56-58, PETER STREET (See details for further address information)

Nos. 56-58 Peter Street is a former club building constructed in 1911 by the architectural firm Woodhouse, Corbett and Dean. The building was largely rebuilt between 1991 and 1993, retaining only its facade. The facade is made of brown and buff terracotta and showcases a Free Baroque style with Art Nouveau influences. It stands five storeys tall with an attic and features five bays, which are articulated only above the ground floor.

The ground floor is heavily banded with dark-brown terracotta and includes a prominent semi-circular arched entrance in the second bay, adorned with run-out banded voussoirs and a scrolled keyblock with a roundel above. To the left of the entrance is a large rectangular window, with various rectangular windows to the right. The first floor is channelled and has a string course, while the third and fourth floors are decorated with festoons. A massive bracketed cornice crowns the fourth floor, leading to a banded attic storey and a high parapet.

On the upper levels, the second bay is slightly recessed but features a raised centre with a reproduction of Donatello's St George in a niche at the third floor. The attic storey includes a tall niche with a shield under a canted canopy. The fourth bay is also recessed, topped by a wide segmental arch at attic level, and flanked by canted oriels that rise from the first floor to the attic in the third and fifth bays. The windows on the first and second floors are small vertical rectangles, while those on the third and fourth floors in the first, third, and fifth bays are treated as vertically continuous slots divided by transoms, with staggered windows under the arch of the fourth bay.

Historically, this building was significant as the first important structure in Manchester to be built using reinforced concrete and marked the first major use of the Kahn reinforced-concrete system in Britain. The original internal layout was modeled after the New York YMCA.