Manchester synagogues and their architects 1740-1940

Bill Williams, the historian of Manchester Jewry, once observed that the history of Manchester Jewry is like 'a walk up Cheetham Hill Road'. The settlement pattern of the Jewish community, whose presence in Manchester, a city built on the Industrial Revolution, dates back at least to the 1790s, can be traced simply by a tour of the synagogues that they erected. This essay takes surviving synagogues as its primary source material and also looks at some others that have been lost. Encompassing synagogues of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century, it examines the character of these little-known buildings in the landscape of a great industrial city and what their architecture says both about Jewish identity and the status of the Jewish community in British society in modern times. Manchester Jewry's built heritage affords an opportunity to explore in miniature the issue of architectural style in relation to Jewish identity in Britain and an attempt is made to place some buildings of local significance in a wider context. This paper introduces a few of the architects, some Jewish, most of them not, who designed Manchester's synagogues and sheds light on how they came to undertake what was still an unusual commission and why they resolved design issues in the way that they did.