbers are 1320 so it cannot be that.”

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Even if Colin doesn’t think the Viking story is worth its salt, there is plenty of mystery left in those timber-framed walls. He went on: “The most fascinating thing is the great hall. A third is missing.  Then, great halls were one-and-a-half to three times longer than they were wide so that tells us a piece should be missing. We have no idea when it went.”

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Brick extensions, thought to be Georgian, have been added to the mediaeval core in the centuries since. They are signs that, in its day, the building was the centre of this part of Manchester’s community — first as the Lord of the Manor’s residence, and then as a wealthy landowner’s home. And Libby Edwards, chair of the Friends of Baguley Hall group, wants to continue that tradition of the Hall being vital to Baguley

“It would be somewhere you can run a dance class, anything you can get the community in,” she said when asked what she’d like to see the building become. “It needs some TLC and someone to come in and look after it for the future. [The buyer] has got to be someone who [Historic England] can know wants to do the right thing.”

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