Manchester Jewish Museum | Citizens Design Bureau

The new museum – situated in one of the city’s most multicultural areas of Cheetham Hill - explores universal experiences of journeys, communities and identities from the perspective of Manchester’s Jewish history. Its Grade II* listed synagogue building has been fully renovated and restored to serve both as a living artefact of an authentic Spanish and Portuguese  synagogue and as a stunning cultural space in which the museum will programme live events throughout the year.

This major £6 million capital redevelopment, supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, has been led by Katy Marks and her team at leading architect firm Citizens Design Bureau (CDB) and a myriad of contractors, specialists and fitters who have worked tirelessly over the past two years and under difficult conditions, due to the ongoing pandemic, to create a hugely significant new museum and cultural offer in Manchester. A major new extension has been built by construction contractors H.H. Smith & Sons to sit alongside the synagogue, doubling the size of the museum, to include a brand-new gallery, vegetarian kosher-style café, shop and collection store. A generous atrium also links new visitor facilities to the old building where there is now lift access to the first floor and the new exhibition gallery.

Situated on an out-of-town trunk road, surrounded by industrial buildings, this area was once the hub of the textile trading industry that so many early Jewish immigrants were engaged in - an unlikely location for a museum. The challenge therefore for Katy Marks and her team at CDB was to create a building that would be more than a museum – one that would instead welcome and become embedded within the local area, reaching beyond the Jewish community.

With food playing such a unifying force between cultures it became the starting point for the architect and her team, launching a collaborative design process which included baking workshops, “syna-gigs” and events to reach out to and engage the local community and discover what it was that they wanted from their local museum. This redefined the museum brief to include flexible spaces to host events, community meals and functions, making links with local faith groups, schools and more. The engagement ‘scratch’ process, funded by Arts Council England as a project in itself with Battersea Arts Centre, significantly shifted the brief to create a holistic museum experience so that every part of the building is densely woven with meaning and learning opportunities. Their unique design approach has been a labour of love, including an immersive design process that has genuinely brought communities together. Those threads weave through every aspect of the new building – all on an extremely tight budget (construction cost £3.6m) further constrained by the unprecedented impact of the recent global pandemic.

Internally, the new gallery has been designed to take visitors on a journey through Manchester’s Jewish history and the journeys that brought Jewish people to the city, right through to the city’s present day communities. Designed in collaboration with All Things Studio and fitted by museum installation specialists, The Hub, the gallery provides the museum for the first time with a dedicated space to showcase an extensive part of its collection of over 31,000 items. New design features of the gallery include a floor map of Cheetham Hill, moveable digital labels and a collection of oral histories placed throughout the gallery, telling the stories of Jewish Mancunians. The interpretation panels, designed by Kellenberger-White, are made from recycled materials as part of the museum’s commitment to sustainability. The new museum is now also fully accessible with lift access and hearing induction loops throughout the new extension and adjacent building.

The former synagogue - built in 1874 and the oldest surviving synagogue in Manchester - has now been extensively repaired. Its original 19th Century decorative scheme has been reinstated following historic paint experts Britain & Co’s forensic paint analysis of over a century of accumulated layers of brown gloss and magnolia paint. Previously, the synagogue was thermally leaky and expensive to run. Now however, in spite of adding a new extension, and working very closely with structural and services engineering experts at Buro Happold, the project has been designed so that the overall energy use of the building and resultant carbon intensity will reduce by around 20% compared to the original building.

A high performance insulation quilt has been introduced into the old roof and a thermally massive double floor slab incorporating a fresh air plenum within the new extension pre-heats air to naturally ventilate the Listed Building. The old Victorian sunburners in the ceiling have been repurposed as natural ventilation extracts. The main atrium and community spaces have automatically controlled natural ventilation. Most significant in embodied energy terms is the retention and re-use of the synagogue. As a Listed Building, demolition was never an option, but its most likely future was a slow decline to dereliction and misuse. The embodied carbon impact of the project is some 250 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent less than if the museum had been rebuilt in its entirety.

Externally, the synagogue’s explicitly religious appearance suggested a faith-focussed museum that failed to integrate the local and diverse multicultural community nor reflect the variety of the extensive and varied collection. The extension therefore creates a new entrance to welcome a greater diversity and number of visitors.  The design avoids dominating the Listed Building and instead serves to amplify its presence in a cluttered streetscape. The new extension balances this context with industrial corten steel, tempered with delicate detailing. The perforated, back lit facade glows with dappled intensity during morning and afternoon rush hours. 

 As Katy Marks from Citizens Design Bureau comments: “We wanted to create a building that would spark conversations, unexpected connections and surprising insights. For example, the facade patterns are an exploration of eight point geometry, drawn from extensive research of the Owen Jones archives at the V&A and inspired by the history of the community that built the synagogue in 1874: Sephardi Jews from Spain, Portugal and North Africa. Their geographic origins inspired the architect Edward Salomons, who incorporated Moorish (Islamic) geometric architectural motifs from that region into the synagogue building. This project was therefore an important opportunity for us on behalf of the museum to embark on conversations across religious and cultural difference.  Now more than ever, it serves as an architectural expression of the idea that we have more in common than that which divides us and we’re excited to finally share the building with everyone.”

Manchester Jewish Museum 
190 Cheetham Hill Road
Manchester, M8 8LW

www.manchesterjewishmuseum.com

KEY MUSEUM CONTRACTORS:

·       Architects - Citizens Design Bureau
Founder and lead architect: Katy Marks
Project architect: Candice Moore

·       Exhibition Design - All Things Studio

Studio director and founder: Matt Schwab

·       M&E & Structural Engineers: BuroHappold
Partner, Andrew Wylie

·       Conservation Consultant - Smithers Purslow
Conservation architect: Ian Lucas

·       Project Managers – BuroFour
Project Director, Gary James

·       Cost Consultants & Quantity Surveyors - Appleyard & Trew LLP
LLP Partner, Mark Newton

·       Construction Contractors - H.H. Smith & Sons Co Ltd  
Construction director, Rob Smith

·       Historic Painters - Britain & Co

·       Access Consultants - Earnscliffe Associate - Jayne Earnscliffe

·       Access Consultants - Manchester Disabled People’s Access Group – Flick Harris

·       Stained Glass Repair specialists - Recclesia Ltd

·       Exhibition Graphic Design - Kellenberger-White

·       Synagogue AV - Plann

·       Masonry Services - Stone Central

·       Exhibition fit-out contractor - The Hub

·       Café & kitchen design - Winton Nightingale
Kitchen Designer, Keith Winton

·       Signage, website & Visual identity - Twelve

KEY MUSEUM TIMELINE:

·       Synagogue was built and opened: May 6th 1874

·       Synagogue closed: Late 1970s - last wedding was held on the  25th September 1977

·       Synagogue transferred into Manchester Jewish Museum and opened:  25th March 1984

·       Manchester Jewish Museum closed:  30th June 2019 (almost exactly 2 years)

·       Capital Development Project was launched: 15 June 2015 when HLF funding was confirmed

·       Citizens Design Bureau was commissioned as new Museum Architects: 10th November 2016

·       All Things Studio were commissioned as new exhibition and gallery designers: 10 March 2016

·       Temporary Pop up Manchester Jewish Museum opened at Manchester Central library: 16 July 2019

·       Time Capsule discovered by Museum builders: 20th September 2021

·       Manchester Jewish Museum announced its new opening date: 9th April 2021

·       Manchester Jewish Museum officially handed over the keys: 23rd July 2021

·       Manchester Jewish Museum re opened: 2nd July 2021