Timber Wharf by Howells with Urban Splash

Timber Wharf in Manchester was presented at the AT Awards live finals on 18 September 2024. Learn about how the project has stood the test of time.

Completed
2002

Designed by Howells for developer Urban Splash, Timber Wharf is a residential development located in Castlefield, Manchester. Fronting Britannia Basin, the nine-storey building comprises 180 apartments, together with a mix of cultural, retail and offices on the ground floor, as well as generous green and public realm spaces. While perhaps not immediately recognisable as housing, the robust masonry and glass structure complements the scale and nature of its industrial context.

The apartments include 2.65 metre-high ceilings, full-height internal doors, and shaded bedroom and living room balconies. Electric heating is provided throughout. A paired-back material palette provides residents with a neutral background, enabling them to create their own homes, and avoid the need for additional finishes.

Responding to a tight budget and the requirement for innovative construction techniques, the scheme was delivered using durable, high-quality, low-maintenance components, including bespoke glazing units, and an innovative precast concrete cross-wall structural system. The latter provides a high degree of flexibility, resulting in nine different apartment configurations.

Assembled on site in just eight months, the project has help transform a once derelict inner city neighbourhood into a thriving and integrated part of Manchester. It was Urban Splash’s first new-build project, and to date, still houses its head office.

Judges comments:
“Dubbed ‘The Barbican of the North’ by its residents, this well-crafted block could sit as easily on the Cote d’Azure as canal-side in Castlefield. In our modern world, where affordability, sustainability, MMC and city densification are so key, this building was 20 years ahead of its time.”

Glenn Howells from Howells and Tom Bloxham from Urban Splash explain how they applied lessons learnt from Victorian warehouses to make a new building that people will value for generations to come.

Tom Bloxham Before Timber Wharf we were doing refurbishments. There were loads of amazing old buildings in Manchester and Liverpool, but they’d been written off by the property industry. And we thoroughly enjoyed discovering them, buying them, converting them, using good architects, and celebrating their historic past. But by 2000, we’d started to think “that’s all great, but what would we need to do a building today that people will value in a 100 years’ time?” I’d bought this site over a number of years. It was alongside the canal but it was outside the inner ring road. It was an area that had never really been occupied until Urban Splash had come and done a couple of conversions and started to bring people back into the city centre. It was also canalside, and it was the first time people started to live back adjacent to the canal around the city centre. It’s incredible to believe now, but when we started, you could not buy a pint of milk or loaf of bread in Manchester city centre. Living here was very, very rare. And this was an important moment for Manchester, both to regenerate Castlefield, but also to pave the way and teach people and explain to people that living in the city centre wasn’t strange. It was a very normal thing to do and would become a very popular thing to do. We decided to go for a competition because we thought it’d be interesting to see what new architectural talent might be out there.

Glenn Howells We had a very small office at the time and we hadn’t been going for long. We were very excited to see this brief. We’d heard about Urban Splash. I think I’d even bumped into Tom because he’d come down to Birmingham to have a look at the Custard Factory, which was sort of groundbreaking in its day, in the early 2000s.

Tom Bloxham We persuaded Lord Richard Rogers to chair the judging panel, and we had a really high-profile jury. It was a blind brief, so we didn’t know who the architects were when we were judging it. We had over 100 entrants from all around the world who were, I think, excited by our idea of trying to do a new type of city centre living.

Glenn Howells Our response to the brief was to be bold and to be clear and simple, because the only way we could deliver the quality and the cost and the efficiency was to think about this not only as a design project, but also as a construction exercise. We didn’t know a lot about the construction of these sorts of buildings, so we spoke to lots of manufacturers and people who had been building in concrete for decades. And this led us to re-examine some of the older, early 20th century buildings, which are now legendary; the early modernist buildings, which were quite beautiful, but also bought a fresh approach to housing.

Tom Bloxham We wanted to work to as tight a budget as ever. And the main reason for that tight budget is that I really want to make very, very beautiful buildings that are as affordable to as many people as possible. And to do that, you need to buy the land very well, which we had already done, but you also need to build to a tight budget.

Glenn Howells We thought “if we’re going to deliver for this budget, how do we give the most for the least?” You can’t do it by designing something which has got layers and layers and layers and is inefficient. So we came up with a diagram, which was a very simple grid where the architecture was the structure and also the finishes and the acoustic and fire separation. That was the proposition that we presented to Urban Splash. I was surprised to get shortlisted. It was only three A1 boards and it was a complete lottery.

Tom Bloxham It’s easy to forget how radical this was at the time. Because if you wanted to buy a new home, everybody was doing exactly the same thing, which were typical house builder pastiche Victorian or Georgian or Edwardian detached houses on an estate. The only flats were those pastiche Georgian ones with three or four storeys. So certainly outside London, I was not aware of anything else that had been built at anywhere near this scale or anywhere near this rational and this simple. Today of course there are a number of buildings like this, which again is testimony to its success. But you can’t overstate how radical – how different – this was to anything else happening at the time.

Glenn Howells The diagram was set out on a six-metre grid because the concrete people said we could go further than a four-metre span, and if it’s six metres, you can get two bedrooms out of it. There was lots of discussion about how it was going to be built and the grid and the size and how it was put together. We came up with this arrangement where it was workplaces and duplexes on the lower floor, which then could enable the district to have other uses – to be shops, workspace or houses. And then the upper floors were a range of different sized homes from one-bed to two-bed to larger duplexes on the upper floors and on the corners. That construction-based approach informed the way we built the building. So it was a precast concrete frame. What you see is what you got. There were no decorations, there were no hidden bits on it. And then the structure; the walls that were six metre centers, it was a cross-wall structural system, which kept the floors held up and also gave you the acoustic and fire separation between the homes.

Tom Bloxham We loved the old warehouses because they were very, very functional buildings that were often built with as much input from engineers as from architects, with no decoration. But if you look at hundreds-of-years-old warehouses or railway stations, you can see that they have stood the test of time as well. And that was the same thing that we were trying to do, to make the building super rational by having the bare concrete walls. It’s a very high-quality concrete. It might cost a bit more, but you save the money on the decoration and the plaster. It was all about being a very honest building; not trying to hide anything with decoration. The more rational it becomes, the more affordable you can make it.

Glenn Howells It was delivered for around £600 pounds per square metre. And it was inherently lean, although that wasn’t a word we used at the time. It was a single authentic stick of rock. What you saw on the outside went all the way through to the inside. It used very little carbon. We’ve done some measurement on it, and it compares very well even to today’s standards. It was very flexible, like the buildings Tom had been involved in up until then, and it’s already changed its use on the lower floors and can continue to change its use.

Tom Bloxham We wanted to prove that good architecture doesn’t have to be expensive; that being modern is not exclusive; that we could make really great, modern, well-designed homes affordable to as many people as possible, which is what Urban Splash has always tried to do.

Glenn Howells We’ve spoken a lot about the outside and the construction, but just as important, if not more important, was creating homes that people would love to buy and to live in and spend their lives in. We developed a number of different house types, but on all of them we celebrated the finishes and the constructional approach of the building. The party walls were left naked as were the common parts. Every apartment gets an amazing balcony, many of them overlooking the canal. The residents are ferociously proud of the building. When the managing agents suggested it might be time to refresh some of the common parts there was a bit of an uproar from the residents who said, “No. This is Timber Wharf.”

Tom Bloxham Urban Splash have been here since it was finished, so I’ve been working in this office for 20 years. We’ve extended into some of the other units, and it’s served us really well. It’s a great showroom for Urban Splash and a good place to welcome colleagues and visitors.

Glenn Howells From the earliest days, I remember going to Urban Splash parties in the communal garden. It was a very messy space. There’s a residents’ society now, that has turned one part of the garden into a big sunny lawn and the quieter end into a community allotment where people grow vegetables. There’s an intranet where people announce which vegetables you can go and pick and it’s become home. That’s one of the most rewarding things, that it’s not just a project that stood the test of time, it’s become a home and a community for people who don’t want to leave.

Tom Bloxham In the summer it’s like a beach. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of people lying on the grass enjoying the sun, meeting each other, enjoying the community. And of course the Manchester sunshine, which is always there!

Glenn Howells Both Tom and I are delighted to have won the Test of Time award. In some ways it’s more exciting to win an award for something that’s been there for over 20 years because it shows that it works, not just that it was great on the day we handed over.

Tom Bloxham For us Timber Wharf is a very important project. This was an example of how you can make city centre living work; how it can be affordable; how it can be a great, green, place for people to enjoy. It was the first project we did with Howells, but we’ve gone on to work on many more projects, and gone on from doing single buildings like this to area-wide regeneration, but still with that same philosophy that we only want to build buildings which we’d like to live in or work in. And we want to work with our architects to squeeze every last ounce of beauty and pleasure and efficiency out of every plot.