This project explores the University of Manchester campus as a locus of change and site of memory within the wider city. Based at the Manchester Institute for Education, the UK’s first Faculty of Education founded in 1913, it invites public submissions of photography which depict the university campus as a lived context. Residents of the city would be invited to submit their images alongside students, staff and alumni with a view to curating a rich visual tapestry of the campus as a site of social life. These will be supplemented with archival photography with an architectural focus in order to produce an interactive visualisation of the campus using the Data Visualisation Observatory based in Alliance Manchester Business School. 

This interactive map will be accessible to the public from June 7th to 9th during the festival, with a participatory experience designed to elicit memories and spark conversations about how the campus has been a site of their unfolding lives. These tours will be supplemented with a programme of events exploring the relationship between the university and the city. The photography will also be archived on the project website, with a view to maximising engagement with the outcomes of the project.  

Historical Context

It has been two hundred years since the Mechanics Institute was established at the Bridgewater Hotel in Manchester. This would later become the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) which would merge with the Victoria University of Manchester (2003) to become the University of Manchester. The university and the city have changed unrecognisably since then. Manchester is no longer the workshop of the world, with its dark satanic mills and ramshackle slums. Likewise the University is unrecognisable, spanning a huge campus which stretches southwards from Oxford Road. But those changes have been deeply interconnected. UMIST and Victoria University both played important roles within the region, contributing to its post-industrial transition and becoming hubs for the knowledge economy. This interconnection continues after their merger.

The campus itself is unusual in the degree to which it is integrated into the fabric of the city and bisected by major arterial roads into Manchester. Though Oxford Road has now been closed off to through traffic, creating a pedestrianised route through the heart of the campus. Even so campus buildings can be found on either side of some extremely busy roads. There are further changes coming, with the huge 1.7bn innovation district development by The University of Manchester and Bruntwood SciTech bound up in the post-pandemic transformation of the city, as Manchester becomes an increasingly politically and economically autonomous region. The university finds itself at the heart of these plans, realising a vision that builds upon two centuries of institutional history.

Full details about how to contribute coming soon. But please get in touch if this is something you might be interested in contributing to.