The Coroner's Court is nestled in the former London Road Fire station and information is hard to find on the actual Coroner's Court but one presumes that the historical aspects are the same as for the fire station. 

The Fire Station opened in 1906 and was designed in the Edwardian Baroque style by Woodhouse, Willoughby and Langham in red brick and terracotta at a cost of £142,000 and was built by J. Gerrard and Sons of Swinton. It attained Grade II* listed status in 1974.

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The coroner's court was the last to close of the complex, finally closing for good in 1988.

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It was placed on English Heritage's Buildings at Risk Register in 2001 and in 2010; Manchester City Council served a compulsory purchase order on the fire station's owner, Britannia Hotels. Britannia announced in 2015 their intention to sell the building after nearly 30 years of dereliction. It was sold to Allied London in 2015 and renovation commenced in 2018 with the building to be redeveloped as a mixed-use centre comprising leisure and hotel facilities.

 

By the end of the 1960s, maintenance was becoming increasingly expensive, and the building's design ill-suited to modern fire appliances. Plans to replace the fire station were put on hold pending the formation of the Greater Manchester Fire Service. The control room at London Road closed in 1979, replaced by a single computerised control room at brigade headquarters in Swinton.

After the sale in 1986, the building was mainly used for storage whilst planning applications to convert it into a hotel were made in 1986, 1993, and 2001, with varying degrees of success.

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Visited in 2017, extensive decay was apparent as I walked around the courtroom and the back buildings. 

All the court papers from the final inquests heard there in the spring of that year were still neatly lined up on the coroner’s desk, next to a 1990s phone covered in dust.

The coroner’s handwritten notes to himself  - and to staff  were all there too, ticking off each name, asking his officers to find out the occupation of one of the deceased’s husbands, with a note of which police officer would be attending.

 

Elegant light fittings remained in place, an old-fashioned fire extinguisher remained in situ on a bench and the public gallery and waiting area were still exactly as they were when the courtroom was in use, albeit looking tired and decayed.

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The Lancashire rose in the stained glass of the main door is still in good condition but paint peels from other surfaces whereas some of the carpet tiles from the entrance hallway have been torn up and discarded in the corner, uncovering the original parquet flooring.

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The current owners Allied London plan to do a complete renovation of the entire building and open a restaurant as part of their plans, but say they want to do as little architecture alteration as possible to the inside of the listed building, which also includes police cells and a fire tower.

Allied want to make the building a major international destination, filling it with an array of cultural venues, including a cinema, digital art gallery and pop-up events spaces, as well as a hotel.