A new college building in Manchester, designed to provide facilities for students of performing arts, creative and digital media, is set to complete in June this year. Helena Russell finds out more

Scheme: City Campus Manchester Client: LTE Group Main contractor: Willmott Dixon Architects: Bond Bryan, SimpsonHaugh Project & cost manager: Pearson Fraser Structural engineer: Aecom Steel frame supplier: Hambleton Steel BREEAM consultant & building services: BDP Fire & acoustics engineers: Hoare Lea Contract value: £54m Construction start: March 2020 Project handover: June 2022

Students passing through the doors of City Campus Manchester at the start of the next academic year will be forgiven for wondering whether they’ve accidentally strayed into a plush arts venue, rather than an educational establishment.

The new building features a five-storey atrium at its heart, around which the teaching facilities are ranged. In the centre of the space, the gleaming 200-seat ‘Jewel Box’ theatre forms the building’s dramatic centrepiece.

The Manchester College, the UK’s largest further-education college, provides courses for 16-19-year-olds, as well as older students. The £54m building will give creative-arts and digital media students access to the Jewel Box and a smaller 100-seat theatre venue, as well as film and recording studios, workshops, digital editing suites, and dance studios with sprung floors.

Rapidly nearing completion, the new building sits on a city centre site previously occupied by Manchester’s famous Boddingtons Brewery. It has been designed to co-locate students in both higher and further education, studying similar subjects at different levels. The two cohorts will each have their own entrance.

The client for the new building is LTE Group, an umbrella organisation that operates the Manchester College as well as several other education establishments in the city. As well as the performing arts, the City Campus will provide a home for the college’s courses in computing, creative and digital media, hospitality and catering. Dedicated space will also be provided for sister organisation UCEN Manchester, serving as a base for The Arden School of Theatre and Manchester Film School.

Initial design of the 18,300 square metre campus building was carried out by architects SimpsonHaugh and Bond Bryan. Willmott Dixon, appointed as preferred contractor, collaborated on design refinement through the second stage of the bidding process. LTE Group director of estate redevelopment Niall Wright says that developing a shared cost plan was central to the process, with the goal of bringing build costs down to meet the available budget. But he adds that parts of the concept design were firmly not up for discussion.

“The facade design was very important to us,” he says. “We wanted to retain this, particularly as the planners were also wedded to it.

“The key central element is obviously the Jewel Box theatre, and we wanted to be sure that it would still have the full drama and impact of its atrium setting.”

The contractor’s proposed adaptations not only made construction more efficient, but also reduced the cost of the building. Wright describes the savings as “a couple of million”.

The sloping site means the building has both four-storey and five-storey elevations. Willmott Dixon project manager Chris Baker explains that one fundamental change involved relocating fifth-floor art studios to lower down in the building and trimming the floor-to-floor storey heights, bringing the building as a whole below 18 metres. This height is one of the thresholds specified in building regulations, above which more extensive and longer-duration fire protection measures are required.

The top floor now houses dance studios, and the courtyard and atrium were also reconfigured to make more efficient use of the internal space. Some of the atrium’s airspace was reclaimed to accommodate the library directly on the roof of the Jewel Box theatre. While this made better use of available space, it did mean special attention had to be paid to the soundproofing between the theatre and library.

Elsewhere, the roof design was revised and simplified, as were window reveals on the rear of the building at ground-floor level, where recording studios and editing suites will be located. Cold-rolled steel was used where possible, and modern methods of construction were employed to deliver further benefits. A prefabricated plant room was installed on the roof and rooflight steelwork was preassembled into cassettes before being lifted into place by crane, while factory-fabricated corners were used in the Corium brick-slip cladding.

The new building, which is due to be handed over in June ahead of September’s new academic year, is the first of two planned phases of development on the site. The second phase, subject to funding, will see the creation of an adjacent academy for business, financial and professional services.

The presence of the former brewery impacted considerably on the groundworks. As Willmott Dixon’s Baker explains, the ground floor slab of the brewery was still in place when the site was purchased, and the three levels below ground, with cellars and tanks, were surveyed and mapped in a separate contract before the main contractor took possession.

“We wanted to be sure the Jewel Box theatre had the full drama and impact of its atrium setting”

Boddington’s famous beer was made with water that came from an aquifer under the site. Baker explains that three extraction wells remained below ground, and had to be capped off safely ahead of the groundworks. Another remnant of brewing operations was the base of the famous chimney, which extended some 7 metres below ground level, founded directly on the bedrock. “We expected to encounter obstructions across around 85 per cent of the site, but, in reality, it was closer to 100 per cent,” Baker recalls.

While most below-ground obstructions were broken out, processed and used as backfill ahead of piling work, a tank room directly adjacent to one of the site boundaries, on Trinity Way, could not be removed due to proximity to a gas main. The team had to develop a permanent engineered solution to prop and support the tank room wall on ground beams, allowing excavation to progress around it and a contiguous bored pile wall to be installed down to a depth of 20 metres behind it.

This piled wall supports the excavation along the southern and eastern sides, where the ground rises in elevation. This site topography allowed creation of a separate at-grade entrance for UCEN students from Trinity Way.

Site-wide, 600mm-diameter continuous flight auger piles were installed on a 7-metre grid, going down approximately 15 metres from ground level to bedrock. Once pile caps and concrete ground beams were cast, assembly of the 1,700-tonne steel frame – some 15,000 elements – could begin.

The logistics were complex on this constrained site, with on-time delivery of structural steel and three mobile cranes working in parallel from one end of the building to the other. A tight 18-week programme for this part of the work was achieved with each crane lifting in around 30 steel elements every day.

The structure of the Jewel Box theatre also had to be assembled as part of this carefully planned sequence. A critical aspect of the frame construction was the erection of five 18-metre-long glulam beams that span the central atrium, and the ready-assembled cassettes for the three northlights in the roof.

Once the steel frame was sufficiently advanced, mast-climbers around the perimeter provided full-height access for the external wall construction. A total of 3,650 square metres of Corium cladding system required 250,000 brick slips, framing narrow floor-to-ceiling windows designed to deliver even lighting to the teaching rooms and studios.

The presence of the atrium and internal courtyard, with an oak-clad curtain wall and walkways that overlook the courtyard, demanded extensive internal access arrangement. A full-height scaffolding system was erected inside the atrium and around the theatre box, allowing installation of the theatre’s distinctive rose-gold stainless steel cladding, supplied by Rimex.

With such a range of different uses within a single building, including a library atop a theatre and recording studios alongside teaching spaces, the internal wall construction varies dramatically across the site, Baker says. Recording studios are being built as a “box within a box” for acoustic isolation, for example, and the 600mm-thick theatre walls feature a triple-layer construction.

Groundworks began in March 2020, Baker says, and while the timing was far from ideal, coinciding directly with the first COVID lockdown, the fact that staff were either confined alone in plant cabs or working in the open air was helpful, and allowed the site to adapt quickly with little impact on the overall programme.

One notable change was that the biometric site security system based on fingerprinting – which brought risks in terms of virus transmission – was swapped for a system based on facial recognition. When Construction News visited the site in January 2022, the industry-wide material and labour shortages were of greater concern, with regular revisions of work schedules necessary to keep things on track for a summer handover.

Willmott Dixon also provided construction and engineering scholarships for 12 local students, who have spent two years gaining valuable work experience on the site. An early example of learning taking place on the college site.