page_title: Victoria Arches
section_title: Packets
hierarchical_section_title: Victoria Arches / History / Packets
caption_attribution_description: English: Cathedral Landing Stage, Victoria Arches, Manchester.
context_page_description: The Victoria Arches are a series of bricked-up arches built in an embankment of the River Irwell in Manchester. They served as business premises, landing stages for steam packet riverboats and as Second World War air-raid shelters. They were accessed from wooden staircases that descended from Victoria Street.
  Regular flooding resulted in the closure of the steam-packet services in the early 20th century, and the arches were later used for general storage. Following the outbreak of the Second World War they were converted into air-raid shelters. They are now bricked up and inaccessible, the staircases having been removed in the latter part of the 20th century.
context_section_description: The Manchester Ship Canal was opened in 1894, and by 1895 the Ship Canal Company, who encouraged passenger traffic, had opened at least one landing stage.  Two of its steamers, Shandon and Eagle, are known to have used the landing stages.  These boats could carry 900 and 1,100 passengers respectively.  During the first half of 1897 more than 200,000 passengers were carried on trips around Manchester Docks, with holiday seasons the most popular periods.  Competition for passengers was fierce, with at least two landing stages being operated by different companies.  The ferries would occasionally carry musicians, for passenger entertainment.
  The landing stages suffered problems with flooding of the Irwell and do not appear to have remained in business for long, being closed in 1906.  In Underground Manchester; secrets of the city revealed, author Keith Warrender quotes the recollections of a Manchester City News writer, originally published in 1923:
  I became acquainted with those arches in the sixties, for my father, a master joiner and builder, had a workshop there. Two approaches thereto were provided, one by a flight of steps near the Cateaton Street side of the old churchyard, and the other at the corner of Victoria Street and Fennel Street. The arches were lofty and spacious, and had previously been used as a copper and iron works, in connection with which was a tall chimney by the cathedral steps. Part of the chimney was damaged by lightning and the upper part was taken down in 1872. I believe the lower part remained until the old buildings at that point were demolished, not many years ago.
  He continues, quoting another letter from the Manchester Evening News in 1960 which says;
  At the time I knew it well, 1898, one or two of the arches were used as a battery station by Manchester Electricity Department and two or three others as meter testing and storage departments. Also there was the first testing station for the department where the prototypes of all apparatus used by electricity users in the city were tested. The tunnel was bricked up, about level with the end of Fennel Street. From its gradient it would reach approximately water level at the Irk at the bottom of Hunt's Bank, and the other end would reach street level at St Mary's Gate. The roadway was one cart track wide. The entrance was in Victoria Street alongside the door to a tobacconist's shop near Cathedral Yard.
caption: The Cathedral Landing Stage in the 19th century
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