Extension: Ashburne Hall of Residence, Fallowfield

When opened this was the largest of the halls of residence for women students at Manchester University. The site, bounded by Wilmslow Road, Old Hall Lane and Whitworth Lane had been the home of the Behrens family. The original house had been converted for 20 students and in 1910 the “Mary Worthington Wing” had been built for a further 40 students (architect P S Worthington). Further expansion had been delayed by the First World War and it was not until 1925 that the central block with hall library and kitchens and a wing for 60 students were opened.

AN ARCHITECTURAL OASIS - Ashburne Hall, to be opened today by the Duchess of Atholl comes as a surprise as one approaches its site along the Wilmslow Road. One appears to be in a neighbourhood of Victorian plaster splendour, perhaps a little decayed. Large houses with spacious lofty rooms and great windows sit back, not without dignity, among their lawns and laurels. Their scale is prodigious. These houses may not possess any great number of rooms, though there is probably a warren of servants’ bedrooms tucked away under the slates, yet they suggest an amplitude of life and a domestic machinery almost incomprehensible in these servantless days. I am told that this district of Fallowfield is the home of Manchester’s intelligentsia. One hopes that it is, for spacious thoughts should certainly arise from such spacious surroundings, though one feels a little sorry for the wives who have to direct the domestic machine.

Into this more solid and respectable St John’s Wood district has crept a great Cotswold farmhouse. Certainly the walls are not of Cotswold stone, but of a beautiful warm brick, and the roofs are not of Gloucestershire split stones but of variegated grey slate. Still the general form is the gabled farm of that countryside, and makes as strong a contrast with the urban civilities of the neighbourhood as its warm colours do with the greys and buffs of the surrounding plaster. Ne may ask how far anyone is justified in changing the character of an established district. It is a challenging thing to do. Perhaps the answer is: if one does it on a large enough scale. In a great town like Manchester it may be worthwhile, with the real country so far away and every day receding, to make little oases of country in the middle of the town. One knows the dismal failure of trying to do this with small parks and recreation grounds, at any rate as usually conceived. Here, however, is a new way. A group of country buildings, if large enough, produces its own atmosphere. Ashburne Hall, even as it is today, is a very large group, but some day it is to have two more wings, and then there is to be behind it the great quadrangles of the collegiate buildings for the new Manchester Grammar School, all by the same skilled architects. The oasis so formed will be a very considerable one. It will have a unity and character of its own. One will be able to visit it and forget Manchester, or wake up and feel that this is the true Manchester finding itself again at the end of the industrial era.

The first glimpse one gets of something new and beautiful and strange enough in this place are of two gate posts of rich South Country brickwork. Crowned with urns and enclosing a really fine wrought iron gate. This gate, I am told, has been hammered out by a local craftsman working in Salford, of the name of Hart; all honour to him that he can carry out his beautiful craft in Manchester. May the oasis provide him with further opportunities! Through this gate one sees for the first time across a long stretch of grass a very stately brick building with two tiers of tall, white barred windows. There is a glimpse of water in front of it. It looks like some Dutch palace shyly retiring as far as it can from its plaster neighbours, (joining a little closer though, one sees that it is a centre feature, solid and sedate, holding together two long picturesque wings of delightful farmhouse building. If one enters it by the centre door – and all the surroundings seem so friendly and inviting that one is tempted to – one finds that one steps at once into a quiet and charming library, a long low room with a bookcase recess at either end. It is the most inviting modern library I have seen. As in all libraries where one really reads, the books give the texture and colour to the room. They are there to be touched and taken down, with no glass or librarian imps to restrain one. Here they have their richness enhanced by contrast with the plain unvarnished oak between them until they seem more lovable than ever. Happy the sweet girl graduates of Manchester who have such a library for daily use. But one must on. In doing so one crosses a fine broad corridor, divided into bays, each with its own niche, and cunningly lit at night by lamps which are concealed by the cross beams to the staircase. This staircase is both noble and restful. One can walk up to dinner with the dignity that dining in hall demands. It is lit by one long window in the curved side facing the stair, and above is a shallow dome. Architecture depends on fine shapes finely disposed. Here it possesses them to a very satisfying degree, and, possessing them, required no bush – that is to say, no added ornament.

From the stair one passes into the great hall. It is a great hall. How difficult it is to make a great hall in plaster without the advantage of stone walls or carved open timber roof, and yet not make it the common concert hall or kinema, only the architect knows. Here it has been done. I think the secret of its dignity lies chiefly in the great deep piers between the five big windows. There is nothing skimped about these piers. They must be five feet thick at least, and deep enough to give somewhat the effect of the piers in the great hall at Fontainebleau. At the end is an oak panelled raised recess between two fine white Doric columns for the high table. This recess, which could be used for plays, is lit with concealed lights. The dons can dine there like gods in their Valhalla and the undergraduates can be duly impressed. This great hall is very simply decorated in a burnt sienna tone with white lines to the panels and rich orange curtains to the windows. Though no cheap room at any time, this hall would not compare in cost to that of an Oxford or Cambridge college: yet to my thinking it is as satisfying. Once again architecture is an affair of proportion, and that is a gift the gods do not give to every architect. For the rest, this great building consists of some sixty or more sets of undergraduate rooms, each very simply designed, but with all that is necessary for comfort and for work. Whether the architects have been responsible, or not, for the furnishings of them I do not know, but it seems to me to have been carried out with exceptional skill. Indeed, if one may stretch the metaphor, the oasis is complete internally as externally [Professor C H Reilly, Manchester Guardian 20 May 1925 page 11]

THE NEW EXTENSIONS AT ASHBURNE HALL – The extension at Ashburne Hall is not quite complete but the interior of the new building is virtually finished except for the library. The extension consists of three brick buildings in a long continuous line running parallel with the Wilmslow Road and facing westward towards it. … The official opening of the new buildings by the Duchess of Atholl has been set for 20 May, by which time the Barlow memorial gates will have been set up to make a central approach from the Wilmslow Road. …. Only two of the three brick buildings are new. Of the two disposed symmetrically on the flanks of the third and tallest, the one to the north was built and occupied fourteen years ago. At that time there was no intention of prolonging the line to the south, and this latest extension has therefore involved a radical departure from their earlier plans by the architects, Messrs Thomas Worthington and Sons, of Manchester. … The outer wings consist mainly of small rooms which are at once study and bedroom, one for each woman student. In the Mary Worthington building, as the older wing is called, there are forty of these rooms; in the new Ward building there are sixty. In the centre block are the dining-room on the first floor, the senior common room behind it – there are other common rooms in the wings at either end – and on the ground floor is the library, with built-in shelving on every side and low bookcases projecting at right angles from the walls, which is to house the books bequeathed to the University by Lord Morley. The architecture is at once dignified and intimate, appropriate to the life of a little community in its charming clean-cut simplicity. The woodwork is all of oak, and the floors are of polished wood, except for the red tile floors of the kitchen and servery. The interior fittings, even to the oak tables in the dining room, have all been designed by the architects.

It is fitting that this dining hall, which will accommodate 200 at meal-times, should be the most considerable room of all, for it is the real centre of the communal life of Ashburne Hall. It has been in use since the New Year, and at present is the meeting place for some 130 students thrice a day. With its polished floor it is also admirably adapted for dances; and the platform on which stands the high table at one end of the hall serves equally well for concerts and dramatic performances. The end of the hall is framed in fluted columns and panelled in oak; the windows can be hidden by oak shutters which conform to the rest of the panelling, and a door through the panelling at one corner serves at once for the waitresses who wait on the diners at the high table and the entrances and exits of the performers in amateur theatricals. The rest of the hall is of a glorious spaciousness. It is lit in daytime by six tall windows in deep embrasures, and at night, when the apricot velvet curtains are drawn, by chandeliers of bronze. The roof is cream and white, with delicately modelled beading of oak leaves and acorns, and the walls are panelled in a grey rough-cast, relieved with white lines. The dining room is approached by a splendid white staircase, lit by another tall window on the half landing. The senior common room behind the dining-hall is notable for the fine simplicity of its fireplace of black and green marble, which is surrounded by oak panelling that is continued by bookshelves on either side. Just as effective in its own way is the smaller common room in the Ward building, with its fireplace surrounded by glass tiles in delicate colour, and surmounted by a little niche in which stands a tiny porcelain figure, the gift of the architects. [Manchester Guardian 25 March 1925 p10]

Reference    Manchester Guardian 25 March 1925 page 10,  photographs:  dining hall and senior common room
Reference    Manchester City News 21 March 1925
Reference    Manchester Guardian 20 May 1925 page 7 - photographs
Reference    Manchester Guardian 20 May 1925 page 11 - Professor Reilly
Reference    Manchester Guardian 21 May 1925 page 13- opening
Reference    Architectural Review Volume 58 October 1925 page 138-147 with photos and plans