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Taking a step back in time… Elegant. Stylish. Incredibly ugly. These are just a few of the words used to describe the old Mathematics Building, or ‘Maths Tower’ as it was informally known. Regardless of divided opinion, memories of this building are vivid, nostalgic and often humorous within all minds that studied here. I went on a journey to find out more about the iconic tower that soared above the Manchester skyline, and the incredible story (and people) behind it... Masterplans The idea for the Maths Tower was first conceived as part of a wider post-war vision for The Victoria University of Manchester. In 1949, the ‘Manchester Plan’ was announced to reconfigure all Higher Education institutions into some form of order. This idea for a wholesale reconstruction of the city was similar to projects that took place after war devastation in London and Coventry. Unfortunately the plan was never realised at this time. However, 20 years later, in the 1960’s, a new push for change came in the form of the University’s major building project, ‘The Manchester Education Precinct’. The project involved a thorough (and visionary) plan to totally reinvent a number of key institutions along the Oxford Road corridor, including The University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) on Sackville Street, various colleges that merged to form Manchester Metropolitan University, and The Victoria University of Manchester. By Jenny Sloan Above: The Maths Tower courtesy of Professor Nick Higham. The plan would also involve the creation of a new commercial Precinct Centre, which would serve as a busy commercial hub with shops, cafes and outdoor dining areas. An architectural trend at the time was to have elevated walkways in the expressionist brutalist fashion of the time. Architects of the Tower, Scherer and Hicks, envisioned that the Maths Tower would be well connected to the Precinct (as well as The Royal College of Music and students’ Halls of Residence) via these pathways. Above: Artist’s impression of the Precinct Centre, with the Maths Tower looming in the distance, as provided by Dr. James Hopkins, Heritage Manager at The University of Manchester. In reality, however, only two of these walkways were actually built; one connecting the Precinct Centre to the Royal College of Music, and another leading to the main entrance of the Maths Tower. Indeed, the remains of the latter can still be found today, on the bridge of Crawford House, on Booth Street East. Left: One of the walkways , which ran through the Precinct Centre, that connected the Maths Tower to the Kilburn Building. 6
Building of the Tower The Maths Tower, built 1967-68, was the first building to be erected after ’The Manchester Education Precinct’ was published. Standing at 18-storeys high on top of a three storey podium (which contained three lecture theatres and several teaching spaces), the Maths Tower in fact still remains the tallest of all University buildings, past and present. It was praised in architectural press as an ‘elegant’ construction of ‘grace and scale’ that was ‘optimistically conceived and heroically realised’. The Tower was often illuminated at night, resting on the University skyline as a lighthouse watching over the city. Indeed, its rather artistic albeit unusual architectural features, such as a triangular staircase, were loved by many of its residents. It was even heralded by John Reade (a lecturer at the time) as a selling point for ‘eager sixth formers’ who ‘gaped at the sixties chic and must have seen themselves in a James Bond movie’. Both structurally and aesthetically, the praise for the Tower seems almost poetic; The exterior is a bundle of cubic shapes, all of different heights, folding around each other, rising and dropping away, seemingly at random. The slender verticality of the Tower has horizontal counterpoints. Indeed, it was an architecturally great building, with its darkcoloured brick forming a vivid juxtaposition with the glass and light grey mosaic tiles. It housed over 450 undergraduates, 75 postgraduate and research students and 60 academic staff, all within the Departments of Mathematics and the Mechanics of Fluids. There were two lifts in the building that were built to move at 350 feet per minute. The gross floor area of the building was 102,775 square feet. Above: A postcard from the 1970s illustrating the Maths Tower and the Kilburn Building. Right: Photo of the Maths Tower taken by Andrew Hamer on 29th June 1993. The original plan was to surround the Tower with grass, as a leafy oasis for weary academics. Extra efforts were made by the architects to reduce sound emission from bypassing traffic, including the omission of windows in each of the three large lecture theatres. 7
Page 1 and 2: Alumni Newsletter THE SCHOOL OF MAT
Page 3 and 4: New Members of Staff After completi
Page 5: Science The new 2016 Extravaganza M
Page 9 and 10: Nevertheless, the demolition of the
Page 11 and 12: Your Maths Tower Memories I was at
Page 13 and 14: The Padlock Icon and a Million Doll
Page 15 and 16: Interview with an Alumnus By Jenny
Page 17 and 18: Jack Williams (1943-2015) Jack Will
Page 19 and 20: All aboard for Mathematics! Alumnus
Page 21 and 22: ongoing efforts to ensure that we p
Page 23 and 24: Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw Lecture 2
Page 25 and 26: Einstein's theory of relativity mea

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