What: The Venetian Glass chandeliers at Manchester Airport.

Where: Terminal 1.

When: 1962.

Now: Gone. The chandeliers were the rarest of commissions. Consider that in the late 1950s, when volume air traffic was still three decades away, few of us experienced airports. They were just coming out of their post-war sheds, and authorities were waking up to the fact that air travel required its terminal buildings to inherit the glamour of the great railway stations and the embarkation docks of the ocean-going liners. In the inter-war years, only the very rich and adventurous passed from land to airside, and they probably didn’t even know it. Manchester Airport’s Terminal 1 opened in 1962. There was a prominently placed but since side-lined bronze by Dame Elizabeth Frink, celebrating Manchester’s Alcock and Brown, the first aviators to fly the Atlantic non-stop, and four astonishing Venetian glass chandeliers by Bruno Zaneti of glassmaker Venini of Murano. Each weighs two tonnes and is made up of 1,300 individually blown pieces of lead grey and amethyst glass, up to 10ft long.

I’m indebted to the airport press office for this information, and the airport management is keen to invite ideas as to what should happen to the chandeliers now that they have been removed in preparation for a £5.5m revamp. This is a bit like running suspended ceilings along the vaulted corridors of Manchester Town Hall, and paneling in the Ford Madox Brown murals in the Great Hall, in order to give the place a more contemporary look. Obviously, the chandeliers are a Manchester treasure. They are as contemporary as Concorde. Nothing that architects Pascall & Watson (who did the Bluewater shopping mall in Essex… big deal) will come up with, in order to produce ‘the ambience of an upmarket high street’ will have anything like their impact. And whatever replaces them will have nothing like their 40-year longevity.

Manchester is my favourite airport. In economic terms, the city - and the ten boroughs - are very, very lucky to have it. I can only say that its various stages of extension and refurbishment have been well handled. But removing the chandeliers is misjudgment bordering on disaster. There is only one thing to do with the chandeliers, and that is to reinstate them.

Future Prospects: Why will people fly in the face of obvious quality and approval? Why did homeowners paint over Victorian ceramics and box-in granite and marble fireplaces? We are an odd lot who watch all sorts of DIY and home makeover tosh on TV, and then set about trashing rare good bits of detail and design. The chandeliers cost £3,000 each. They, and the building they are in, opened to the public in 1962, the same year as the CIS tower in the city centre was completed. The early ‘60s was when Britain started to rediscover the world, and to readjust to the twentieth century clock. There was a long way to go before post-Victorian Manchester would get comfortable with its place in the present.

Out at the airport things were a little bit different. Foreign people were moving in and out, and little touches of glamour caught the eye. In those moments before charter flight rage, over-sized Spanish donkeys, and away-away-away boys en route to stag weekends in Dublin or Amsterdam, the airport was somewhere exotic and exciting. It still is. I like airports more and more, and we are lucky to have a good one.

Any ideas for what should happen to the chandeliers can be emailed to chandeliers@manair port.co.uk.

I will be emailing, saying: “It is madness to consider any alternative but their reinstatement.” I hope you may join me.