Bridgewater Hall
| The Bridgewater | |
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| Address | The Bridgewater Hall Lower Mosley Street Manchester M2 3WS |
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| Location | Manchester, England |
| Operator | SMG Europe |
| Type | Concert hall |
| Capacity | 2,400 |
| Construction | |
| Built | 1993–1996 |
| Opened | 11 September 1996 |
| Website | |
| www |
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The Bridgewater Hall is a concert venue in Manchester city centre, England. It cost around £42 million to build and currently hosts over 250 performances a year.
The hall is home to The Hallé orchestra, and is the primary concert venue for the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. The building sits on a bed of 280 springs, which help reduce external noise.
The venue is named after the Third Duke of Bridgewater who commissioned the eponymous Bridgewater Canal that crosses Manchester, although the hall is situated on a specially constructed arm of the Rochdale Canal.
Proposals to replace the concert venue in the Free Trade Hall existed since it was damaged in the Second World War but the hall, which was home to The Hallé orchestra was repaired and renovated. Despite being a popular venue, the Free Trade Hall, built in the 1850s, had poor acoustics. Throughout the 1970s and 80s several schemes to replace it were considered but the project became more likely in 1988 after the creation of the Central Manchester Development Corporation.
In the 1990s, land east of Lower Mosley Street and north of Great Bridgewater Street adjacent to the G-Mex exhibition centre (now Manchester Central Convention Complex) which was occupied by a former bus station and car park near the Rochdale Canal was identified as the site for a new hall. A competition inviting architects to present designs for the new concert hall was launched and a proposal by Renton Howard Wood Levin (RHWL) architects was chosen. The development included the construction of a basin on a specially built short arm of the Rochdale Canal and part of the Manchester & Salford Junction Canal providing a waterfront setting for the hall.
The Bridgewater Hall held its first concert on 11 September 1996 and was officially opened on 4 December by Queen Elizabeth II, alongside the Duke of Edinburgh. The Bridgewater Hall was one of a number of structures built in the 1990s that symbolised the transition to a new and modern Manchester.
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