TOAST RACK MANCHESTER ARCHITECTURE: L.C. HOWITT'S CONCRETE HOOPS IN FALLOWFIELD

Nobody in Manchester calls it the Hollings Building. Since the day it opened in 1960, the seven-storey college on Wilmslow Road has been the Toast Rack — a row of concrete hoops rising from a wide base, narrowing as they climb, and curling over the roof into open arches that hold nothing up at all. It was built to teach bakery and hairdressing to the daughters of a city still rationing optimism, it was listed before it was forty, and it has stood empty since 2013 while a succession of developers worked out what to do with a building whose whole character is its shape. It is also one of the most recognisable structures in the north of England, and the best argument there is that a municipal architect with a structural engineer and a sense of humour could make a landmark.

Written by Gavin Paisley, director & model-maker at Chisel & Mouse based in Sussex, England.
Last updated: 22-Oct-26.

Photograph by Bob Harvey , licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

We've recreated the Toast Rack as a handcrafted plaster wall model

Our Toast Rack Manchester PopArc captures the building's west elevation in three-dimensional plaster relief set against a choice of six coloured backgrounds and ready to hang.

What is the Toast Rack?

The Toast Rack is the nickname of the Hollings Building, a former college in Fallowfield, south Manchester, designed by the City Architect Leonard Cecil Howitt and built between 1957 and 1960 as the Municipal Domestic and Trades College. It stands at the junction of Wilmslow Road and Old Hall Lane, opposite Platt Fields Park.

Its fame rests on its structure: a frame of 23 tapering reinforced-concrete arches, spaced evenly along the building's length, which narrow as they rise and continue above the roof as a line of open hoops. The upper floors step inward to follow the arches, so the building is widest at the ground and narrowest at the top. A separate semi-circular annexe beside it, built as the college restaurant, has a concrete frame of its own and is known as the Fried Egg. Together they are, in the words of the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, a perfect piece of pop architecture.

The building was Grade II listed in 1998. Manchester Metropolitan University, its last occupant, moved out in 2013, and it has been empty since.

Facts panel

Official name: Hollings Building (originally the Domestic and Trades College; later Hollings College, then Hollings Campus of Manchester Metropolitan University)
Nickname: The Toast Rack; annexe known as the Fried Egg
Location: Old Hall Lane / Wilmslow Road, Fallowfield, Manchester M14
Architect: Leonard Cecil Howitt, Manchester City Architect
Structural engineers: L. G. Mouchel & Partners
Contractor: J. Gerrard & Sons, Swinton
Client: Manchester Corporation
Built: 1957–60; formally opened by Princess Margaret, 8 March 1962
Height: approximately 40 metres (around 134 feet) to the top of the arches
Storeys: seven (Historic England); some sources say eight
Structure: 23 tapering reinforced-concrete arches, brick infill panels, flat roofs
Listed: Grade II, 24 April 1998 (Historic England list entry 1119722)
Status: vacant since 2013; planning consent for residential conversion; marketed for sale 2023

Architect: L. C. Howitt

Leonard Cecil Howitt (1896–1964) was Manchester's City Architect from 1946 to 1961, which made him responsible, through the City Architect's Department, for an enormous postwar programme of schools, housing and civic buildings. Most of it was competent and anonymous; the Toast Rack is the building where Howitt let his structural imagination off the lead. Historic England's list entry describes it as demonstrating the architect's love of structural gymnastics in a dramatic way, which is as close as a listing document gets to a grin.

Howitt also designed the Crown Courts on Crown Square and Manchester's Blackley Crematorium; the Toast Rack is the only one of his buildings most people could name. He was, by the standards of the Brutalists who came after him, a conservative — his college owes more to the Festival of Britain's lightness and whimsy than to béton brut — which is part of why the building reads as cheerful rather than severe. Read our guide to Brutalist architecture for where the Toast Rack sits against the movement proper.

A college for the domestic trades

The Domestic and Trades College succeeded a women's institute founded in 1901, and its curriculum tells you a great deal about Manchester in the 1950s: bakery, housecraft, hairdressing, catering, clothing manufacture and art. The Clothing Institute lobbied for the tailoring and hairdressing courses; a public restaurant in the Fried Egg let the catering students practise on paying customers; the single-storey clothing block behind the tower had a north-light sawtooth roof like a mill.

The building was planned at about £650,000 and opened in 1960, two years before its formal inauguration. It was renamed Hollings College after its first principal, Elsie Hollings OBE, and passed through Manchester Polytechnic into Manchester Metropolitan University, which ran its food and fashion faculty from the site until consolidating onto the Oxford Road and Birley Fields campuses in June 2013.

Structure: why the arches taper

The Toast Rack's shape is a diagram of its brief. The college needed large rooms — kitchens, workshops, a hall — and small ones — classrooms, offices, salons — and Howitt and Mouchel sized the floors to the rooms by letting the frame narrow as it rose. The result is a building whose cross-section is a tall, slightly pointed arch: wide and open at ground level, where cars park beneath the first floor, and tapering to a crest that clears the top storey entirely.

Twenty-three of those arches run the length of the building. Between them, brick spandrel panels fill the lower part of each bay and ribbon windows the upper part, so from the park the elevation reads as a stack of horizontal bands sliced by the vertical rhythm of the concrete. The staircase windows slant to follow the arches. A 1958 newspaper likened the frame to croquet hoops; the students, with a catering college's sense of priorities, went with the toast rack.

The geometry has been described three ways — Historic England calls it a hyperbolic paraboloid frame, older accounts say parabolic arches, and the architectural historians at Mainstream Modern insist the ribs are tapered rather than parabolic. The honest summary is that the arches are not a single mathematical curve but a shape chosen to fit the rooms, which is a very Howitt reason for a very good silhouette.

The Fried Egg

The semi-circular annexe to the west was built as the college restaurant: externally two storeys, with concrete frame members that rise up its curved walls and continue over the roof like the ribs of a shell — "boomerang-shaped", in the listing's phrase. From above it looks like something fried, which is where the nickname comes from, although Manchester has never settled whether the egg is fried or poached. The Twentieth Century Society suggests the poached egg was originally the shallow aluminium dome of the first-floor assembly hall and the name migrated.

A circular library building known as the Drum was added in 1996, by Mills Beaumont Leavey Channon. It now houses a gym — the only part of the site in use.

Photograph by Cjc13 , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The empty years

Manchester Metropolitan University put the 3.7-acre campus on the market in March 2014 and sold it that October to Estrela Properties, with Generation Ltd as developer, for a reported £5 million. Generation won consent in July 2016 for around 210 flats across the Toast Rack and new buildings on the site, with the Drum converted to a gym (opened 2018) and a rooftop garden on the main building. A fire in the upper floors in May 2017 was contained within an hour.

Work on the flats never began. The interior was stripped to a shell by 2022, and in June 2023 the whole site was put back on the market with its consent intact: 211 homes, a gym and shops. As of the most recent reporting (autumn 2024) it remained unsold and the Toast Rack remained fenced and empty — more than a decade after the last student left.

Is the Toast Rack Brutalist?

Not in the strict sense. Brutalism — raw board-marked concrete, monumental mass, the Smithsons, Banham — arrives in Britain in the later 1950s and reaches Manchester in the 1960s. The Toast Rack belongs to the slightly earlier, lighter strand of postwar modernism that grew out of the Festival of Britain: structure as spectacle, concrete used for its line rather than its weight. Historic England makes the Festival connection explicitly.

It earns its place in our Brutalist collection on the grounds that matter to anyone standing in front of it: an exposed concrete frame doing all the talking, a complete absence of applied ornament, and a shape that no earlier style of architecture could have produced. If the strict Brutalists are the movement's novelists, the Toast Rack is its best short story.

Model-maker's lens

Focus. The west elevation, towards Wilmslow Road and the Fried Egg, is the one everyone knows.

How it reads at small scale. Better than almost any building we make. The Toast Rack is already a diagram of itself, and a diagram loses nothing when you shrink it.

How to display. The PopArc is designed to hang. The coloured ground does the work the Manchester sky does on a good day — the building was always a pale frame against something brighter — and the warmer backgrounds suit it particularly well.

How we made it. The relief is cast in plaster from a mould taken from a master pattern; the stepping of the floors gives the piece its depth. Finished by hand in our Sussex studio.

Visiting the Toast Rack

The site is private and fenced, but the exterior is entirely visible from the public road. The classic view is from the Platt Fields Park side of Wilmslow Road, looking across at the west elevation with the Fried Egg in front; the arches read best in low afternoon light.

By bus: the Wilmslow Road corridor is one of the busiest bus routes in Europe; the 41, 42, 43, 142, 143 and 147 all stop at Owens Park / Platt Fields, directly outside.
By train: Mauldeth Road station is about fifteen minutes' walk.
On foot or by bike: about two miles south of the city centre along Oxford Road and Wilmslow Road.

Frequently asked questions about the Toast Rack

Why is it called the Toast Rack?

Because the row of tapering concrete arches that continue above the roof looks like one — a nickname with a wink, given that the building was a catering college. The name was in use almost from the day the Toast Rack opened in 1960.

Who designed the Toast Rack in Manchester?

Leonard Cecil Howitt, Manchester's City Architect from 1946 to 1961, with L. G. Mouchel & Partners as structural engineers. The Toast Rack was built between 1957 and 1960.

Is the Toast Rack a listed building?

Yes. The Toast Rack (officially the Hollings Building) has been Grade II listed since 24 April 1998, Historic England list entry 1119722.

What was the Toast Rack used for?

It opened as Manchester's Domestic and Trades College, teaching bakery, catering, hairdressing, clothing manufacture and housecraft. It later became Hollings College and then part of Manchester Metropolitan University, which used the Toast Rack for its food and fashion faculty until 2013.

Is the Toast Rack still empty?

Yes, as far as public reporting shows. The Toast Rack has been vacant since Manchester Metropolitan University left in 2013. Planning consent for conversion to flats was granted in 2016 and the site was put up for sale again in 2023.

What is the Fried Egg next to the Toast Rack?

The semi-circular annexe built as the college restaurant, with curved concrete ribs over its roof. Some Mancunians call it the Poached Egg; the Toast Rack and the egg are both covered by the same listing.

Can you go inside the Toast Rack?

No. The Toast Rack is fenced private property awaiting redevelopment. The exterior can be seen from Wilmslow Road and Old Hall Lane, and the Drum building beside it operates as a gym.

Is the Toast Rack Brutalist architecture?

Strictly it predates British Brutalism and belongs to the lighter, Festival of Britain strand of postwar modernism. It is usually grouped with Brutalism, including in our own collection, because its exposed concrete frame and lack of ornament share the movement's values. See the section above.