A planning row has rumbled on this summer – featuring a cycle lane, exodus from Fallowfield, and an obscure 1996 documentCambridge Halls opened in 1998, but are not popular anymore, MMU says(Image: STEVE ALLEN)

It seemed like a great idea: Demolish some ageing 1990s university halls that students dislike and replace them with ‘state-of-the-art’ en-suite bedrooms.

But when Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) announced plans to knock down Cambridge Halls and replace them with 24-storey and 30-storey skyscrapers to add more than 1,500 rooms to the area, in January, it kick-started a row which ultimately rumbled on until the end of summer.

It had solid thinking behind it: Manchester ‘has the lowest student-to-bedroom ratio in the country’, MMU says, and Manchester council has a strategy to encourage students to live in-and-around Oxford Road.

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Data suggests students like city centre living. In the four years from 2018, the number of students living in their typical Fallowfield heartland dropped by a fifth, according to council figures. In a similar timeframe, between 2016 and 2022, 42pc more students moved to town.

It’s giving private developers like Vita confidence to invest in purpose-built student accommodation in town, with its ‘Plot 9B’ project securing planning permission for 861 bedrooms near First Street.

So the prospect of MMU building lots more student rooms in an area dominated by students seems to make perfect sense in that context, as its director of campus services, Stephen Bloye argued in a crunch town hall meeting where councillors discussed giving planning permission to the redevelopment.

How the new blocks will look once completed(Image: Cartwright Pickard)

“We’re proposing just over 2,300 ensuite rooms to meet future demand,” said Mr Bloye. “It helps solve Manchester student bedroom shortage building in an established student residential location.”

The existing Cambridge Halls, built in 1998, are ‘only filled up every year because of the shortage of bedrooms in Manchester’, he added, with ‘students telling us loud and clear they want quality ensuite accommodation, and are willing to pay a little bit more within reason’ — so the prospect of new facilities should be a win-win for city and student.

And yet, the plans caused a big row.

It began a few weeks after their unveiling, when pro-cycling and pedestrian pressure group Walk Ride Greater Manchester said a 1996 ‘stopping order’, only gave MMU permission to close Cavendish Street in Cambridge Halls’ construction on the condition it ‘shall provide a new highway which shall be a footpath/cycleway along the route’.

How the new towers could look when viewed from All Saints Park(Image: Pickard Cartwright for MMU/Unite Students via planning documents)

Planning documents showed the building was set to cover Cavendish Street, and after Active Travel England also listed concerns, MMU changed its plans so ‘the route would continue to function as pedestrian and cycle route with improvements to the space, including seating and planting’, a council report said.

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Even as planning permission was being debated, Hulme councillor Lee-Ann Igbon hit out at MMU as being ‘very challenging to work with’.

“It has been very, very taxing,” the Labour councillor said. “We have got access around the city as we improve active travel.”

Although she praised the planned accommodation as ‘brilliant’, Coun Igbon sounded a warning to management: “We do not want to keep coming into battles about things that could have been listened to earlier.

“I just want MMU to commit to working with councillors and the [council’s] neighborhood team to give more to the community. What are they going to do for existing community facilities?”

Although the planning committee unanimously voted to give MMU permission to bulldoze and build, it only came after differences were worked out outside the council chamber.