Restoration work on an iconic piece of Manchester’s industrial heritage nears completion

Restoration work on iconic piece of Manchester’s industrial heritage revealed as it nears completion at the Science and Industry Museum.

Over 140 years after the gantry outside of the museum’s Power Hall was first built, visitors will be able to see it fully repaired in the lead up to the reopening of Power Hall: The Law Family Gallery in Summer 2025.

Over the coming weeks, visitors at the Science and Industry Museum will be able to see glimpses of the essential repairs that have taken place to the towering outdoor gantry crane outside of Power Hall.

Painstaking and careful shotblasting to remove historic water damage and rust, specialist conservation treatment and paint analysis have allowed the museum to repaint it in keeping with its history. 

The historic Grade II listed gantry in the museum’s Upper Yard is one of the most striking features of the museum site. It runs almost the full length of the Power Hall (formerly the Shipping Shed for the Liverpool Road Station) –and provides a unique sculptural feature in the city’s historic Castlefield area.

Essential repair works have included shot blasting the 72m long and 8m high metal structure to remove historic weather damage before carefully removing each layer of corrosion and rust, a painstaking process which took four months to complete under the care of specialist teams.

Sarah Baines, Curator of Engineering at the Science and Industry Museum explains how the museum determined what colour to repaint the gantry after the repair work was complete:

“Working with Buttress Architects paint samples of the gantry were analysed to determine the colour and type of paint originally used. Samples were taken for cross-sectional analysis which allowed us to look back though the layers of paint that had built up on the gantry through time.

There were at least eight layers of paint, from the original red-brown lead oil paint to the modern dark grey oil paint. We could also see several layers of sooty deposits between the earlier 19th century layers, indicating the high levels of air pollution present in industrial Manchester.

The earliest paint layers identified on the gantry all consist of dark red-brown ochre which we’ve matched as closely as possible to repaint the gantry back to its original colour.”