Turn away from Manchester Piccadilly station and its crowds, head down quiet Altrincham Street, past the lads hanging around under the railway viaduct arches and in five minutes you’ll be in Vimto Park – named for the soft drink of indeterminate flavour first produced at a factory on the site in 1908 – beside the University of Manchester’s giant, empty Sackville Street Building, a mash-up of Edwardian terracotta and mid-20th-century extension.
At present, the campus of the former University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (Umist), merged into the University of Manchester in 2004, is a jumble of classic civic university architecture and classic 1960s modernist university tower blocks, bounded by the Mancunian Way – a classic, catastrophic 1960s city-centre elevated motorway.
But over the next 15 years, the plan is to turn the site into ID Manchester, a £1.7 billion project envisioned as “one of the world’s leading applied innovation districts”, with space for 10,000 workers. The scheme, a joint venture between the University of Manchester and specialist property developer Bruntwood SciTech, took a step forward last month when a strategic regeneration framework for the project was submitted to Manchester City Council.
Innovation districts built by partnerships between universities and companies – such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Kendall Square, which blends housing, retail, laboratories and research space – are in fashion.
