The Bridgewater Hall is a concert venue in Manchester city centre, England. It cost around £42 million to build in the 1990s, and hosts over 250 performances a year.

Venue: Bridgewater Hall
Address: Lower Mosley Street, Manchester M2 3WS
Town: Manchester, GB
Capacity: 2,400

The Bridgewater Hall is a concert venue in Manchester city centre, England. It cost around £42 million to build in the 1990s, and hosts over 250 performances a year. It is home to the 165-year-old Hallé Orchestra as well as to the Hallé Choir and Hallé Youth Orchestra and it serves as the main concert venue for the BBC Philharmonic. The building sits on a bed of 280 springs intended to insulate it from external sound. The hall is named after the Third Duke of Bridgewater who commissioned the eponymous Bridgewater Canal that crosses Manchester, although the hall and waterside frontage is situated on a specially constructed arm of the Rochdale Canal. Proposals to replace Manchester's historic concert venue, the Free Trade Hall, were made after it was damaged in the Second World War, but the hall, which was home to The Hallé orchestra was repaired and renovated in the 1950s. Despite being a popular venue, the Free Trade Hall, built in the 1850s, had poor acoustics and outdated audience facilities. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, several schemes to replace it were considered but the project became more likely in 1988 after the creation of the Central Manchester Development Corporation. In the 1990s, land east of Lower Mosley Street and north of Great Bridgewater Street adjacent to the G-Mex exhibition centre (now Manchester Central Convention Complex) which was occupied by a former bus station and car park near the Rochdale Canal was identified as the site for a new hall. A competition inviting architects to present designs for the new concert hall was launched and a proposal by Renton Howard Wood Levin (RHWL) architects was chosen. The development included the construction of a basin on a specially built short arm of the Rochdale Canal and part of the Manchester and Salford Junction Canal, providing a waterfront setting for the hall. The Bridgewater Hall held its first concert on 11 September 1996 and was officially opened on 4 December by Queen Elizabeth II and the Du