![]() A design competition was held, with the hope of creating some sort of marker to what is considered an important gateway to the city’s centre. ![]() As this is, in effect, a small power station near the heart of the city, it was felt that something other than a standard flue tower was desirable. The tower serves a symbolic as well as a practical function, as a statement of the council’s desire for cleaner energy. Renewable power sources, they add, can be plugged into the system at a later date. Conceived in 2019, the network is not so far advanced as to dispense with fossil fuels altogether, but the city council and its partner Vital Energi say it’s a considerable upgrade on previous arrangements. The tower is the most visible manifestation of the Manchester Civic Quarter Heat Network, a £24m project to provide a more sustainable heat and power system to the landmarks such as the city’s town hall, central library and convention centre, and the Bridgewater Hall music venue. They are inspired, say its architects Mike Tonkin and Anna Liu, both by the ornate chimneys on Tudor palaces and by the glass sponge, a submarine organism that is one of David Attenborough’s favourite creatures. Its swirling forms resemble those that Antoni Gaudí put on top of Barcelona apartment blocks. It’s a dispersion flue, to use the technical term, a 40 metre-high device for extracting fumes from a gas-fired combined heat and power unit beneath it. It is essentially a big chimney, but not as LS Lowry would have known it. The Tower of Light, white and sparkling, updates this tradition for a low-carbon age. Mancunian architecture grew fantasy from the filth of coal-fired wealth. For all the four-square practicality of its Victorian streets, its buildings are eclectic in their detail – Byzantine, Flemish, gothic and baroque, encrusted and polychrome, with turrets, domes, gables, swags and cartouches formed from stone, brick and soot-resistant ceramics. ![]() ![]() M anchester has long liked garnishing industry with ornament. ![]()
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