£2.5m Manchester penthouse named after communist revolutionary

While Engels wrote about poverty, he hailed from a wealthy family.

His father owned a textile mill in Barmen in Germany, and it was his father’s hope that by sending him to work in the family’s textile mill in Weaste, Salford, Engels would recant his radical ideals.

But what he saw in the slums of Manchester led to his work The Condition of The Working Class in England.

Dr Dean Kirby, a Manchester-based journalist and historian who researched Engels’s journey through the slums of Manchester for his PhD, said Engels was “a man of contradictions”

“If he was around today he may well have enjoyed the champagne lifestyle of high rise living while writing about the deprivation still prevalent in British cities including Manchester,” he said.

But, he added, there was an “inescapable irony” in naming a penthouse after a man who had said the wealthy of Manchester were “systematically shutting out of the working class” and hiding them away in “cattle sheds for human beings”.

The other penthouse in the building is named The Turing, seemingly in homage to Alan Turing, the computing pioneer and Enigma machine codebreaker worked at the University of Manchester from 1948.