High up above those gathered at the many civic meetings, weddings, ceremonial events and general revelry that have played out in Manchester town hall’s finest space over the years, a secret has been lurking.
Nobody knows why, but some of the ornate Victorian frescos that decorate the Great Hall’s ceiling have sprays of air gun pellets embedded in their paintwork.
Theories range from some long-forgotten party that got out of control, to a practical attempt to shoot down celebratory balloons that may have floated the 75 metres up to the room’s furthest reaches.
Whatever the reason, they are still there, hidden among the lavish depictions of Manchester’s historic trading partners - from Glasgow and Bristol to Australia, China and Denmark - that adorn the ceiling of this grand civic chamber.
These are not the only mysteries to have been unearthed as work has gathered pace on the gem’s long restoration. Manchester town hall has been closed to the public since 2018 and since then an army of surveyors, engineers, stonemasons, builders and conservation experts have been combing every inch of what has become the biggest heritage project currently ongoing in the UK.
Even for those familiar with the building, its scale and hidden depths are still revealing new secrets.
Below Princess Street, construction contractors working on the drains discovered an unexpected brick-arched tunnel, five or six feet in height. Boxed off in a corner of the Lord Mayor’s chambers, they found a cast iron spiral staircase.
And there are small clues, fragments of past lives. A leather shoe; enamel signs stamped with town clerk’s orders; beer bottles dating to the 1930s and 1940s, although history doesn’t record whether they belonged to slacking workmen or wayward aldermen; Players cigarette packets from the 1950s.
After nearly 150 years, the town hall is giving up these secrets, bit by bit. Even the original plans themselves - drawn up by Alfred Waterhouse - were only discovered in the basement in 2018.
Many of those secrets are part of the design. One of the most striking aspects of Manchester town hall, say those working on it, is the quality put into detail you can barely see from ground level, from the ornate gargoyles, which scaffolding has now had to be carefully accommodate, to those frescos in the upper echelons of the Great Hall.
Each tiny detail is now being carefully inspected and navigated as work to fix and restore the building - the first time that has happened on this scale since it was constructed in the 1860s - continues.
The council’s deputy leader, Bev Craig, points to both the ‘sheer scale and complexity’ of the project, as well as the care and craft going into every aspect of it.
"Manchester has been left an absolute gem of a building by our Victorian forebears,” she says.
“It is much loved but sadly it's showing its age and we needed to safeguard it for generations to come. By repairing, restoring and protecting it - with additions like extra lifts to make it easier to get around - we are ensuring that current and future Mancunians will be able to enjoy it too, with improved access to the town hall and its artefacts.”
The project is as expensive as it is big, with a budget of more than £300m. But like the Palaces of Westminster, which are in an even worse state than the town hall, there was concern that without a major intervention, the listed building could fade away.
So the decision was taken to embark upon a six-year restoration project. Coun Craig stresses that a major factor has been trying to ensure local people are employed on the project, including apprentices now learning their craft on the biggest heritage job anyone involved has ever undertaken.
"I’m proud to see that the money we invest in our city benefits Manchester people in this really practical way, while being money well spent in restoring such a special building."
After being slowed down during the peak of the pandemic, there are now up to 300 people on site on any given day, including dozens of apprentices, learning everything from stonemasonry to heritage conservation.
Much of the building has been shrouded in scaffolding, including the inner courtyard, the set for films and TV shows from Peaky Blinders to Sherlock Holmes, and the stonework is being carefully cleaned, smoothed and in some cases replaced, with rock taken from the same Huddersfield quarry that supplied the original.
The town hall’s 34 chimneys are being fixed where needed, as some of them have become unstable with age. Just one section of a chimney taken down in recent weeks weighed three quarters of a ton, testament to the immense logistical considerations of the project.
Damaged slates will be replaced with new ones from the same quarry as their predecessors, up in Kirkby-in-Furness.
The town hall clock’s mechanism is being painstakingly inspected, before being taken away for expert tinkering in Cumbria; the bell will come down for the first time since the 1930s; the organ in the Great Hall has already been removed and taken away for restoration in Holland and Somerset.
Inside the building, the decades of different piping systems and machinery that have historically been adapted and added to over time are being disentangled and replaced with modern services, including several new lifts for the public.
The town hall’s Victorian police cells will be opened up to the public, as well as an air raid shelter that has been left in place, another remnant of the building’s many histories.
Above their heads, Venetian marble mosaics are being painstakingly prised from the floor, their cornflower motifs kept as one piece so they can be restored and cleaned. Each original cobble from the inner courtyard is being removed, mapped, restored and put back in sequence.
Panes of glass have been carefully labelled ahead of their removal.
The Ford Madox Brown murals - commissioned personally by Alfred Waterhouse, who also designed lots of the furniture in the building - covering the Great Hall’s walls have been placed behind a screen fitted with an atmosphere monitor, which will check how the paint responds to changes in the air when windowpanes are taken out and temporary roofs installed.
Meanwhile, several storeys of scaffolding above, slightly faded depictions of Australian kangaroos, Chinese dragons, Dutch cheese and Mancunian bees are delicately cleaned, ready for a fresh layer of paint.
But nobody can yet explain the air pellets.
