A SOCIETY dedicated to saving `ugly' buildings has been launched in Manchester.

Tower blocks, concrete landscapes and motorway flyovers will be celebrated by the Manchester Modernist Society.

More than 200 people have joined the society, which plans to hold its first meeting later this year.

Members say the CIS tower, the benefits office Albert Bridge House on Bridge Street, the former Department of Employment offices on Aytoun Street and the Daily Express building in Ancoats are all worthy of praise.

Founder member Maureen Ward, an artist and archaeologist, said: "We have embraced regeneration wholesale in this city often for good reasons but there is now one glass building too many.

"There are old buildings which might not strictly be beautiful but people feel a lot of affection for them.

"Many Victorian buildings are beautiful and deserve to be protected but there are later buildings which mean something to a generation - and there are not necessarily a lot of them left."

The Manchester Civic Society - an appreciation group for architecture - has been running for several decades and has backed campaigns to restore the Victoria Baths and Gorton Monastery.

But the new society says it will focus on saving 20th-century buildings, including the disused Odeon Cinema on Peter Street, the 15-storey Moberley Hall at the former Umist campus and the Holloway sculptural wall, also at Umist.

Among the members is Steve Millington, a geography lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, who ran a series of lectures and tours in praise of the Mancunian Way dual carriageway.

Steve said he was particularly interested in how people had reclaimed the space in the 1967 motorway's flyovers and underpasses.

He said: "Skateboarders have created a skatepark and in the past people have had parties in the underpasses and the roundabouts. It is very easy to dismiss it as a dead space but it isn't."

To mark its launch, the society will produce a series of postcards of buildings it considers hidden gems.

Its first meeting in November will feature screenings of documentaries from the North West Film Archive about the construction of the Mancunian Way and the creation of post-war housing in Hulme.