Memorial Hall

Memorial Hall is a meeting room and hall, now functioning as a public house and restaurant, built between 1864 and 1866 by Thomas Worthington. The building is constructed of red brick with sandstone and polychrome dressings, and features a trapeziform plan on a corner site in the Venetian Gothic style. It has three storeys above a basement, with a narrow three-window symmetrical facade facing Albert Square and a longer six-window return facade on Southmill Street. The sandstone ashlar basement storey acts as a plinth, with sill-bands on all floors, plain intermediate stone bands, a moulded band above the second floor, a corbel table, and a moulded cornice.

The principal facade on Albert Square includes a large two-centred arched doorway, which is moulded in two orders and features an inner band of dog-tooth ornament and an internal flight of steps. This doorway is flanked by pointed-arched windows with shafts and polychrome extradoses. A band with raised lettering states "MEMORIAL HALL ERECTED IN COMMEMORATION OF THE YEAR 1662." The windows on the first and second floors are arranged with 1, 3, and 1 lights, with the first-floor windows resembling those on the ground floor, while the second-floor windows are larger and square-headed, featuring foliated caps to the shafts, cusped lights, and quatrefoil tracery in the heads, with small stone balconies on the outer windows. The return facade on Southmill Street has arched doorways at each end, with windows on each floor arranged similarly to those on the front.

The hall was erected to commemorate the 2,000 nonconformist clergy who left the Church of England in 1662 due to the Act of Uniformity. It previously housed the Manchester Unitarian Sunday School Union and Home Missionary Board, the Charles Halle Choir, and various societies, including the Statistical, Photographic, and Elocutionist societies. The building forms part of a group with other items in Albert Square.