Holy Name Church Digitisation Project

I have been working on a small but significant project to digitise and share some of the original architectural drawings and sketches for the Holy Name Church. 

The Church, which opened for worship in 1871, is an architectural icon on Oxford Road and is rightly a Grade 1 Listed building. But sadly I think it is also somewhat overlooked by busy scholars and students. Many people spend years at the University of Manchester - myself included - and pass by every day and never look inside nor consider its distinctive Gothic-inspired architectural design.

The architectural drawings shed new light on the design and the early history of the Holy Name including the unrealised plans for a tall lantern tower and spire.

There are more details on the project in this press release and you can browse all the digitalised images in this Flickr album. The enthusiastic support of the Church is gratefully acknowledged, including their willingness to release the images free online for wide public access.

The digital photography and scanning work on the delicate old drawings was expertly handled by Nick Scarle in the University's Cartographic Unit and logistical support was kindly provided by the SEED technicians in the Geography labs and the Architectural modelmaking workshop. 

Our exhibition, Making Post-war Manchester is ongoing and is being well attended. It also seems be attracting some positive comments on the twitter-sphere.

Here are a couple of pixs of the exhibition installation, courtesy of co-curator Jack Hale at the Manchester Modernist Society.

We also got a great feature for the exhibition in the Guardian newspapers on Monday. Journalst John Harris spent quite a while discussing the exhibition with us and did a good job at summarising some of our ideas in his 'Lost Horizons article'.

Making post-war Manchester: visions of an unmade city

Over the last few months I have been working on a exhibition about planned - but unrealised - urban changes in the 1960s for Manchester. Drawing upon a fascinating range of original sources, plans and architectural models we set out to consider how Manchester city centre could have been transformed if a number of large-scale commercial, educational and entertainment redevelopment schemes had come to pass. The exhibition emerged from an architectural studio project lead by Richard Brook with a talented group of Masters students, working in collaboration with Dr Kevin Tan (MMU computer science game design) and the Manchester Modernist Society.   

The outline pitch for the exhibition is as follows: "During the 1960s a vision of Manchester was being drawn up by property developers and town hall planners that only existed in architects drawings and consultant’s reports and was never realized in concrete and steel. Manchester was booming and vast swaths of the city centre were scheduled for redevelopment for entertainment, shopping, education, office complexes and transportation. But as with many masterplans, only portions of what was designed were actually built. In this exhibition, for the first time, visitors will be able to encounter the 'unmade city' - the masterplans as they were intended to be."

The exhibition opened last Friday and runs for the next three weeks. It has been installed in the glass-fronted foyer of the Manchester Technology Centre right on Oxford Road. This building was formerly known as the 'National Computing Centre' and is an interesting example of a 1960s post-industrial development that planners hoped would help transform the city (and the country). The exhibition site is also within sight of the elevated section of the Mancunian Way, another potent example of the 1960s agenda for radical urban transformation of the city through large-scale transport infrastructure.

Some more detail on the free exhibition is given on the Manchester Modernist Society events page. At the heart of the exhibition are a set of interactive models of unrealised 1960s era redevelopment schemes for five different sites created by the student teams (supported by Kevin Tan). These are presented in computer game environment that visitors can explore. In addition to these 3d digital models, the exhibition includes a series of large visual panels explaining the five redevelopment sites and the various possible architectural solutions that were advanced but unrealised. There is also a nice physical architectural model of planned Manchester Polytechnic development and a cabinet displaying some of the original planning reports and brochures from the 1960s. To accompany the exhibition there is a free 60-page print catalogue full of architectural pictures and historical plans. 

The production of the exhibition has been generously supported by architectural firms BDP and Hawkins\Brown. In particular, we are grateful to Bruntwood who have let us have the space in the Manchester Technology Centre for three weeks as well as funding support.

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Exhibition location: Oxford House, Manchester Technology Centre, Oxford Road, Manchester, M1 7ED.

General admission: June 6th - 24th, 9am to 6pm Monday to Friday (and Saturday 11th June).