Architect
Stephenson Bell
Developer
Circa Life
Contractor
Not yet appointed
Planning Authority
Manchester City Council
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The Britannia Basin area of Manchester Castlefields already has several of the city's best recent apartment buildings (Burton Place, pages 12-15). Now the architects that helped make apartment living fashionable in Manchester a decade ago with projects such as Smithfield Buildings, a Housing Design Award winner in 1998, have played their hand.
The scheme is 216 apartments over a ground floor of retail in a pair of eight-storey apartment blocks. The larger, a C-shaped building wrapping a plaza and the smaller, a rectangle with a small interior courtyard. The C-shaped block is broken at ground floor level with a pedestrian route which leads into the private courtyard of the rectangular block.
The access is from Ellesmere Street which is also the access road to the Basin's other schemes but this site fronts the busy Chester Road to the south. The scheme responds by turning the majority of units to face west and east. So three mostly blank flank walls face the road, but their eight storeys are relieved by three double-height glazed units at each corner. Additional balconies to these duplexes are cantilevered off the flank walls.
The glazing is set between chunky precast floors and precast privacy screens acid etched to reflect the irregular pattern of the stone blockwork on the adjacent spire of a listed church, now also residential after conversion.
The solid balcony decks and privacy screens to flats staggered above each other form a bold geometric lattice which dissolves at the corners because of the frameless double-height glazing. The design suggests it will project the conceit more strongly again by night when these double-height spaces will be light-filled voids puncturing the blocks' dark flanks.
The same strong lattice design is intensified where the C-shaped block turns the corner onto Ellesmere Street and two facades of the lattice meet at the corner.