The mystery removal of four pillars on the Rochdale Canal in Manchester City Centre has been explained.
Last week, the four pillars on the canal — opposite the former site of the Hacienda nightclub — vanished, according to Ed Glinert, who runs the New Manchester Walks tours company. That came as a shock to Ed, given their historical importance.
“I saw the pillars had gone,” he said. They were not industrial, they look it, but they’re not.”
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“They are right opposite the back of the Hacienda,” he added. “Tony Wilson put them there as a Tribute to the Hacienda. The idea being that the columns were there to remember what was there.”
Ed says that the pillars are a reference to the Temple of Dionysus’ theatre, a set of ruins in Naxos. Dionysus is the Ancient Greek is the god of the grape-harvest, wine making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre.
Enquiries by the Manchester Evening News have now established why the pillars are going — but why they will soon come back. The pillars are at the rear of some office space, which was purchased by construction firm Domis to use as the offices for its Viadux project, which is currently being built nearby.
Staff at Domis inspected the columns, but found them to be ‘cracked’ and had concerns over their structural integrity. "We bought the office about 10 months ago, and we also bought Lock 90, the adjoining building, six months ago. That's where the columns sit,” a spokesperson for the firm explained.
"We knew the history behind them, and we had a look at them because we were concerned at how structurally sound they were. There were some concrete cracks.
"We felt really uncomfortable about two of them, so we took the decision to remove them, and repair where we can or replace them. There is an absolute, 100 percent commitment from us to get them back in place within 6-8 weeks.
"They will look how they looked before we took them down."
The restoration means that a little-known piece of Manchester history is set to be retained.
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