page_title: Didsbury Campus
section_title: Early history: 1465–1946
hierarchical_section_title: Didsbury Campus / History / Early history: 1465–1946
caption_attribution_description: English: The library at Didsbury College, 1911. This building was formerly the chapel, and it is grade II listed.
context_page_description: The Didsbury Campus on Wilmslow Road, Didsbury, Manchester, England, originally a private estate, was part of the Manchester Metropolitan University; the oldest building on the site dated to around 1785. It became a theological college for the Wesleyan Methodist Church in 1842, about the same time as a chapel which later became part of the college was built. These buildings are now all listed.
  In 1946, in response to a growing need for new teachers across the country, the site became a temporary teacher training college, becoming permanent in 1950. Over the next thirty years there was a significant building programme, with classrooms, lecture theatres, offices, sports facilities and a library all being constructed. The college became a part of Manchester Polytechnic in 1977. In 2005, the campus became home to the Science Learning Centre North West.
  The university closed the campus in 2014, sold the land to developers, and moved its facilities to a new purpose-built campus named Birley Fields in Hulme. All the buildings constructed after the Second World War were then demolished, with only the listed buildings remaining.
context_section_description: According to local historian Diana Leitch, the site has been in use since 1465; the first house was built in 1603 as part of a large estate with a deer park. In 1740 the site was purchased by the Broome family, and a new house was constructed after 1785 by William Broome, extant today as the front part of the university's former administration building, now known as Sandhurst House. By 1812 the house was occupied by a Colonel Parker, and in the 1820s and '30s it was a girls' school. The site was purchased by the Wesleyan Methodist Church on 18 March 1841 for £2,000, and opened as a theological college on 22 September 1842 with a special service. The construction and later renovations were paid for from a centenary fund, an initiative started ten years previously by the Methodist scholar Adam Clarke.
  To the south of the main house, the Methodist owners constructed a chapel that could hold 300 worshippers, along with accommodation for staff. This was later dubbed the Old Pump House. In 1866 the main house was extended by the addition of two wings and a back to form a quadrangle, and the front was reclad in Kerridge stone. In 1877 a new church was built to serve the college, the large Victorian Gothic St Paul's Methodist Church, on an adjacent site, and the chapel became the college library and lecture theatre. By the end of the nineteenth century Didsbury had become a branch of a national Wesleyan Theological Institution, along with Wesley College, Headingley, in Leeds and Handsworth College in Birmingham. The first president of the Institute was Jabez Bunting; John Hannah was among the first tutors.
  During both world wars the site was used as a military hospital, with up to 200 beds and more than 5000 patients receiving treatment between 1941 and 1945. In 1943 the Board of Education had begun to consider the future of education, following reforms that would inevitably come after the war ended. It was estimated that with the raising of the school leaving age, following the 1944 Education Act, about 70,000 new teachers would be needed annually, almost ten times as many as before the war. In 1944 a report was produced by the Board of Education on the emergency recruitment and training of teachers, and it was decided that there were to be several new training colleges set up. These colleges were to be staffed by lecturers seconded from local authorities, with mature students selected from National Service conscripts. In 1945 the theological college, which was no longer required by the Wesleyans, was leased to the Manchester Education Authority,. The new emergency training college was officially opened on 31 January 1946, with Alfred Body as its first principal.
caption: The interior of the original college library in 1911. It was previously the chapel, known as the Old Chapel.
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