Manchester Town Hall restoration is £76m overbudget, council confirms
The grade-I listed Town Hall has been closed since 2018 for a huge refurbishment, which was initially expected to be completed this year
The restoration of Manchester Town Hall will cost at least £76 million more than first planned, the council has confirmed.
The grade-I listed Town Hall has been closed since 2018 for a huge refurbishment, which was initially expected to be completed this year. However, that deadline slipped back to 2026 as the Covid-19 pandemic and unforeseen issues created delays in the project.
Now, bosses say they believe there is roughly around two years’ of work to complete, but they are confident progress will speed up — and the Town Hall will reopen in July 2026. However, the LDRS understands they cannot rule out needing more cash as the new budget hits £429.8m.
“It’s the largest heritage project of this scale in the country, and with that brings a lot of complications,” said deputy council leader Garry Bridges, in charge of overseeing the project.
“Throughout the whole time we’ve done work, there’s been a pandemic, there has been inflation after Ukraine. But on top of that, the nature of the specialist work going on in that building is really complex.”
More specifically, some £1.6m of problems have been found with previously unseen issues in the building’s roof, which were only ‘discovered’ once the outer layers of the building were removed.
Council chiefs say at least one new problem has been found in this fashion every week since last summer. Many require unique engineering solutions as off-the-shelf parts and materials cannot satisfy the need to restore the building to grade-I condition, bosses add.
Delays also mean contractors can claim for compensation from the council, arguing they have incurred extra costs on equipment hire and lost the ability to ply their trade elsewhere when work overruns. The council says it is ‘robustly negotiating 80 such claims to ensure a fair outcome’.
The Town Hall is the second major council building project to overspend in recent years. The first was Aviva Studios, which opened last year.
In 2017, it originally had a budget of £110m. Earlier this year, the final bill was calculated at £241m.
While the two projects do not share many similarities, the repeat overspend raises questions over the council’s financial prudence. While Coun Bridges said it was ‘hard to actually judge the Town Hall against another project in terms of its costs, because it is so specialist’, the council ‘will look at ways we can learn lessons’ from both.