Magic Mirror, Selfie Pod & Photography Hire at The Monastery Manchester

Gorton Lane, Manchester, M12 5WF, Manchester, Greater Manchester, M12 5WF

✓ We’ve worked at this venue before

The Monastery Manchester on Gorton Lane was built as the Church and Friary of St Francis to a design by Edward Welby Pugin, son of Augustus Welby Pugin, and raised by local people who dug the foundations and made the bricks themselves — some still carry their makers' fingerprints. The nave stands ninety-eight feet high. The last Mass was said in November 1989; the building was stripped, vandalised and left derelict until a charitable trust founded by Elaine and Paul Griffiths bought the ruinous shell for a pound in 1996, and the World Monuments Fund named it one of the hundred most endangered sites in the world. Restored in 2005 and reopened for events in 2007, it is Grade II* listed, now deconsecrated, and still owned and run by the Trust. The Great Nave and the Private Chapel are licensed for ceremonies: cosy for seventy within the pillars, three hundred and fifty across the full room, and up to four hundred for a wedding.

We know this building. We've worked a wedding at The Monastery, so we already know the load-in off Gorton Lane and what Pugin's windows do to the light through the afternoon.

The Great Nave does everything — ceremony, wedding breakfast and then the dancing, all in the same room, reset around you. We set up once and stay put through both turnarounds, which is the single most useful thing a supplier can do in a room that changes three times in a day.

Ninety-eight feet of vaulted ceiling is a gift and a problem, because it swallows light. The mirror brings its own, and set against the stone rather than under the height it reads as part of the building instead of a box parked in a cathedral. It needs a 10ft by 8ft footprint and one ordinary socket. At four hundred guests two units beat one — a mirror at the party end and a pod further down — so nobody queues across the floor.

The Cloisters are the best-kept secret in the building: that white-arched internal walkway, lit in your colour, is where a selfie pod belongs, because guests pass through it all night anyway and it needs barely five foot square. The Secret Garden inside the cloister walls is where our photographers want twenty minutes — private, walled, and nothing like anywhere else your guests will have been. The audio guest book, meanwhile, wants somewhere off the Nave where the acoustics stop working against you.

Gorton sits well outside Manchester's and Barton's flight restriction zones, so aerial film of Pugin's roofline is a matter of planning the launch point and the timing rather than asking permission — and it is a shot almost nobody has. We've put together a free wedding pack for couples marrying at The Monastery, downloadable below — it sizes every option to the Nave, lays out the prices in full, and carries MONASTERY5, a venue-exclusive code that takes 5% off anything in it.

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Last reviewed August 2026 · Venue details and pricing verified current.

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