The Toast Rack - Manchester Metropolitan University, Hollings Campus

If you drive out of the city centre along Oxford Street it becomes Oxford Road and then Wilmslow Road.  As Wilmslow Road passes through Rusholme you pass Platt Fields Park on your right and across the street from the park you will see a building that Sir Nikolaus Pevsner described as "a piece of pop architecture if I ever saw one".

The building in question is part of the Manchester Metropolitan University's Hollings Campus but when it was built in 1959 it was the new home of the Hollings Domestic and Trades College, which had been teaching cookery and domestic science in various incarnations since 1901.



The buildings were designed by City Architect L. C. Howitt who clearly had a sense of humour because in designing two buildings for a domestic science college he made one look like a toast rack and the other a fried egg. 



Pevsner says of the building that it exhibits "a large number of very closely set steep angled concrete piers looping over at the top as parabolic arches.  The floors, owing to this, decrease in depth from bottom to top ...  The staircase windows slint like the arches."






A lower extension at the rear of the building, seen above, was built to provide workshops.


Manchester Metropolitan University says this of the Hollings Campus,  "Hollings is world renowned for its teaching in clothing and fashion, food, hospitality and tourism management. It has excellent facilities and strong links with industry to help prepare graduates for a wide range of career opportunities.

Central to the Faculty's work is the close relationship it enjoys with professional bodies and the industries in which students find employment, both in the UK and abroad. This ensures that courses are both vocationally relevant and provides opportunities for industrial experience and work placements."

Manchester Metropolitan University operates seven campuses across Manchester and into Cheshire.  Its long term plan is to close some of its outlying campuses and concentrate its activities in an ever expanding All Saints Campus, in Hulme.  This plan would have seen MMU leave their Hollings Campus including the Toast Rack.  However, an article in the MEN's South Manchester Reporter on November 26, 2009, says this of the plan:

"But a move of the Hollings campus in Fallowfield is on ice until the university gets through its cash crisis.  MMU plans to create a £120m campus called Birley Fields in Hulme adjacent to its All Saints site off Oxford Road.  The site, due for completion in 2012 to 2013, had been planned to encompass all its Manchester campuses, including Didsbury, Hollings and Elizabeth Gaskell in Victoria Park.  But a shortfall in cash – including the loss of £10m in the Icelandic banking crash – means the university must make £8m in savings this year." ..... "MMU says it doesn’t know at the moment when it will be in a position to move the 3,500 Fallowfield students and shut down the iconic ‘Toast Rack’ building and Hollings campus."

 
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