place

Faraday Building, Manchester

Buildings at the University of ManchesterGreater Manchester building and structure stubsUnited Kingdom university stubsUse British English from March 2015
Faraday Tower
Faraday Tower

The Faraday Building is a university building in central Manchester. It is part of the campus of the former University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. The Faraday Building's architect was Harry Fairhurst, of the long-established Manchester firm of H.S. Fairhust & Son. It was constructed in 1967 by J. Gerrard & Sons. The building housed, until mid-to-late 2007, part of the University of Manchester School of Chemistry. The School of Chemistry is now located mainly at the Chemistry Building on Brunswick Street, however a significant number of former Faraday-based academics researching biologically related chemistry are now based in the nearby Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre. Appropriately, given its chemistry roots, the building houses a mural called The Alchemist's Elements, by Hans Tisdall.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Faraday Building, Manchester (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Faraday Building, Manchester
Sackville Street, Manchester City Centre

Geographical coordinates (GPS) Address Nearby Places
placeShow on map

Wikipedia: Faraday Building, ManchesterContinue reading on Wikipedia

Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 53.4735 ° E -2.2341 °
placeShow on map

Address

Sackville Street

Sackville Street
M1 3BB Manchester, City Centre
England, United Kingdom
mapOpen on Google Maps

Faraday Tower
Faraday Tower
Share experience

Nearby Places

Barnes Wallis Building
Barnes Wallis Building

The Barnes Wallis Building/Wright Robinson Hall is a university building in central Manchester. It forms part of the campus of the former University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, which merged in 2004 with the nearby Victoria University of Manchester. It is unusual in that the two parts of the building have different names and different uses, though the building is a single structure, purpose-built by a single architect. It was built in 1963–66 and the architect was W. A. Gibbon of Cruikshank & Seward. The building faces across a green space at the centre of campus towards the Renold Building, which was designed by the same architect and constructed the previous year. According to the Pevsner Architectural Guides: "Its scale and form was designed to relate to the earlier building. It is all white concrete. The vertical stabbing funnel on the roof is designed to light the stairs." The low-rise structure facing onto the green space at the centre of the campus is the Barnes Wallis Building, named after the pioneering aircraft designer Sir Barnes Wallis who opened the building in 1967. This once housed the main campus refectory (closed June 2009), and until 2004 it was also home to UMIST Students' Association. For a number of years it was used by the merged University of Manchester Students' Union with a print shop, bar and shop. The building was for decades a central part of student social life. It is now largely given over to computer clusters and student workspaces, mostly used by the students of the engineering schools still resident in the former UMIST campus. Famous from the late 1960s to late '80s amongst not just students, but also youngsters from across Manchester, for its Saturday Night Dances and Wednesday Technites. Many major rock bands played there, including The Who, The Yardbirds, Chuck Berry, Traffic, Jimi Hendrix, Def Leppard, Dr Feelgood and Nazareth. Its bar today is named Harry's Bar after the Principal of UMIST at the time Harold Hankins. The naming of internal parts of the building was for many years a good indicator of the current political balance of the UMIST Student Union. The Large Assembly Hall was at times called the Lenin Assembly Hall. Conversely, the Small Assembly Hall was at other times named the Sharansky Assembly Hall, after Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky. The 15-storey high-rise part of the structure is called Wright Robinson Hall, and is a student hall of residence. In January 2021 The Guardian listed the Barnes Wallis Building as one of Britain's Brutalist buildings most at risk of demolition and development. It was included in Brutal North: Post-War Modernist Architecture in the North of England, Simon Phipps's photographic study of Brutalist architecture.

Sackville Street Building
Sackville Street Building

The Sackville Street Building is a building on Sackville Street in Manchester, England. The University of Manchester occupies the building which, before the merger with UMIST in 2004, was UMIST's "Main Building". Construction of the building for the Manchester School of Technology began in 1895 on a site formerly occupied by Sir Joseph Whitworth's engineering works; it was opened in 1902 by the then Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour. The School of Technology became the Manchester Municipal College of Technology in 1918. Built using Burmantofts terracotta, it was subsequently extended along Whitworth Street, towards London Road, between 1927 and 1957 by the architects Bradshaw Gass & Hope, the delay being due to the depression in the 1930s and the Second World War. Originally, a swimming pool was planned for the top floor, but after concerns that the weight of water might cause structural issues, it was instead used as a dug in gymnasium and in more recent years as an examination hall. The building was Grade II listed in 1974. The building is bounded by Whitworth Street to the north, Granby Row to the south, Cobourg Street to the east, and Sackville Street to the west, where the original main entrance (called the Grand Entrance) lies. The entrance on Granby Row is the usual entrance to the eastern part of the building (there is another entrance on Whitworth Street only for the use of the students and staff of the University of Manchester). The lower floors contain among other departments the Royce Laboratory for mechanical engineering, named after Henry Royce. Floors are denoted by letters, from BA (lowest), then A to L (highest) missing out I. The historic Godlee Observatory sits on the roof and is still in use. The building is used by the University for a number of functions and departments. These include administration, teaching and research in science and technology, and examinations. Inside on floors D, E and F are the Joule Library (now part of the University of Manchester Library) and various offices, laboratories, lecture theatres and exam halls. The Joule Library was given this name (commemorating the physicist J. P. Joule) in 1987 when it was refurbished.There are inscriptions at the Grand Entrance and at the Whitworth Street entrance, recording important events in the history of the building. The later part of the building was built on the site of St Augustine's Church, the third Roman Catholic chapel in Manchester. It was replaced by the second St Augustine's Church in York Street, Chorlton on Medlock. There is also a plaque recording the previous existence of Ivan Levinstein's laboratory on the site.In the estates strategy for 2010-2020 for the University of Manchester, it is stated that essentially all of the former UMIST campus, described as the "area north of the Mancunian Way", is to be disposed of. The fate of the former UMIST Main Building (Sackville Street Building) is not described. The vice-chancellor of Manchester University, Dame Nancy Rothwell, has stated that a fitting use must be found for this "fine old building".Sackville Street Building currently serves as the home for the University of Manchester's school of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE), along with providing a base for textile sciences and nuclear science at the Dalton Institute on site.

Maths and Social Sciences Building
Maths and Social Sciences Building

The Maths and Social Sciences Building is a high-rise tower in Manchester, England. It was part of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) until that university merged with the Victoria University of Manchester, to form the University of Manchester, in 2004. It was vacated by the university in 2010 but is currently in use by the School of Materials while waiting for a new building to be constructed. The MSS Building was built in 1969, as part of the UMIST campus. Constructed from reinforced concrete and designed by architects Cruikshank and Seward, it has fifteen stories and an overall height of 50 metres (160 ft), making it the tallest building on the former UMIST campus. Unlike many examples of Brutalist architecture on university campuses of that period, the building deviates from a purely cuboid outline with decorative towers at either end (now used as convenient locations for mobile phone antennae) and the floors up to the 10th being larger, which also breaks up the outline. The building was used largely for staff offices, with some teaching rooms. The 10th to 14th floors (called floors M–Q) accommodated the Department of Mathematics. The University of Manchester Regional Computer Centre (UMRCC) was based on J floor. The "Social Sciences" in the building's name indicates that the building once housed the Management Department, but in recent years the Department of Computation occupied the lower floors of the building. They were to become the School of Informatics in the new university and have since been split between the Schools of Computer Science and Manchester Business School. A two-floor annex to the MSS building connected to the ground floor houses tiered lecture theatres. It was built on the site of cramped terraced housing that accommodated factory workers that was studied by Friedrich Engels in his book The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. The new, merged University of Manchester announced in June 2007 that it plans to sell the Mathematics and Social Sciences Building. In July 2007, School of Mathematics relocated from MSS as well from the Ferranti building and the temporary buildings Newman and Lamb, to the new purpose-designed Alan Turing Building. Later in 2007, the staff of the former School of Informatics relocated, some of them to the Lamb building vacated by the mathematicians. As of 2015, the building houses the Materials Science department, recently relocated from the old Materials Science Building, awaiting demolition.

London Road Fire Station, Manchester
London Road Fire Station, Manchester

London Road Fire Station is a former fire station in Manchester, England. It was opened in 1906, on a site bounded by London Road, Whitworth Street, Minshull Street South and Fairfield Street. Designed in the Edwardian Baroque style by Woodhouse, Willoughby and Langham in red brick and terracotta, it cost £142,000 to build and was built by J. Gerrard and Sons of Swinton. It has been a Grade II* listed building since 1974. In addition to a fire station, the building housed a police station, an ambulance station, a bank, a coroner's court, and a gas-meter testing station. The fire station operated for eighty years, housing the firemen, their families, and the horse-drawn appliances that were replaced by motorised vehicles a few years after its opening. It was visited by royalty in 1942, in recognition of the brigade's wartime efforts. After the war it became a training centre and in 1952 became the first centre equipped to record emergency calls. However, the fire station became expensive to maintain and after council reorganisation decline set in. The building was the headquarters of the Manchester Fire Brigade until the brigade was replaced by the Greater Manchester Fire Service in 1974. The fire station closed in 1986, since when it has been largely unused despite several redevelopment proposals. It was placed on English Heritage's Buildings at Risk Register in 2001 and in 2010 Manchester City Council served a compulsory purchase order on the fire station's owner, Britannia Hotels. Britannia announced in 2015 their intention to sell the building after nearly 30 years of dereliction. It was sold to Allied London in 2015 and renovation commenced in 2018 with the building to be redeveloped as a mixed-use comprising leisure and hotel facilities.

Alan Turing Memorial
Alan Turing Memorial

The Alan Turing Memorial, situated in Sackville Gardens in Manchester, England, is a sculpture in memory of Alan Turing, a pioneer of modern computing. Turing is believed to have taken his own life in 1954, two years after being convicted of gross indecency (i.e. homosexual acts). As such, he is as much a gay icon as an icon of computing, and the memorial is situated near to Canal Street, Manchester's gay village. Turing is depicted sitting on a bench situated in a central position in the park, holding an apple. On Turing's left is the University of Manchester and on his right is Canal Street. Sculptor Glyn Hughes said the park was chosen as the location for the statue because "It's got the university science buildings...on one side and it's got all the gay bars on the other side, where apparently he spent most of his evenings."The statue was unveiled on 23 June, Turing's birthday, in 2001. It was conceived by Richard Humphry, a barrister from Stockport, who set up the Alan Turing Memorial Fund in order to raise the necessary funds. Humphry had come up with the idea of a statue after seeing Hugh Whitemore's play Breaking the Code, starring Derek Jacobi. Jacobi became the patron of the fund. Glyn Hughes, an industrial sculptor from Adlington near Westhoughton, was commissioned to sculpt the statue.Roy Jackson (who had previously raised funds for HIV/AIDS and Gay Awareness in Manchester) was asked to assist in the funding raising to make the memorial happen. Within 12 months, through donations and a "village lottery", £15,000 was raised. It would have cost c. £50,000 would have been needed to cast the statue at a British foundry, and so it was instead cast by the Tianjin Focus Company in China. The inscription in relief on the cast bronze bench reads "Alan Mathison Turing 1912–1954" and "IEKYF ROMSI ADXUO KVKZC GUBJ". The latter is described by Glyn Hughes as "a motto as encoded by the German 'Enigma'". The original message is often given as "Founder of Computer Science", however this is unlikely as the Enigma ciphering system does not allow a letter to be enciphered to itself, while the fourteenth letter of that message (the "U" in "Computer") is the same as the fourteenth letter of the encoded inscription.A plaque at the statue's feet reads "Father of Computer Science, Mathematician, Logician, Wartime Codebreaker, Victim of Prejudice", followed by the Bertrand Russell quotation "Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty, a beauty cold and austere like that of sculpture." Glyn Hughes buried his own old Amstrad computer beneath the statue, in tribute to Turing.