The Manchester Conference Centre is a conference centre in Manchester, England that is owned and managed by the Opal Property Group. It has several locations, distributed over the campus of Manchester University. As the Weston Building it was originally built, owned and operated by UMIST.
When it was built in 1982, British universities had already become established in the conference market, providing large-scale facilities for conferences during university vacation down-time, and bringing in cash to help bridge the funding gap. The Manchester Conference Centre was built to appeal to the corporate market; the architecture is very modern, and all of its facilities were cutting-edge.
The Sackville complex was built in 1991, using the latest technology at the time. However, in some areas it is starting to look a bit dated by modern standards.
The lower foyer features one of the few Foucault's pendulums in the United Kingdom, but this particular pendulum is pushed by an electro-magnet and no longer demonstrates the turning of the earth, but remains as an interesting feature of the centre. Unaffected by this technicality, a brass plate still tells the history of the pendulum and describes the effect in detail.
In recent years, the 117 hotel bedrooms have been franchised to Days Inn as a Days Hotel which has seen further growth in its business as a premium budget city centre hotel. A great factor in its success is that it is within 300 m of the Manchester Piccadilly station, Manchester's main west coast station. Manchester has seen a vast increase in hotel build in recent years and competition has been very stiff in the city.
Famous quotes containing the words manchester, conference and/or centre:
“The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“Politics is still the man’s game. The women are allowed to do the chores, the dirty work, and now and then—but only occasionally—one is present at some secret conference or other. But it’s not the rule. They can go out and get the vote, if they can and will; they can collect money, they can be grateful for being permitted to work. But that is all.”
—Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)
“To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one’s fellow countrymen.... But to emigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)