The area around the school continued to change. During the 1840s, Victoria railway station was completed opposite the school and the church became Manchester Cathedral. Then, in the 1870s, a new building, the Manchester Grammar Extension, was built, designed by Alfred Waterhouse, and including new classrooms, laboratories and a gymnasium, reflecting the wider curriculum that had developed since the 1830s. It was connected to the original by a first-storey bridge. It was said that the bridge's purpose was not for ease of movement between the parts of the school, but rather to dwarf Chetham's gatehouse both in terms of size and grandeur.