MANCHESTER University has published its plans for the biggest
construction programme in the history of higher education in
Britain.
The £350m Project Unity will see the campus on Upper Brook Street
and Oxford Road completely remodelled, with nine new buildings, the
refurbishment of existing buildings and extensive
landscaping.
The flagship will be the £60.2m SCAN Building, replacing the Maths
Tower on Oxford Road, which features a 1,000-seat lecture hall and
is due to be completed in December 2007.
The redevelopment of the entire campus will provide 6m sq ft of
accommodation and has been trigged by the merger of Umist and the
Victoria University of Manchester.
It is being funded by the university, the Northwest Development
Agency, the Office of Science and Technology, and the Higher
Education Funding Council for England.
Diana Hampson, the university's director of estates, said: "This is
the biggest capital programme in the history of higher education in
this country.
"We are aiming to deliver a campus that will help make the
University of Manchester one of the leading universities in the
world by 2015.
"There will clearly be some disruption to existing staff and
students, but as we complete each of these projects they will see
some very impressive facilities opening up right across the
campus."
The £50m Michael Smith Building, named in honour of the late Nobel
Laureate Dr Michael Smith, was completed in March and will be home
to 800 scientists. It is the first of three new facilities that
will eventually form one of the largest biomedical complexes in
Europe.
More than £16m will be spent to create another wing of the Smith
Building and there will also be the £33.3m Smith Extension, due for
completion in September 2008.
As well as the three new biomedical buildings the Stopford Building
teaching labs will be refurbished, at a cost of £3.72m, and the
School of Pharmacy relocated into this building at a cost of
£17.7m.
The £9.7m FB1 building (functional biology) is currently under
construction behind the Bioscience Incubator and is due for
completion in January 2006.
A new £13.36m chemistry block will be completed in time for the
2006 academic year and a new £30.58m humanities building by April
2007.
The £37m Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre is back on track
after some delays and will be ready next summer, dominating the
skyline to the north of the Mancunian Way.
There will be some new building and some refurbishment on the site
of the existing Schuster Building for Physics, creating the £51.9m
AMPPS block (astronomy, maths, physics and photon science), to be
completed in September 2007.
And there is the continuing £16.7m project to renovate the John
Rylands University Library on Deansgate (see below).
As if all that wasn't enough, the university will spend £10.1m on a
new multi-storey car park.
Diana Hampson said: "As well as all the new buildings, there is the
public realm project that will really be the glue that bonds the
campus together.
"The campus will be extensively landscaped to make it more
accessible to the communities on all sides, particularly opening
pedestrian and cycle routes through from the east to the west. It
will be a visible statement of the university's intent to integrate
into the developing urban and economic structure of
Manchester."
Prior to the merger, car parking and service roads took up 46 per
cent of the campus.
Concrete vaults for priceless books
PRICELESS books and manuscripts will be stored in
computer-controlled concrete vaults when the John Rylands Library
restoration project is complete.
Each floor of the four-storey extension to the rear of the
Victorian building will be an airtight, 250mm-thick, concrete box -
doubling as both a 36m-long safe and the building's exterior
walls.
Computers will control the sealed environments, with steel doors
helping to regulate temperature and humidity.
The basement, second and third floors will be used to store the
most delicate books from the library's collection of more than 3.5
million books.
These include the world's first printed Bible - the 1453 Gutenberg
Bible - a fragment of St John's Gospel from the second century, and
several books published by England's first printer William
Caxton.
The extension will be built with a steel frame, concrete and glass
walls, and connected to the main library via a glass bridge.