Stock Exchange Hotel

Stock Exchange Hotel opened in November 2019 inside the Edwardian former Manchester Stock Exchange, a Grade II-listed building. It is the first hotel from GG Hospitality, the venture of Gary Neville and Ryan Giggs with Winston Zahra. It has 40 rooms, has since joined Marriott's Autograph Collection, and houses the restaurant Tender, run by chef Niall Keating.

The place

The building stands on Norfolk Street in central Manchester, between Market Street and King Street. The hotel's postal address is 4 Norfolk Street, M2 1DW.

The hotel's website mentions easy links to public and private transport without naming a station or tram line. The surroundings are the shopping and office streets of the city centre, within walking distance of the main pedestrian streets.

The concept

The Exchange was built between 1904 and 1906 for £86,000, to designs by the Bolton practice Bradshaw, Gass and Hope. The style is Edwardian Baroque: three storeys of Portland stone, a rusticated ground floor, a strong cornice and, in the middle, five bays of oriel windows topped by colonnaded ones. Pevsner described a hall whose dome rests on pilasters clad in green and cream marble. The building has been Grade II listed since 3 October 1974, under the name Northern Stock Exchange.

Manchester's first exchange had opened in 1836 as a branch of the London Stock Exchange. Trade in the new building initially tripled, and it became the busiest provincial exchange in the country for industrial stocks. The 1929 Wall Street crash disrupted dealing, and the exchange's role slipped behind London's. After the 1973 merger of the Northern Stock Exchange with London, the trading floor was computerised and closed shortly afterwards. The premises became offices, then a restaurant, until the two former Manchester United players bought the building for £1.5 million.

Planning permission in 2015 was for a 35-room hotel; the scheme that opened in 2019 has 40. That year a homelessness campaign group squatted the site and renamed it the Sock Exchange to collect clothing for rough sleepers, and the owners let it stay over the winter. GG Hospitality also owns Hotel Football, next to Old Trafford.

The hotel's website describes rooms and suites that keep the original marble, brass and woodwork. It gives neither room sizes nor a breakdown of categories.

Dining & wellness

At opening the flagship was Tom Kerridge's Bull and Bear, which closed in 2022. Tender replaced it, led by Niall Keating, previously executive chef at Whatley Manor. The hotel's site presents him as a two Michelin-starred chef.

Tender sits in the restored original trading floor, where brokers once shouted their orders. The hotel also runs two bars, Tender Bar and Sterling Bar, serves a Tender afternoon tea, and offers private dining in a room called The Bank. Weddings and private events are handled on site.