Where: Bridge Street, on the Salford bank of the Irwell, just by Albert Bridge.

When: 1972.

Now: At any one time, a handful of architects shape the way the city looks. In the '60s they were Fairhurst's, Cruickshank & Seward, and Leach Rhodes Walker. LRW were heroic. They built big and fast and introduced building techniques into the city for the first time. On Highland House, Victoria Bridge Street (now refurbished as part Premier Lodge, part apartments), they put up the 23 storey lift-shafts first, and then tower-craned the various pre-cast concrete units into place.

Things didn't always go to plan. The first version of the funky TV-screen windows in the building, ended up in Salford bus station one windy night. Manchester House, just up the road from their office, is an eight-storey cube over a two-storey podium. They erected the steel frame and then cast the floor slabs on-site, and stacked them one on top of the other on the ground, like so many slices of toast. When they were all done, each of them was then craned into place, one after the other, on the same day, like some sort of Generation Game routine. The job drew an audience, and people stood in the street and applauded. St Andrew's House on Portland Street, the one with the big yellow-green Commonwealth Games logo on the side, is another of theirs, and it used to house the best penthouse with the best southern views anywhere in the city. Not all their buildings are successful. Unloved Cumberland House forms one side of Crown Square. You used to have to go there to be married by the registrar. The building is far more suited to its role as the registry of deaths. It's about to be killed off by the new Spinning Field development.

The practice might be said to have a suspiciously unhealthy relationship with the Inland Revenue. They built both their new white HQ building, Trinity Bridge House, in 1998, and the old Aldine House (now re-branded as Riverside West) next door, in 1967. Aldine House wraps around their own darkly elegant office box like a carefully fashioned pashmina. If only the horrible plastic canopy hadn't been part of the Riverside refurbishment, the black marble pavilion would remain as fresh and frankly opulent as the day it was completed. Only the CIS tower comes anywhere near this build-quality in the city, and only the LRW office pavilion comes close to the richness of the Mies Van de Rohe's American buildings that inspire it.

Future Prospects: It’s fair to say that Leach Rhodes Walker lost the plot somewhere in the late ‘70s. Commercial buildings on the scale at which they operated are far from recession-proof, and new technologies and work patterns demand new design solutions.

Things began to happen again in the ‘90s, not least, The Trafford Centre. Love it or loathe it, the £600 million development by Peel Holdings gave architects Chapman Taylor, and their Associate Architects, Leach Rhodes Walker, quite a few drawings to do. It turns out that Peel Holdings, parent company of the Manchester Ship Canal Company, are the biggest benefactors of Imperial War Museum North, architect, Studio Daniel Libeskind, Berlin; Associate Architects and Contract Administration, Leach Rhodes Walker.

I think that, far from witnessing a funeral in Berlin, LRW are about to be resurrected, big time. Dodgy shopping mall one day, landmark icon mega aluminum new fangled much hyped museum the next. I still think they've kept their best work for themselves.