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Manchester Conference Centre

Buildings and structures in Manchester
Weston Foucault 0119
Weston Foucault 0119

The Manchester Conference Centre is a conference centre in Manchester, England that used to be owned and managed by the Opal Property Group, which has several locations, distributed over the campus of Manchester University. As the Weston Building it was originally built, owned and operated by UMIST. When it was built in 1992, British universities had already become established in the conference market, providing large-scale facilities for conferences during university vacation down-time, and bringing in cash to help bridge the funding gap. The Manchester Conference Centre was built to appeal to the corporate market; the architecture is modern. The Sackville complex was built in 1991. The lower foyer features a pendulum reminiscent of a Foucault pendulums, but ironically it is not a real Foucault pendulum as it doesn't precess. Instead, once the pendulum is set swinging in a particular direction, it continues to swing in that direction without deviation, despite the Earth's rotation. The reason for that is unclear. As is common for such pendulums, it is pushed by an electro-magnet — embedded in the static sphere at the base — to keep it swinging. The Manchester Conference Centre's 117 bedroom hotel was rebranded in 2014 to The Pendulum Hotel.

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

Manchester Conference Centre
Sackville Street, Manchester City Centre

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Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 53.474027777778 ° E -2.2347222222222 °
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Address

Pendulum Hotel

Sackville Street
M1 3BB Manchester, City Centre
England, United Kingdom
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Weston Foucault 0119
Weston Foucault 0119
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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.

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.

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.