The Manchester College
CLIENT:
The Manchester College
PROJECT LOCATION:
Manchester | North West
PROJECT VALUE:
N/A
ARCHITECT:
N/A
PROJECT MANAGER:
N/A
CONTRACTOR
N/A
City Campus Manchester offers state-of-the-art facilities in the city centre, including a modern coffee shop and a 40-seat student-run restaurant and bar within the Industry Excellence Academy for Hospitality and Catering. Vision Commercial Kitchens worked closely with Willmott Dixon to design, specify and install the College’s foodservice facilities across multiple areas.
Multi-site brief across teaching and commercial spaces
Vision’s scope covered two training kitchens, a food court kitchen, ground-floor restaurant bar, student union bar, theatre bar and kitchen servery. The scale and diversity of the brief required extensive design coordination to meet teaching needs and service throughput.
Design solutions: ventilated ceiling and bespoke fabrication
In the bakery training kitchen, the room size and island layout led to a stainless-steel ventilated ceiling rather than individual canopies, delivering a cleaner aesthetic and future-proofing equipment positions. Across the training kitchens, Vision's design featured bespoke fabrication including two bespoke kitchen stations, several cooking islands and multiple prep runs.
Logistics, programme and post-handover training
Given the project size, Vision carefully coordinated deliveries—collating equipment by area at Vision’s warehouse and delivering each zone as it became ready for installation. Timings evolved during the build; Vision adapted to the new programme. After handover, training with a specialist development chef ensured a coherent approach for staff and students. All dates were achieved for a successful handover, with a satisfied client.
Testimonial
“The Manchester College have worked with Vision Commercial Kitchens over the past 3 years to deliver the refectory, cafe and training kitchens for our new City Campus together with a new cafe facility for our Openshaw campus. The design work for these facilities were developed in collaboration with our catering and curriculum teams and Vision were very adaptive and reactive to the teams requirements, including developing a number of options for layouts and equipment that could be considered by the teams prior to sign off. The site installation works were completed to a very high standard and have been operational since September 2022 with great feedback from both staff and students." — Niall Wright, Director of Estate Redevelopment, The Manchester College
“Working with Vision Commercial Kitchens on Manchester City Campus College was an enjoyable experience for ourselves and the wider design and customer team. Vision brought their knowledge and skill by collaboratively working with the whole team to develop the design, during installation until completion by problem solving, giving advice on buildability and bringing efficiencies to the design whilst delivering an amazing end product which the end users enjoy using." — Latifah McIntosh, Design Manager, Willmott Dixon Construction Limited
