Alumni Newsletter

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.
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