The student accommodation market has become one of the most competitive sectors in the entire property industry, attracting both institutional and international investors. While the universities themselves consider the quality of the flats and other campus facilities they offer as being a key means of helping to sell the courses they run.

Amongst the priorities for the design team and the main contractor was selecting a construction solution which would deliver a set of low-rise apartment buildings to a tight timetable and at an economic price. Appearance, long term durability and low maintenance requirements for the building exteriors were also equally important. 

Phase 1 of the £78m project for the Russell Group University involved the delivery of 1,122 study bedrooms arranged in cluster flats across eight new build blocks, along with high quality landscaping and external works. 

The Unsworth Park student accommodation development for the University of Manchester is an exemplar for the education sector: making extensive use of modern, offsite manufacturing to deliver high specification and comfortable living spaces to a tight timetable. The accommodation has also created an attractive environment through their form and the style of the buildings’ traditional brick elevations, with Wienerberger’s St Ives Cream Rustica bricks being selected by main contractor Vinci and lead consultant, MHA Architects, following the erection of several trial panels by specialist sub-contractor, Keith Walton Brickwork.

In particular, the St Ives Cream Rustica was chosen to bring cohesion to the completed development: the buff soft mud moulded stock brick, with its tumbled texture enhanced by traditional detailing, delivers a homely yet modern, premium feel.

While the buff-coloured St Ives Cream Rustica brick is the dominant material to the elevations, they are given extra visual interest by the inclusion of charcoal-coloured cladding elements beneath matching fibre cement slate roofs.  

Managing Director for Keith Walton Brickwork, Harry Clayton, commented: “Prior to our start on site at University of Manchester’s Fallowfield site, we had already constructed a number of trial panels for the project team to consider, while Vinci organised the supply of the bricks.

“The St Ives Cream Rustica is not only a high-quality facing brick, but it is also a good product to work with and the generally straightforward nature of the work made for very rapid rates of progress.”

Extra interest is given to the elevations by the inclusion of a double-stacked soldier course of the St Ives Cream Rustica bricks above each run of window heads, and some feature panels of projecting headers. All of the natural-coloured mortar was batched from a silo on site and was finished with a simple bucket-handle joint detail.

There was a total of 1.2 million bricks supplied by Wienerberger for the project including a small number of specials. To eliminate the chance of ‘patching’ due to variations in colour between batches, three packs of bricks at a time were mixed before being stacked for the bricklayers.  

Despite the scale of the contract and its logistical challenges, the brickwork package was completed on schedule and the entire project handed over in time for the arrival of new students for the start of the academic year. 

The combination of Keith Walton Brickwork’s technical skills and the aesthetic attributes of Wienerberger’s St Ives Cream Rustica bricks with their tumbled finish, helped make this development a worthy winner of the North England Best Student Accommodation Design Award in 2020.