On Oldham Road in Manchester there’s a new 12-storey block of 144 flats to rent, called Poplin, designed by local 19-year-old practice Tim Groom Architects. It has character and presence, with vertical rhythms of brick pillars and horizontal concrete bands every other storey, incised with repeating arch motifs. At the top there’s a larger-scaled pattern of arches. A sense of substance is imparted by the thickness of reveals, and by deep balconies that are in places hollowed out of the facade.
Its four-square sturdiness and faintly Venetian theme have an obvious likeness to the city’s 19th-century mills – a potentially clumsy allusion that, as the building has enough of its own personality, instead adds to its identity. Some of the building’s heft is, on closer inspection, illusory – visible joints betray the fact that the solid-looking concrete is actually composed of thin panels, and elements that might resemble cantilevered concrete beams in its neobrutalist atrium turn out to be made of metal sheet. But there’s enough oomph to lift this project out of the run of generic new apartment blocks to be seen all over the country.
