Meet the man who builds incredible miniature replicas of iconic Manchester buildings and shop fronts

For Ric Facchin, a living made immortalising Manchester’s most prominent buildings and shopfronts into miniature sculptures wasn’t always on the cards.

Ric, from Prestwich, had originally worked in recruitment but, when the 2020 lockdown hit, he found himself at stuck home and in desperate need of a project to keep himself occupied.

Ric had built just one replica in the past – the Manchester Arndale Exchange Book Shop in Shudehill – with the aim to fill his back room wall with sculptures of old Manchester buildings and historic doorways and frames.

However, it was only when he found himself with an abundance of time on his hands that he decided to truly throw himself into the art.

Levis

@manchester_builds / Instagram

Speaking to Proper Manchester, Ric said: “There’s just so much history in Manchester’s city centre, and I wanted to recreate the seedier side to it too, particularly around Ancoats and the Northern Quarter, and whack them in frames and put them up on the wall.”

But when Ric shared a photo of one of his builds on Twitter, his craft ‘blew up’ and he found himself inundated with calls and requests from people from not just Manchester, but the whole country – not that he’s interested in travelling outside of Manchester, that is.

Ric said: “It’s now my full time work, I’ll be busy right up until the end of the year with commissions… I get people from all over the country asking me to rebuild their local pub, but I don’t want to travel miles to work on something I’ve never seen before in my life.”

And rightly so, because the process to recreate these buildings and shop fronts is painstakingly long and can take months at a time.

The procedure begins with Ric traveling to the location and taking between thirty and sixty photographs, capturing the finer details any other person would usually overlook, such as the small numbers on surrounding lamp posts.

@manchester_builds / Instagram

@manchester_builds / Instagram

He joked: “I’m a perfectionist, everything has to be bang on otherwise I’ll go into a strop.”

The photographs are then uploaded onto his laptop, where the specific scales of the buildings are worked out to ensure the final sculpture is as structurally accurate as possible.

Ric continued: “Once I’ve got a flat picture of the front of the building, I go and layer the scale down and then I’ll draw a blueprint of the front of the building and I’ll draw it all up onto a big piece of paper.

“For the shop signs I use a website that searches for specific fonts – like Shazam but for fonts – I upload a photo of the sign and it will find the exact font for me, or the closest thing to it. Once I’ve got that, I fire up Photoshop and start remaking the whole thing there. It’s very time consuming!”

As for the materials used to build the replicas, they can vary from wood, plastic, styrofoam, and even foam board.

@manchester_builds / Instagram

@levis.vintage.clothing / Instagram

Ric has since recreated dozens of buildings and shopfronts, for both personal commissions and for larger, high profile companies, all of which average to a size of 22cm to 25cm across; the small details for interiors can be as small as 4mm.

One of his favourite creations was Chorlton’s Kingbee Record Shop, which was commissioned by global clothing retailer Levis as a part of their Happy Mondays range.

Because they couldn’t fly their models out to Manchester as a result of the pandemic, the retailer instead sought the help of Ric to build ten different places from around Manchester, Kingbee Record Shop included, for them to then superimpose the models in front of the builds.

Another memorable build is the recreation of an Eccles butcher from the 1980s. Ric had been commissioned to recreate the shop in tribute to its owner who had passed away, though was only given one photograph taken at an angle for reference.

He explained: “I was more than happy to do it, it’s a good story and that’s what I’m all about. However, there was only one photograph of the butchers itself as it closed down years ago, and it had been taken from an angle.

@manchester_builds / Instagram

@manchester_builds / Instagram

“The building is still there and it’s a different shop but the brickwork is all the same. So I travelled down to Eccles and took some photographs and started working backwards from there.

“That was a really challenging piece because for me, everything has to be millimetre perfect and it was difficult to achieve that with just one old photograph.”

While Ric travels all over Greater Manchester, his favourite place to recreate is the Northern Quarter and Ancoats, with the old Victorian warehouses and manor houses that now house shop fronts being his preferred builds.

Despite him successfully keeping his craft based on buildings exclusive to Greater Manchester, however, Ric admits that he will eventually have to expand further afield as a result of the rapid gentrification taking place across the city. 

You can see Ric’s impressive catalogue of work and enquire about commissions over on the official Manchester Builds Instagram and Facebook pages.