It is the jewel in the crown of Manchester's plentiful Victorian architecture: Alfred Waterhouse's towering, Munich-inspired town hall. Fittingly for a city that prides itself as a municipal power on a scale rivalling the great city-states in European history, Manchester Town Hall is the grandest, greatest and most imposing building in the region.With historic stained glass windows, murals, cobbled flagstones, rare organ and intricate tiling. Outside, the atmospheric Victorian courtyard has doubled for so many period TV shows and films – Frankenstein, Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes – is closed to Mancunians, never having been upgraded for safe public use. There are old stable doors to what is now used as a garage for the Lord Mayor's car, signs dating back decades, leading to the old air raid shelter constructed in the second world war, words etched into glass reading 'police' or 'superintendent', a reminder of the first time public services were 'integrated', over a century ago.