Manchester Memories

By the nature of this blog, many of the places featured here I am unable to visit but others are all too familiar to me. Today's post is the latter.
I was a student a Manchester University in the mid 1990s. If you're  expecting tales of drugged fuelled nights at the Hacienda then I'm sorry to disappoint you, I never went and I never did drugs either. I did get thrown out of the Paradise Factory though for following some friends through a side door as I didn't realise they were trying to sneak in without paying, oh and I once saw Dawn Acton in Jilly's Rockworld but perhaps those stories are better for if I ever cards of those particular nightspots.
I digress, today's subject matters were seen nearly every day by me for three years.  The first card is the Manchester Mathematics tower. I never had lectures here ( I studied languages) but I do remember taking a couple of exams here and finding the room labelling rather confusing. There was an urban legend that the tower had accidentally been built upside down and I can almost believe it. Like most students I tended to use the maths tower as a landmark, especially in the early days when I was new to the city. Its instantly recognisable shape probably aided many a poor student to navigate the city. I know if I saw the tower I knew I was nearly home.
The Mathematics Tower was constructed in 1968 in a modernist-brutalist style by local architecture firm Scherrer and Hicks. It was in use until merger of UMIST and The Victoria University of Manchester in 2004. It was deemed unfit for purpose and demolished the following year.  It was replaced by the Alan Turing Building in 2007. The postcard isn't dated but I've seen a similar picture in the University archive and that is from 1972 which seems accurate for the card.

The next card is of Moberly Tower and the Refectory, now I never stepped foot in Moberly Tower but I did use the refectory quite a bit and enjoyed their fish and chips and hot chocolate.  The Tower was built in 1963 and named after Walter Moberly who was Vice-Chancellor of The University between 1926 and 1934. I don't know if the refectory was built at the same time. It outlasted the Mathematics Tower by 5 years being demolished in 2010 and replaced  by the Alan Gilbert Learning Commons.  The card was sent in 1966.

Regarding the structures, now I'm the kind of person who can see beauty in most buildings but even I struggle to call The Mathematics Tower and especially Moberly Tower attractive , but I do think a refirb would have been preferable to total destruction. The towers were symbolic, and evocative for those of us of a certain age and instantly bring to mind more carefree and idealistic days .  The Maths Tower can even be seen in my graduation photographs. I visited Manchester University a few years ago as part of an alumni event and I shocked to see so few buildings I recognised (my halls of residence have also been destroyed). A lot of my memories are tied up in the look and feel of the place and I found it quite disorientating being among a mixture of the familiar and new. I almost felt as if my memories had never been real or had also been destroyed.
For those who want to see the destruction of the tower, pictures can be viewed here. As you'll see not everyone is as sentimental about the place as I am.
https://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=254283

The Planes, The Planes

I thought I would show something quite modern, by my standards, for today .

This card was sent to me in 2002 by my brother and was issued to commemorate the Commonwealth Games which were held in Manchester that year.

Just to show how quickly things change, only one of the airlines depicted on the card, British Airways, exists under that name today.
The other three, Air 2000, Britannia and bmi have all merged into other airlines.

Air 2000 had the shortest run, operating between 1987 and 2004 before being merged with First Choice Holidays in 2008 and later with Thomsonfly to create Thomson Airways. The aeroplane on the card is an Airbus A321.

Britannia Airways was once the largest chartered airlines n the UK. It was founded in 1961 as Euravia and was renamed Britannia in 1964. It is probably best remembered in the UK as being the subject of a docusoap, ubiquitous in the 1990s, in 1998 called Airline. In 2005 it was rebranded as Thomsonfly which as we saw above eventually became Thomson Airways.

British Midland International (bmi) has the longest history of the airlines featured and operated under a number of names during its lifespan. Founded in 1938 as Air Schools Limited, as a school for training pilots, it changed its name to bmi in 1964.
The airline had two subsidiaries, bmibaby which is also defunct and BMI Regional which is still operating in the UK and Europe.
BMI itself was integrated into British Airways in 2012.