The Proud Place: Manchester’s Golden LGBT+ Community Hub and Architectural Gem

The Proud Place is the new golden and energy efficient three-storey LGBT+ Community Centre and Queer Public Place in Manchester’s city centre. Completed in 2022, it is the only purpose-built LGBT+ community centre in the UK and provides a safe and accessible ‘third place’ for LGBT+ people. The centre is operated by a life changing and life enhancing charity providing education, support and advocacy for LGBT+ young people and their communities.

The building is home to the UK’s leading LGBT+ youth charity, but it also serves as a community hub for the LGBTQ+ population across Greater Manchester. In 1988, Manchester defiantly built the UK’s first publicly funded Gay Centre, a modest single-storey life-saving building, the same year the homophobic Section 28 became law. In 2022, it was demolished and re-built.

Emily Crompton, senior lecturer at the Manchester School of Architecture, has been working with The Proud Trust the charity who manage the building and collaborating with architects URBED on the design and engagement for the building. She has done research into the building’s rich but hidden history and assisted the project in engaging over 600 people in the re-design.

The LGBT+ Centre, previously known as The Gay Centre , is located on Sidney Street, off Oxford Road, and was the first and only purpose-built building for the LGBT+ community in the UK (others such as the London Lesbian and Gay Centre made use of an existing building). Manchester’s Gay Centre served the LGBT+ community for over 30 years. In that time, it went through many organisational and structural changes and whenever threatened with closure was saved time and time again by the Centre’s staff, users and volunteers.

The new Centre has a joyous golden façade which glints in the Mancunian rain and shines out, calling in the next generation of activists to continue demanding for LGBT+ rights. Just as its predecessor, but updated for the twenty-first century, the building’s façade complements its physical surroundings of shiny new university blocks, providing a cautiously proud exterior affording anonymity as well as hopeful pride.

This project encompasses the potentially polarising idea of ‘exclude to include’. It is an exclusive space, but at the same time a public one. In contrast to the alcohol-fuelled ‘gay village’ this building demands space for the more marginalised of an already marginalised group of people. It was designed with and for LGBT+ people, and its very existence provides a safe, dry (sober) and accessible place; a ‘third-space.

AHEAD provided funding to enter the building to the Architectural Review public awards which are a biannual international awards and are a great opportunity to showcase high quality public buildings. Emily was keen to nominate The Proud Place (Manchester’s LGBT Centre) for this award. This nomination could help add evidence to a Research Portfolio about the research and involvement in designing the new building. She was eager for the project to be recognised in this way as it adds to the argument about the physical specificities of the building as the only building built specifically with and for LGBT+ community in the UK. The pull of it being an international awards was key to this application  as it would bolster the evidence of quality and originality in the portfolio, and would go some way to demonstrate a 4* output.