London Road Fire and Police Station, Manchester

Lying immediately to the west of Piccadilly railway station in the centre of Manchester is an Edwardian extravaganza of a building that occupies an entire city block. This startling structure of brick and terracotta, with turrets and domes and a tall belfry tower, could have been one of those grand railway hotels in the tradition of St Pancras in London. In fact it was once the heart and home of a breed apart. The clue is written across the lintel above the grand central archway: FIRE STATION.

This is, or was, the London Road Fire Station but, as I was about to discover, it wasn’t a common or garden fire station, just a place to provide parking for the fire engines and a mess room for the crew. In its time it was one of the most significant firefighting centres in the country. It also served the community in other unexpected ways. These old bricks embody the spirit of people whom society may take for granted until it needs them: individuals who hold the line between chaos and order; who run towards danger when the rest of us flee; who save our lives at risk to their own.

Access was through the pedestrian door recessed in one of the main wooden gates. The archway beyond led into an inner courtyard where scores of men and women were milling about in the convivial way of old friends and colleagues. A pipe band was playing ‘Scotland the Brave’ and as the kilted pipers and drummers finished the tune and started another, the crowd applauded – the band was kith and kin as the musicians in question comprised the Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service Pipe Band.

A plastic cup of pop was thrust into my hand, a plate of samosas and sausage rolls offered – and I was absorbed into a hubbub of reminiscence and comradeship. ‘It’s quite emotional for me,’ said one man of perhaps my own age. ‘I’m the third generation of my family who worked at this fire station.’ Another even managed to wax lyrical about cleaning duties: ‘Every Saturday I’d scrub all the yard, all the balconies – everywhere, up and down, it was scrubbed and then jetted with a hosepipe. It was immaculate. You could eat your dinner off the balconies.’

I had wandered into a party that was to feel more like a wake. This close-knit group of men and women were in such an expansive and nostalgic mood because it was the final gathering they would have here, where they had all once worked, and in some cases it was possibly the last time they would see each other again. The London Road Fire Station was decommissioned in 1986 and has lain empty and unused ever since, except for occasional get-togethers like this. But plans were now well underway to develop the site. Soon the old place would be gutted and reinvented as a complex of flats, offices and a hotel. The people who remembered it so fondly were paying their final respects.

The timing was lucky for me. It was a great privilege to be allowed access to this extraordinary building, for not only is it fascinating in architectural and functional terms but it also contains a wealth of stories concerning the history of ‘first responders’ in this country, not to mention tales of individual heroism. I also hoped to learn something of the special qualities of these unsung people, whose function in society (in the words of one former firefighter I met) is to ‘save life, save property and render humanitarian services’.

The day after the farewell event I returned to explore the place in peace and quiet, and the first thing that struck me was the sheer size of the site. My idea of a fire station is a box of a building with big red doors, enough room inside for a couple of appliances, and a tower and operations room attached. The London Road station is a triangular-shaped citadel, an enclosed city within a city, rising to four storeys and lavishly decorated with carved nymphs, bearded faces and imperious eagles. In the inner courtyard there are iron balconies on three levels.

I pushed open a door on the far side of the courtyard and climbed stairs to the first floor. Here the first room I entered had a fireplace, which gave it a domesticated air. In the second there were cartoon characters painted on the walls and I stooped to retrieve a pair of toy drumsticks from the floor – a child’s bedroom, surely. In the third room, where plaster was peeling from the walls, I had arranged to meet a couple of people who could explain precisely where I was.

‘Welcome to our lovely abode!’ said Barrie Pestle.

‘If we’d known you were coming, we’d have decorated a bit more!’ added Mike Berry.

The two of them had grown up here. They told me that London Road was a residential fire station, that we were standing in one of thirty-two flats provided for firefighters and their families, and that they both lived here as the sons of firefighters. ‘I spent the first eleven years of my life here,’ said Mike. He produced a photograph of himself taken in the courtyard when he was nine or ten years of age, wearing a junior fireman’s uniform and holding a fire hose. ‘It was a little community, like a village. Everybody looked after each other. Loads of kids. There were kids in almost every flat.’

It was, they agreed, an exciting place to live as children. When we returned to the courtyard Mike pointed up at the tall tower near the south-east corner, decorated at the very top with stone eagles perched on globes. This was the ‘hose tower’ and despite its dramatic embellishments it had a practical purpose: it was where they hung the fire hoses to dry after washing them. ‘Sometimes if the firemen left the building open, if they went out on a fire call and forgot to lock it, I’d go up there, right up to the top,’ said Mike. ‘There’s a drop there of over a hundred feet.’ He grinned at the memory.

All this was a surprise to me. I had assumed that before the 1970s or early 1980s – when women were allowed to join the service and the correct descriptive noun changed from ‘fireman’ to ‘firefighter’ – a fire station had been a very adult male environment. London Road certainly had a well-appointed gymnasium up on the corner of the second floor, which Mike and Barrie took me to see. It’s empty now but must have been a splendid space in its time, with a high ceiling and large windows overlooking London Road and Whitworth Street, where you could imagine fine physical specimens keeping themselves in shape in order to manage the arduous demands of fighting fires.

But with flats occupying the upper floors on all three sides, the London Road station was also a domesticated place, smelling of roast dinners on a Sunday, resounding to the theme tune of Coronation Street on weekday evenings and ringing with children’s laughter pretty much all the time. ‘The kids used to play on the wide balconies,’ said Mike. ‘Football, cricket. The ball going over into the yard and we’d be shouting at the firemen, “Throw my ball back!”’

‘Which they would do,’ added Barrie. ‘They were very good to us.’

The fire service has always attracted a distinct type of community-minded person. Until the early nineteenth century firefighting was carried out by local voluntary brigades or teams contracted by insurance companies. Throughout the country old buildings still bear ‘fire marks’, the metal plaques placed high up on the frontage that indicated they were covered by insurance in the event of fire. If buildings were uninsured they were simply left to burn, but this was a highly unsatisfactory arrangement as fire did not discriminate between insured and uninsured buildings – having set the latter ablaze it would frequently engulf the former.

By the time London Road was built, between 1904 and 1906, the need for a universal service had been recognized and the responsibility for firefighting had passed to local government. The station wasn’t just ambitious in design – it became, in modern parlance, a kind of ‘one-stop shop’ for death and disaster on the streets of Manchester by incorporating a police station and a coroner’s court (which I would explore later in the day).

The residential element was common in big-city fire stations at the time, as firemen had to be on constant alert for immediate turnout (and indeed there were alarm bells in each flat). But living on top of each other in this way had another function. It fostered a sense of togetherness and trust that was vital in the life-threatening situations in which they would sometimes find themselves when fighting fires.

The fire service became one of those closed professions that tends to pass down the generations. Both Barrie and Mike, having grown up at London Road as the sons of firefighters, went on to join the profession themselves and to serve in this very station. But lest this all sounds rather too neat and cosy, they soon reminded me of the sometimes traumatic reality of their work. ‘When you’ve had a child fatality, they’re the worst ones,’ said Mike. ‘You don’t get over them for a while. You just relate them to your own kids.’

The greatest incidence of fatalities – of both civilians and fire officers – occurred during the Second World War, when crew numbers were increased tenfold with volunteers to cope with the threat of air raids. The Luftwaffe’s targets in Manchester included the A. V. Roe factory, which built Lancaster bombers, as well as aeronautical engine manufacturers, warehouses and highly combustible textile mills. Down in the courtyard a vision of those days appeared – a red Dennis fire engine with snout-like silver bonnet and wheeled ladder. ‘It was delivered here in 1940,’ explained the driver, Bob Bonner, as he descended from the open cab. ‘It had a real baptism of fire, then spent the rest of its career at this fire station.’

Bob, a former firefighter and now a historian of the fire service, was based here himself, having joined the brigade as a sixteen-year-old. His father, Robert Bonner, served here for forty years, including the war years (1939–45) when according to Bob it was ‘just complete pandemonium really’. The vintage Dennis, and the blue serge uniform Bob was wearing, are period pieces now. He talked affectionately of both. ‘The engine has a pump and what we call a wheeled escape ladder – those are the original ladders that go back to Victorian times,’ he said.

The uniform – which comprised a double-breasted jacket with silver buttons, wide-buckled belt and hard helmet with protective peaks front and back – remained essentially unchanged from the mid-nineteenth century to ‘well into the 1960s’. He had brought along a similar uniform for me to try on and as I muttered the words, ‘It’s a great honour,’ I meant it. Of the various careers I have pursued, from politician to broadcaster, none has involved my having to lay my life on the line for others, and I have great respect and admiration for those who face this prospect every working day.

I pulled on the jacket – the heavy woollen fabric, incidentally, can’t have afforded much protection against fire – and buckled up the belt, attached to which was an axe used for breaking down doors and windows. ‘One more thing, then you’ll look like a fireman,’ said Bob, planting a helmet on my head. ‘OK, let’s mount, as we say.’ And while he climbed behind the large steering wheel, I sat in the passenger seat where the captain would normally sit. Then, channelling my inner nine-year-old, I rang the brass bell like crazy and we headed off into the streets of central Manchester for a spin.

This may sound like an exercise in harmless nostalgia but there was a serious point to it. Bob wished me to gain at least an inkling of what it must have been like for his father and fellow wartime firemen when they drove in a vehicle like this to a warehouse or factory blitzed by German incendiary bombs. Astonishingly, the firefighters of this era had barely any training. They learned on the job. And war was the most extreme and unforgiving of practice grounds.

‘Once the air raids started in earnest there were larger fires than they’d ever experienced,’ said Bob, as we rattled past the railway station (which was badly damaged in the war). ‘The Christmas Blitz of 1940 was the big one. Two nights of severe bombing: December the twenty-second and twenty-third. In those two nights most of the damage and casualties occurred.’ Some 470 tons of high explosive were dropped in that period. An estimated 684 people died and more than 2,000 were injured.

The old Dennis fire engine drew many admiring glances even if it was not the ideal vehicle for negotiating twenty-first-century traffic systems. When we returned it to the sanctuary of the London Road courtyard, Bob showed me a relic of Manchester’s Christmas Blitz that brought home its absolute hellishness. ‘It’s what they call a branch pipe, which is the bit the firemen hold at the end of the hose,’ he explained. ‘Two firemen in Old Trafford were directing this onto a fire where incendiary bombs had set a church alight. The German bombers came back on a second air raid, dropped high-explosive bombs on the fire. The two firemen were killed, sadly. Roy Skelton and William Varah. This branch pipe was pretty much all that was found.’ Bob offered me the pipe and I turned it in my hands. It was almost as long as my forearm and made of brass – a heavy, substantial object. But it had been penetrated by shrapnel and twisted by heat. We fell momentarily silent. Skelton and Varah were two of thirty Manchester firefighters killed in the Second World War.

In the post-war years the fire service was determined to act on lessons learned so harshly in wartime. The service was professionalized. Firefighters were no longer expected to pick it up as they went along. In 1948 one of Britain’s premier firefighting schools was opened on the London Road site. One of its pupils was my next witness, Sam Smart, who joined me in the courtyard. ‘I did three months’ training here and I lived here so, yes, this has got a lot of memories for me,’ he acknowledged.

In a career spanning thirty years Sam attended 9,000 blazes, so I knew I was in safe hands when he revealed that he planned to give me a taste of the training programme. First of all he handed me a uniform that post-dated the heavy serge jacket I had worn with Bob Bonner. It was called the Inferno suit and was in use until 2010. A faded maroon colour with fluorescent flashes, it was certainly bulky but was both water- and fireproof. Fortunately Sam didn’t expect me to actually perform the first exercise he described.

‘We used to have to do a height test,’ he said. ‘The instructor put the letter L and the letter R on the soles of your boots. He then asked you to walk to the top of the tower. See the three windows? The ledge above it?’ I looked up – he was talking about a spot a good 70 feet from the ground. ‘That’s the edge of the tower. You couldn’t come back down till the instructor had stood below and seen the L and R on the bottom of your boots.’ I asked him if he was scared: ‘Yes. A fireman who tells you he is not scared is a liar.’

Firefighters, he explained, have to be able to work at extreme heights, in confined spaces, while managing potentially dangerous equipment. Handling the hose correctly is a critical part of the job, as he was about to demonstrate. He handed me a coil of hose from the modern appliance he had brought along and showed me how to hold it in the middle and walk so it unspooled smoothly behind me. ‘Now you want something to extinguish the fire – a branch.’ This one was not made of brass, like the war relic, but of heavy-duty plastic which clicked easily into the fitting on the end of the hose.

‘You’re going to be aiming for that corner of the building,’ said Sam. ‘Your stance is left foot forward and right foot back. My stance is going to be behind you, same way.’ I gripped the handle of the branch, which was like the stock of a pistol, with my right hand and steadied it with my left. ‘Full power!’ yelled Sam to a colleague on the appliance. The flat hose bulged to life, the branch recoiled in my hands. The force of the jet was enormous, the feel of that power beneath my hands unexpectedly exhilarating. This was only a medium-sized hose but it blasted out hundreds of litres of water a minute.

Controlling it was also challenging, even with Sam backing me up, supporting my shoulders. If a firefighter mishandles or loses control of the hose, the pressure could be enough to whip him or her up into the air or be thrown off a ladder. Factor in flames, fumes, smoke and panicking victims and you begin to understand the predicament of a firefighter in an extreme situation, and to appreciate the expertise required to be able to cope with it. The other thing that struck me was how much I relied on my colleague steadying the ship behind me. Firefighting is not a matter of individual heroics, but of working as a team in the service of collective safety and efficiency. Comradeship is all.

There is only so much training you can do, however. You can learn to operate equipment, prepare for flames and fumes. But what about the ultimate test, of having to deal with dead or dying victims? The next person I had arranged to meet was Paul Miller, who had barely finished his training at London Road when he attended the worst fire in Manchester since the Second World War. He told the story as we stood in the old engine room, complete with firemen’s poles, where engines were once parked in a row between the pillars.

The year was 1979. At lunchtime on 8 May a clerk in the office of a taxi firm dialled 999 to report smoke coming from the Woolworth store at Piccadilly Gardens, a short distance northwest of the fire station. It was immediately apparent that the fire was huge and particularly problematic. ‘The officer in charge made it “Pumps Ten” – ten engines straightaway,’ recalled Paul.

There were some 500 customers in the store at the time. Many remained trapped inside as smoke billowed from all six storeys. Paul was a rookie, but not even the seasoned officers around him had experienced a conflagration of this magnitude. ‘You’re conditioned to do exactly what you’re told to do, and that’s basically all I did,’ he said modestly. ‘We got the ladders off to where there were some ladies trapped in the wages room. The window had iron bars on it so they couldn’t get out. I will always remember the screams and the harrowing noises they made.’

Eventually a colleague cut through the bars with a reciprocating saw and freed the women. They survived but ten people died in the Woolworth fire – not in the flames, but from inhaling toxic fumes created by the burning synthetic fabrics and furnishings. Paul was one of the firemen tasked with recovering the bodies: ‘We had to go up into the smoke, take one of the casualties, place them in a salvage sheet and bring them down to ground-floor level.’ He had not seen a dead body before that day and admitted, with understatement, that it was ‘a bit overwhelming’.

The fire at Grenfell Tower in west London in 2017 brought home to the entire nation the terrible psychological consequences for those caught up in such an inferno. Back in 1979 there was simply no provision for the emotional welfare of either victims or firefighters – even a youth of such inexperience as Paul Miller. But London Road had learned to look after its own. The female operators in the control room, who took emergency calls and dispatched the appliances to the fires, were very much part of the station’s tight and mutually supportive community. One of their unofficial roles was to be good listeners to firemen who had returned from distressing call-outs.

Three of those operators, Linda Bonner, Gloria Gaffney and Lynne Bairsto met me in the old wood-panelled control room on the ground floor, where they once sat wearing headsets, listening and talking to citizens of a big city in their most vulnerable moments. They ran through the procedure for taking calls. ‘You always had to get the address, the street number, the nearest main road and the locality,’ said Gloria. ‘They would sometimes say, “Oh, I don’t know,” and the only other thing we could ask was “Where is the nearest public house?” Everyone, after all, knows the name of their local.’

Most incidents were minor and easily dealt with, but occasionally there would be one of such severity that it threatened real psychological damage to the firefighters involved. ‘I remember one incident, it was the Christmas period,’ said Gloria. ‘There was a fire and fatalities with children. I think there were three. That was awful because the fireman who carried them out said he had children of a similar age.’

This was where the operators came in. ‘The firemen used to come in and sit with us, and we used to give them tea,’ said Linda. ‘And they talked out their problems. They never took their problems home. We were their counsellors.’

It wasn’t just the firefighters at the London Road site who faced death and disaster. The history of this extraordinary Edwardian Baroque building in the centre of Manchester tends to be dominated by its association with the fire service, but as I explored its nooks and crannies further I found evidence of other functions, other equally fascinating worlds. On London Road I entered the building through a modest-looking wooden door, pushed through interior double doors glazed with stained glass and descended an ornate staircase to a basement waiting room lined with wooden benches and dimly lit by street-level grilles. Beyond it was a courtroom, a seemingly perfectly preserved capsule of Edwardiana with parquet flooring and wood-panelled walls. On the desk were old forms pertaining to deceased persons, requiring name, occupation and other details, which confirmed this as the former coroner’s court, last used in 1998.

At street level I walked back along London Road, turned left into Whitworth Street and down at the bottom end I entered another section of the building, into a lobby of green-glazed brickwork. A succession of rooms led to a row of cells, with white-tiled walls, a bench and a lavatory. Sitting in one (entirely of his own volition, I should point out) and awaiting my arrival, was eighty-nine-year-old Dennis Wood, who had worked at London Road for twenty-five years. Dennis was a policeman based at the police station that was also sited here and we talked in one of the holding cells.

He said the police officers and firefighters who both operated from this building frequently found themselves working on the same cases – especially when fires had claimed lives or criminal intent was suspected. But the police station was busy in its own right, and the investigation that stands out for Dennis is one that will be immediately and chillingly familiar to all readers of this book.

‘I was told to go round to a house where a little girl had gone missing,’ he told me. ‘Her mother was distraught.’ The girl’s name was Lesley Ann Downey, she was ten years old and she had disappeared after visiting a fairground on Boxing Day 1964. Subsequently she was revealed to have been one of the five victims of the so-called Moors Murderers, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, two of the most cruel and depraved killers in British criminal history. Hindley was from the Gorton area of the city, to the south-east of the London Road fire and police stations. Once Brady and Hindley had been arrested, in October 1965, officers at this station were part of the team that painstakingly built the case against them, resulting in murder convictions and life sentences for both.

In 1981 the police had to contain riots in the local community – with their firefighter colleagues at London Road also targeted. One of the latter was Albert Gilbert and, as we talked back in the engine room, he admitted it had been a ‘surreal’ and entirely unfamiliar experience to be the object of such hostility. The occasion was the so-called Moss Side Riots which took place between 8 and 11 July 1981, when the deprived neighbourhood of Moss Side erupted in violent behaviour. There had been considerable sympathy among the firefighters for the plight of people in such inner-city areas, which were suffering high levels of unemployment and a general sense of hopelessness in the early 1980s. But they didn’t expect to have missiles thrown at them.

‘You’d got these shops with their windows put through and we started fighting the fire and a lad came along and said, “It’s all kicking off, you’d better get out of here,”’ recalled Albert. ‘Next thing is we’ve got bricks and bottles coming towards us.’ It was a hard way of learning a crucial truth about the first responders of the fire service. They do their job without fear or favour and act at all times with impartiality. ‘You don’t have any control over what happens, you just do what you’ve signed up to do,’ Albert told me. ‘That is, save life, save property, render humanitarian services. And humanitarian services can cover a multitude, including riots.’ He allowed himself a wry smile.

In 1986, five years after the Moss Side Riots, Manchester’s London Road Fire Station closed for good. It was the usual story – the building was too costly to maintain and no longer commensurate with the demands of modern firefighting, which had devolved to smaller neighbourhood stations. After lying empty for thirty years and deteriorating accordingly, it is now going to be developed as a complex of apartments, offices, ‘cultural spaces’ and a ‘boutique hotel’.

This fate is hardly unusual, but in many cases the redevelopment of historic sites pays only lip service to their cultural heritage. The developers of London Road seem intent on incorporating as much as possible of the original fabric and history, however, and a representative of the development company, Rochelle Silverstein, was enthusiastically persuasive when she came along to the site to explain the scheme more fully.

‘We have really taken our time over it,’ she said, as we stood on one of the balconies where firefighters’ children once played. ‘We are meticulously going round the building documenting every single finish, every single window, to see what we can keep and what we can bring back to life. We’ve taken lots of histories from people who lived here and we want to document them in one place if we can.’

Artists have been brought in to introduce a uniquely creative element to this commemorative process. One such is Harriet Shooter-Redfearn, who I found beavering away in one of the old flats. She records tiny and apparently ephemeral traces of people’s lives and preserves them. In this case it was firemen’s signatures that she had found scribbled on walls beneath wallpaper. She recreates them in wire and embeds the wire in glass to make a sculpture.

‘My dad’s a firefighter, so there’s a personal connection,’ she told me. ‘Through this building we can access stories about the community. I feel the community is really important and it’s something we are perhaps losing in contemporary society.’

Harriet hit the nail on the head with this comment. The men and women who called London Road home were a true community, a community within a community, who lived, worked and in some cases died together. Behind these citadel-like walls they fostered the comradeship that enabled them to go out into the wider world and make it a safer, kinder place for the rest of us. Founded on mutual trust and courage, they were the best sort of family.