Cutting Room Square

Five weathered copper monoliths rise from the pavement of Cutting Room Square, their surfaces etched with photographs that document the industrial decay of Ancoats from decades past. This pedestrian square sits at the center of the neighborhood, framed by the massive, red-brick cotton mills that defined Manchester’s identity as an industrial powerhouse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The square takes its name from the specific rooms within those mills where raw cotton bales were once sliced open for processing.