Former Reform Club Manchester Club

The former Reform Club, now offices and a club, is located on King Street in Manchester. Constructed between 1870 and 1871, it was designed by Edward Salomons. The building is built of sandstone ashlar with polychrome dressings, featuring hipped slate roofs. It occupies an end-of-block site with chamfered corners and follows a double-pile plan, with a rear range projecting to the right. The design is in the Venetian Gothic style.

The building is three storeys high with a basement and attic, encompassing five bays and the corner projections, displaying a symmetrical facade. It includes a chamfered plinth, cornices to the ground and first floors, and three-sided oriels at the corners, finished as turrets with slated spirelets. A prominent bracketed main cornice and blind-arcaded parapet cap the structure.

The ground floor features an elaborate round-headed doorway within a porch composed of colonnettes and a concave under-hang, leading to a projected, balustraded first-floor balcony. Coupled square-headed sash windows are visible in the remaining bays. The corner features similar colonnettes leading to elaborately bracketed under-hangs of the oriels, with a window to the left corner and a doorway to the right.

The tall first floor has a prominent arcade of large round-headed arches, with banded two-centred extradoses and hoodmoulds. These arches are carried on coupled columns with carved capitals, each containing a tall two-light sash window with round-headed lights and circular tracery. A balustraded balcony runs along the first floor. The second floor displays small coupled two-centred arched windows with shafts and an impost band, accompanied by a small wrought-iron balcony to the central bays. Dormer windows and a central spire were later removed.

The oriels exhibit elaborate detailing, including tall, slender, arcaded windows to the first floor with carved emblematic panels above, a prominent balcony to the second floor with a wrought-iron balustrade, and an arcaded cupola featuring projecting grotesques. The return sides mirror the first bay but differ and are simpler at the rear, with an arcaded, quadrantal, two-storey oriel in the angle where the rear wing meets the main building.

The interior, as recorded in 1974, includes a hall and staircase with linenfold panelling, a two-storey Grand Dining Room, and a large billiard room situated within the roof space.