The Mabel Tylecote
Building used to accupy the corner of Oxford Road and
Cavendish Street. It was built in 1973 to a design
by the City Architect's Department as a college for
adult education but was adopted by MMU in 1991. It
was named in honour of
Dr Dame Mabel Tylecote, Labour Party politician,
Manchester City Councillor and advocate for adult
education.
The MMU website explained that the Tylecote Building
"...
houses the Languages Resource Centre,
for individual and group teaching and learning,
including specialist facilities for viewing
international satellite TV, video-conferencing and a
large collection of audio, video and computer
material for individual study at all levels in
Arabic, Chinese, English as a Foreign Language,
French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Urdu.
Mabel Tylecote’s new learning zone features four
group work rooms and computing facilities including
new PCs, iMacs, up-to-date creative and business
software, network-attached printing and scanning
devices and Wi-Fi access." The building was
also home to the Capitol Theatre, the performance space
for the university's drama students within the Faculty
of Art and Design.
The School of Theatre started life as the drama
department of the Northern School of Music in the
1960s. It became part of MMU in 1970 and at that
time their performance space was a former ABC cinema in
Didsbury called the Capitol Building. The School
of Theatre moved to the All Saints Campus in 1998 and
set up home in the Mabel Tylecote Building.
When the Corner House Arts Centre moved in 2016 to their
new building called Home, MMU moved their School of
Theatre, Filmaking, Multimedia, Journalism, Creative
Writing, Languages and their public engagement
programme, Humanities in Public from Mabel Tylecote into
the building they renamed as 70 Oxford Street.
This would be a temporary move because it was their
intention to demolish the Mabel Tylecote Building and
replace it with what they described as,
"... a
stunning new University Arts and Cultural Hub that
is planned to open in September 2018. "
**********************
When I visited the building in March of 2017, the
process of demolishing the building was well underway.
The old building had incorporated the facade of the
former Chorlton-on-Medlock Townhall, designed by Richard
Lane. As you can see below, that facade has been
extracted from the Mabel Tylecote Building and secured
so that it can be integrated into the new building when
it is erected.
Update August 2018
***********************
In 1844 the foundation stone was
laid for St Andrew's Free Church of Scotland on this
corner of Oxford Road and Cavendish Street.
The church was designed by Edward Walters, famous in
Manchester for The Free Trade Hall. Walters
also designed the Sunday School located beside St.
Andrews.
The "Stranger's Guide To
Manchester, 1850" says that,
"... the cost of
erecting St. Andrews was about £1700. The
interior is neatly fitted up; the body of the
church will hold 600, and the galleries 400. The
dimensions of the interior are 80 feet by 48."
The church was still there when the aerial
photograph below was taken on the 13th of May,
1953. It is indicated by the red arrow.
I haven't been able to
discover when the church closed as a place of
worship, but clearly at some point it was
transformed into commercial premises owned by
the Singer Sewing Machine company. If you
click on the links below you can see two images
of the building in 1958 on the Manchester
Central Library website (as long as the
site is available).
Prior to the construction
of the Mable Tylecote Building, the church,
adjacent buildings on Oxford Road and most of
the Chorlton-on-Medlock Townhall (next door on
Cavendish Street) were demolished to make way
for the new building.
