Victoria Station - Art Nouveau, lettering,words showing M&LR and L&YR destination on ornate glass & iron canopy, Manchester Victoria railway station

Architecture and features The original M&LR single-storey offices facing Hunt's Bank Approach were built in the Italianate style in sandstone ashlar with slate roofs in 1844. They were later enlarged and given a second storey. William Dawes built the station's larger extension for the L&YR in 1909. It is at right-angles to the north end of the old station giving the enlarged station an L-shaped plan. Facing Victoria Station Approach, its façade is in the Edwardian neo-Baroque style, four storeys high and 31 bays to the rounded corner at the south-east end. The ground floor windows have rounded heads and those on the floors above are square. The ornate glass and iron canopy along the façade displays the names of destinations that the station served in Art Nouveau lettering. The canopy was damaged by the Provisional IRA's 1996 bomb placed in a street adjacent to the Arndale Centre and was restored four years later. Heritage features in the concourse were restored during the 2013-15 renovation, they include the café with its glass dome and mosaic lettering which was originally the first-class dining room, the adjacent bookstall, and the original 1909 wood-panelled booking hall. In the entrance is a large, white glazed tiled map showing the former network of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway. Underneath the map is a bronze World War I war memorial with effigies of Saint George and Saint Michael at each end which was installed in 1923. At the south end of the concourse is the 'soldier's gate' which opened to the former fish docks from where thousands of soldiers departed for World War I and where a bronze plaque was erected to commemorate them. The gateway was restored in 2015 and a steel screen inserted featuring a map of World War I Commonwealth grave cemeteries in Northern France and Belgium. The station received Grade II listed building status in 1988