Showroom will polish up into university offices
A FORMER car showroom known for selling Jaguars and Land Rovers is set to be converted into ‘short-to medium term’ office space by Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU).
The university has been granted permission to transform the vacant Williams building on Birchall Way in Hulme, which spans 16,400 sq ft, into temporary office space.
The space will be used by MMU’s estates and facilities department, which is currently housed in the university’s John Dalton West and All Saints buildings in the city centre.
According to planning proposals approved by Manchester council, the building will also be used as a temporary storage space for campus furniture being moved from buildings under redevelopment.
Overlooking Princess Parkway, the building was used as a Williams showroom from 1999 until 2019 when the company moved around 240 staff to its new £41m facility in TraffordCity.
Proposals for the Birchall Way site indicate that when the departments are permanently rehoused, the former showroom site will be redeveloped as part of MMU’s property portfolio in the Oxford Road Corridor.
According to the ‘Oxford Road Corridor Strategic Regeneration Framework Guidance,’ published by Deloitte in September 2019, the former showroom building is part of a wider stretch of land on Birchall Way consisting of a large area of surface car parking.
The car parking space has been identified as a potential ‘longerterm development opportunity.’
Development has been reserved for academic expansion, commercial uses and/or residential uses that aim to ‘add to the creation of a balanced mix of residential development within the Hulme area.’
As per Manchester council’s ‘Core Strategy’ policy, 20pc of any residential development on the site must contribute towards affordable housing. The Birchall Way site is located near to MMU’s Oxford Road site and its Birley Fields campus, home to the Faculty of Education and the Faculty of Health, Psychology and Social Care, which opened in 2014. A new 130,000 sq ft student residential scheme at Birley Fields is in development and is due to be complete in spring 2021.