It's possibly Manchester’s most unexpected piece of modern art.

And it’s not hanging in the Whitworth or the Lowry, or gracing a grand city centre square.

Instead Mitzi Cunliffe’s stunning stone relief, which pays tribute to the engineering marvel that is the Haweswater aqueduct, is tucked away on a quiet suburban street in Prestwich, overlooking a row of semi-detached houses.

Designed to be seen from the pavement below, the New York-born sculptor’s 1955 sandstone and Westmorland stone frieze covers a large part of the front wall of Heaton Park reservoir pumping station.

Depicting a highly-stylised portrayal of the construction of the 82-mile long pipe, which brings water from the Lake District to Manchester, the sculpture is a magnificent symbol of civic pride, made all the more remarkable by its everyday surroundings.

Underneath the frieze five stone panels tell the history of the pipe project and inside the pumping house, hidden from public view, the walls are lined with travertine marble and there is a diagram of the aqueduct route in veneered sycamore.

Historic England, which made the pumping station the only post 1945 building to be listed entirely for its sculpture, describes it as a ‘remarkable synthesis of architectural design and fine sculpture’.

Mitzi, who is best known for designing the BAFTA gold mask statue, moved to Manchester after marrying history professor Marcus Cunliffe in 1949.

From the garage of the couple’s Didsbury home she took on a stream of large scale commissions, producing some of the north west’s most influential public artworks.

Other surviving pieces include Man and Technic, which has pride of place at the Manchester Health Academy, and Cosmos I, a fibreglass relief at the base of Owens Park Student Tower.

Writing in 2012 Manchester Modernist Society founder Maureen Ward paid tribute to the life and work of Mitzi, who died in 1970 aged 88.

She wrote: “If we were the sort to award blue plaques or lobby for a Hollywood-style Wall of Fame scheme in our own city, Mitzi would top the bill.

“She epitomises the spirit of an exuberant, utopian partnership between planners, architects, artists and sculptors dedicated to rejuvenating the public realm after the chaos of the blitz; functional yet accessible, experimental yet egalitarian, international yet rooted in everyday surroundings.

“Mitzi might have been born in New York but her soul belongs firmly in the North West of England and her Didsbury garage – the Heaton Park Pumping Station might be a far cry from the glitzy backdrop of the BAFTA ceremony but it’s no less deserving of our Modernist Heroines Wall of Fame.”