Bath time

Swimming pools hold a special place in memories of childhood. For me, growing up in the 1980s, our weekly school trips to the local pool represented a unique opportunity. While the more diligent pupils swam lengths and attempted to retrieve rubber bricks from the bottom of the pool, I spent my time mucking about doing somersaults from the diving boards and trying to glimpse girls through a hole in the changing room wall.

The main pool will be renovated in phase two

Fond childhood memories no doubt linger for those who frequented the pools and corridors of Victoria Baths near Longsight in Manchester, where a major renovation project is under way. Opened in 1906, the building served as a hub for the local community: children swam there in their hundreds, businessmen held meetings in the Turkish baths and the less fortunate used it as a place to wash in the absence of facilities at home.

The building was a prime example of municipal swimming pool architecture. Designed by Manchester’s first city architect, Henry Price, it cost £59,144 to build, roughly double that of any contemporary municipal bath. The facade features multi-coloured brickwork with terracotta decoration, interior public spaces are clad floor-to-ceiling with glazed tiles, and there are numerous decorative stained glass windows.

The building was in use for 86 years until, in 1993, it was closed because the council could no longer afford to maintain it. Years of neglect followed, but in 2006 main contractor William Anelay and a team of specialists began work on restoring the building to its former glory. ‘The building was in very poor repair, but remarkably intact with much of the stained glass and original tiling. It didn’t so much look like a building falling down, just one needing lots of care and attention,’ says Gary Shea, site manager for William Anelay.

Serious deterioration had hitherto been prevented by a local group known as the Victoria Baths Trust, which in 2002 carried out a £244,000 programme of emergency works.

But it wasn’t until 2003 that the full extent of public support for reopening the baths became evident when the project won the public vote on BBC2’s Restoration programme. The win meant a £3.4m lottery grant was allocated for phase one restoration works. Due for completion in July this year, these involve repairs to the entire front section of the building, the roof, replacing or repairing all the windows and floors in the Turkish baths and refurbishment of the stained glass windows.

Most of the problems were related to water damage, as Shea explains: ‘With swimming pools, saunas and showers there is obviously lots of water sloshing about, which had seeped into the floors and woodwork. The structure is made up of concrete floors with steel beams as reinforcement, many of which had rusted and needed replacing.’

Hundreds of terracotta blocks on the facade had to be replaced because the rusting beams had expanded inside them, causing them to crack. This is painstaking work as each piece must have a template taken, and then a model made off site, which is in turn cast in clay, fired, glazed, then sent back to site for reinsertion.

Dry rot was also a headache because, unlike wet rot which affects only localised areas, it can spread. ‘If there’s a problem with restoration work it’s that you don’t really know what you’re going to uncover once you start exploring,’ admits Shea. ‘Dry rot is a typical example – you can find a section of beam affected by dry rot and replace it, only to find that the rot has spread into adjacent rooms.’

In this case, the whole facade was infiltrated with dry rot, which meant replacing the timber windows completely – an unusual situation on an English Heritage project where saving existing structures is a priority.

It required teams of specialist contractors and the mosaic work was particularly intricate as each tile was individually removed and replaced.

If there’s a problem with restoration, it’s that you don’t really know what you’re going to uncover

Gary Shea, William Anelay

As with any restoration work of this type, a dedicated team of specialists is vital to getting the kind of authentic detail required. William Anelay predominantly specialises in stone masonry and subcontracts timber and joinery work. Specialists are a priority because none of the original architectural drawings are available. ‘We’re reliant on the recent drawings by the new architect Lloyd Evans Pritchard, plus some photographic evidence,’ says Shea. ‘A bonus with this type of building is that patterns are generally repeated, so you might have six windows and one completely missing, so you can make a pretty accurate assumption as to what the missing one looked like.’

Mosaic work in the first and second class male entrances to the building also had a repeated pattern so the Mosaic Restoration Company could second guess what was missing. It’s painstaking work. ‘For a single guy to sit for weeks and weeks very carefully cutting out individual pieces of mosaic takes a lot of patience and the results are amazing,’ says Shea. ‘He went to a lot of trouble bringing in samples of coloured marble to match perfectly with the original pattern. Marble is by nature a bit sugary and absorbs dust, mud and grease, so we had to clean a lot of the existing tiles, notably in the turnstile area where there was a lot of foot traffic.’

One of the biggest challenges facing the team was replacing steel beams underneath the mosaic floors. Rust damage had caused rust jacking – rusting beams forming layers and pushing the floor up from underneath. Unable to replace the floor entirely, the team decided to cut out the old steel beams from below and insert new stainless steel ones. After propping up the structure, a saw was bolted to the basement ceiling, which cut down either side of each beam. A core drill, predominantly used for coring concrete, then drilled through the steel beams to effectively divide them into two halves.

‘With a bit of jiggery pokery and swearing and crowbarring, we could physically fish the two halves out,’ says Shea.

Stainless steel beams were then inserted to replace the rusted ones, shuttering erected underneath and through the crack formed in the mosaic floor above, small holes were drilled into the beam. Expanding grout was then poured in through these to fill all the voids. After a couple of weeks curing time, the new beams were set.

Upstairs, in the Turkish bath area, a similar replacement process was used, but with less success. ‘There’s some fantastic faience tiling work [fine tin-glazed pottery on a pale buff body work] on the ceiling of the Turkish baths, which drops down below the original steel beam. This time we cut down each side of the steel beam from above, pulled it out and inserted a new beam,’ says Shea. Unfortunately it didn’t go as planned and after grout had been poured, despite propping and packing underneath to keep the faience in place, the tiles became loose and unstable.

An alternative system had to be devised. The team tried to get advice from other similar projects, but drew a blank. ‘No one knew how to tackle it, they hadn’t encountered this problem before,’ says Shea. Forced to improvise their own solution the team opted to bolt a small angle onto the stainless steel beam from which the large faience tiles could be hung without further support (see diagram). ‘We took a slightly different route to get where we wanted – no one has ever used this technique before,’ Shea enthuses.

In other areas of the Turkish Baths, terrazzo floors (cement with chips of coloured stone embedded and polished) had to be completely ripped out because the beams underneath were rotten and new stainless beams, a concrete floor and a terrazzo floor installed on top.

Some of the stained glass windows were in a very poor state due to lack of maintenance and vandalism. The lead had deteriorated, causing splitting and many glass pieces were missing. To create a faithful replica, a template of the window was taken by the specialist, who then rebuilt the window on a workshop bench, with new glass pieces inserted and the existing glass reused where possible. Back on the building the stained glass is virtually indistinguishable from the original.

Replacing the roof was straightforward, but fixing tiles in the Turkish bath area was problematic.

Elsewhere on the job things were more straightforward. Replacing the roof was just a matter of stripping off slates, changing rotten timbers and installing new slates. Still, Shea nearly had a heart attack when the time came to remove the old clock tower for refurbishment: ‘We used an 80-tonne crane to lift it off on rigid steel joists. When we got the scaffolding up and started to take off some of the coverings, mouldings and decorative work we found that the clock had been sitting on a very, very rotten piece of six by six, which had actually snapped and been repaired with a small piece of two by two. It was quite a relief to get the clock down for repairs.’

William Anelay is confident it can meet the 11 July deadline for phase one works. However, the faience tiling in the Turkish baths is unlikely to be finished by then owing to problems sourcing tiles from the supplier and there’s still a long way to go before the original facilities can be fully returned to use. There is around £17m of work to be done before the renovation is complete, but with phase two developer Artisan Ship Canal Development already on board, the baths will be causing a splash again before too long.