A day at the Manchester Transport Museum with the original plans for the line. Hand-coloured route maps and station drawings from the 1890s, the covers stamped M.S.&L.R. for the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway, amended over the years in red ink.
Before drawing anything for the new station it seemed right to understand the old one. The geometry of the platforms, the way the line curved through Levenshulme, the language of the original draughtsmen.
Nothing in the plans made it directly into the new design. What they did turn up was a twin. Wilbraham Road station, further along the same line in Whalley Range, was an exact copy of Levenshulme, just mirrored. Same drawings, flipped.
Wilbraham Road is no longer standing, but it has its own place in music history. In May 1964 Granada Television filmed the Blues and Gospel Train there, with Sister Rosetta Tharpe playing on the platform in the rain and the audience across the tracks. So the building I was working on had a sister that once hosted one of the great live performances of the sixties.
You design better for a building when you know what it was for, and sometimes what its relatives got up to.
Part of the Station South case study.