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STOP THE PRESSES

Manchester’s Printworks gives publishing past star role

By Donna Mitchell

The Printworks, an entertainment center in Manchester, England, is built to encourage shoppers to look up at facades resembling local architecture.

From a design perspective, The Printworks retail and entertainment concept is about storytelling.

The 600,000-square-foot complex opened in November 2000 with swarming lights and a trove of special effects. Built on the old site of — and named for — the printing presses of several daily newspapers run by London-based Miller Group, The Printworks shopping center is the latest chapter in the revival of the city center of Manchester, in northern England. With a metro area population of 2.5 million, Manchester was at one time one of the country’s industrial nerve centers.

Architects from the Birmingham, United Kingdom, office of the U.S. architecture firm RTKL drew on the site’s publishing and Victorian history to influence The Printworks’ design and layout. The result is a center full of sensory theatrics that, when taken together, make The Printworks experience a narrative unto itself.

"We wanted to create a sense of … the magic of a show as people walked in. It should be a constantly evolving scene, like the scenes of a film," said David Gester, RTKL’s vice president and director of entertainment design.

The Printworks is unmistakably about entertainment. In fact, most of the complex’s anchors are entertainment spots: Less than 10% of the 380,000 square feet of leasable space is dedicated to traditional retail.

Anchors are The Hard Rock Cafe; Holmes Place — a health and fitness center; an innovative cinema complex called Thefilmworks; a comedy club called Tiger; and Books Etc., a U.K.-based subsidiary of Borders.

The concept combines its storytelling history with the draw of a metropolitan entertainment district. (Manchester has been home to some of the United Kingdom’s best-selling rock bands, including the Smiths, the Buzzcocks and Oasis.) Take The Printworks’ facade, which faces Manchester’s Exchange Square. It used to be part of the original printing press building of the Daily Mirror. In a telephone interview, Gester said RTKL kept it because it "was of such a quality of natural stone and design that we felt that we were unlikely to replicate it as cheaply and satisfactorily as simply keeping the original."

The facade is now illuminated with multicolored LED lighting and a 60-foot blue and orange neon guitar ushering hipsters into the Hard Rock Cafe. The outlet features a live music stage.

The designers carefully assembled pieces of Manchester’s publishing past into 600,000 square feet, overlaid it with cobblestones, and then capped it with an 82-foot ceiling. The interior streets — Mark Lane, Pump Yard and Balloon Lane — wind their way past tenant facades that are characteristically Manchester — or Mancunian, as locals say.

Passersby are given plenty of encouragement to look upward. That’s because the Mancunian facades begin at around 15 feet above ground level, allowing the tenants to present their own shop fronts, said Lee Richardson, director of Richardson Developments.

The private Birmingham company owns multiple property types, including retail, leisure, industrial and office developments. Richardson spent £50 million ($72.9 million) on renovating the old building and transforming it into The Printworks. "We came up with a history for the [interior] street and the 25 different buildings," Gester said of the tenant facades. "These are part of the story lines. It reflects the uses that used to go into [that site]."

That figurative history happens against the backdrop of buildings like "the Old Pressroom," and a so-called editorial building labeled Evening Chronicle. Gester’s team used real stone, glazed brick, steel and glass to match each building’s character. The "Old Press Room" is styled as a Victorian-style brick warehouse, and houses BB’s Muffins and Cakes and a Häagen-Dazs shop. The more glamorous Evening Chronicle building is decked out in 1920s-style black-and-white glazed brick. It houses Holmes Place.

However, the historic facades do not usurp the whole look of the shop fronts. "They are allowed to have their own shop fronts," Richardson said of the tenants.

Patrons also get treated to a further unfolding of The Printworks narrative. A constant stream of special effects offers urban humor and gives the impression of a district with a life all its own. Steam seeps into the street through manhole covers; an imaginary demolition crane casts the shadow of its pendulum and chain onto building walls; and every day a steam whistle sounds to signal the printing press run.

A grating embedded in the street is a throwback to the Marilyn Monroe film "The Seven Year Itch." Lights flicker through the grating, timed with a gush of air and the blare of an underground train.

"The whole idea was to add urban humor," Gester said. Passersby are brought in on the joke — as any Mancunian knows there is no underground rail system in the city or sewer workers roaming underneath Printworks’ manholes.

Gester’s team also included some lofty touches of urban life. A mock rail bridge rumbles with the sound of a make-believe train crossing nearly 60 feet above street level. More than 20 feet past the rail bridge is a ceiling with a huge projection screen. It teems with images of clouds, fireworks, falling leaves, and hot air balloons to name a few. RTKL designers call it a living ceiling.

"It’s meant to be just a little bit extra, a big effect that lasts intermittently," Gester said. "It’s not supposed to be television, engaging people for a long time to stop and watch." Gester’s team spent months researching Manchester’s past. They surveyed and photographed the streets, skylines, and signage to reproduce an area loaded with Mancunian effects.

As it turns out, keeping the old external structure of The Printworks resulted from a bag of mixed fortunes. In 1996, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) devastated Manchester’s city center with a 3,300-pound bomb. The bombing exacerbated Manchester’s depressed economic situation, as its heavy industry-based economy had evaporated years before. The facade was left standing, though.

"Land values were quite depressed, and allowed us to do an urban entertainment center on an urban square," said Gester, noting that the master plan targeted that area for such a project.

But for all the urban effects and historical references, The Printworks is about entertainment. It is a place to have fun, said Gester.

"We’ve created an idyllic background that is comfortable and does not detract from the bigger importance, which is the units," he said.

One of the complex’s showpieces is a huge UCI cinema. Its entrance is right across the way from Cromwell’s Madhouse. Branded Thefilmworks, the cinema is packed with 4,500 seats in total and a 400-seat IMAX theatre. And in keeping with the spirit of a print works premise, there is a big Daily Dispatch sign across the top of its smooth concrete entrance. Thefilmworks is UCI’s largest cinema, and the IMAX screen is the second-largest in the United Kingdom. UCI is a joint venture between Universal Studios and Paramount.

The theater includes UCI’s trademark luxury balcony section called The Gallery, where patrons can take in a screening from the comfort of sofa-style double seats. Each seat is equipped with a built-in wine cooler and more than three feet of legroom. The Gallery package includes admittance to an exclusive bar with a variety of free refreshments, according to UCI’s Web site.

Architects are known to vigilantly steer away from the increasingly garish look of cinema complexes. To do that, RTKL decided to expose some of the structure of the building. The firm included wood and glass to complement the exposed concrete and steel. Specifically, the use of brick in the ground floor is a direct reference to the history of The Printworks building, explained RTKL associate Rupert Plumpton, who was senior designer of Thefilmworks.

"We wanted to hint at past uses of the cinema part of that building," Plumpton said. Plumpton blended all the elements that make up a cinema — the box office, signage and canopies — with deliberately contrasting vibrant colors, lighting and contemporary materials.

Some look at The Printworks as one of the final touches to Manchester’s rebuilding process after the IRA devastation.

"This area of Manchester has now got all the content that one would associate with what a city should have, and that Manchester was losing," Gester said.

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