THE MANCHESTER COLLEGE
The new Manchester College campus, named City Campus Manchester, is located in the City Centre, offering state-of-the-art facilities. Their foodservice facilities include a modern coffee shop, a 40-seat restaurant and bar run by students in an Industry Excellence Academy for Hospitality and Catering. Vision worked closely with the Main Contractor, Willmott Dixon throughout the project.
OUR WORK
Vision's brief for the project was for 2 training kitchens, food court kitchen, ground floor restaurant bar, student union bar, theatre bar and kitchen servery. As this was a large project with multiple areas, it required an extensive amount of design work. Due to the size of the room and the layout of the cooking islands in the bakery training kitchen, the ceiling was designed to be a stainless-steel ventilated ceiling, this gave it a much neater, aesthetically pleasing look compared to having individual canopies over each piece of equipment. This also futureproofs the equipment as it's not restricted as to where the equipment sits. Our design in the training kitchens featured bespoke fabrication, including 2 bespoke kitchen stations, several cooking islands and several prep runs.
OUR WORK
Due to the scale of the project, there was a lot of coordination involved from both a design and project management perspective. Delivery to site had to be carefully coordinated, including collating all required equipment at Vision's warehouse into the specific areas that they would need to be installed into and delivering this section all at once, as and when each area was ready for installation. Due to the complexities of such a large project, it was inevitable that timings could be changed, and Vision had to adapt to meet new timings. After handover, Vision arranged training by a specialist development chef to provide a coherent approach to training.
This extensive project was completed with all dates achieved at 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
TESTIMONIAL
"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
