THE NAME is a marketing man’s dream. Never mind the architect’s vision of three storeys of a new apartment block that “angle and wiggle against each other, like chips on a plate”.

Just imagine how many clever headlines, puns, proverbs you can devise using the word “chips”. Then there is the sheer power of the word to evoke the smell and the taste of the freshly cooked variety. After all, Manchester and the North West of England claim to be serious contenders for the title of “cradle of fish and chips”, although the name of the genius who actually opened the first shop remains elusive.

Even delegates at a fringe meeting of the recent Delivering Sustainable Communities Summit in Manchester were served fish and chips, with the developers missing no opportunity to reinforce the message.

The message is that the Chips building will comprise the first residential homes in Britain designed by the flamboyant architect Will Alsop. They will be 145 one, two and three-bedroom apartments, overlooking the Ashton Canal and a new water link to its almost parallel waterway, the Rochdale Canal. They will go on sale on May 7, appropriately in a café at Urbis, Manchester’s £30 million Centre for Urban Culture. Some will be earmarked for first-time buyers and key workers who can take advantage of a new home-buy scheme.

Chips will be one of the early attractions on a 29-acre site in east Manchester, close to the new Manchester City football stadium and former Commonwealth Games village, historically known as New Islington. Although the address remains today, it raised eyebrows in that other Islington 200 miles south when it was first announced three years ago.

Alsop’s team created the strategic framework for the long-term plan to create Manchester’s Millennium Community. It will include homes of all shapes, styles and prices, a primary school, health centre and shops, including of course a fish and chip emporium. They are also aiming for a three-star Michelin restaurant.

The developer Urban Splash, which started out converting old mills and industrial buildings in the North West before moving on to new-build schemes in other parts of Britain, is a key partner. The firm’s involvement is partly responsible for the decision by Alsop, who has designed homes in Europe, to build his first homes in Britain. “A lot of people who build housing in this country rely on old formulae, ” says the man whose vision of Barnsley as a Tuscan hill town still sparks debate almost three years on. Alsop adds: “Urban Splash are different. What we have done at New Islington is to create an extraordinary place to live within walking distance of the city centre.”

But this is not just another city-living scheme. “I hope that the people who live in New Islington will not feel any pressure to move on. It is not a stepping stone,” he says. “It is an urban environment but there will be areas quiet enough to be able to sit and, frankly, enjoy yourself. The remit of so much urban planning and design assumes you have to be doing something all the time. Not so.”

His apartments will be double-storey high, with the emphasis on space. Kitchens, larders and bathrooms will be sited in the middle of the space — “like a big piece of furniture” — with hinged walls that can be moved to create privacy. “It depends on who lives there, how they use the space,” he says. “Two people might never divide it, others might only push back the walls when they throw a party.”

The building will be clad in a timberveneered rain screen system, with letters and names such as Bombay, Istanbul and Yokohama — destinations that recall Manchester’s Industrial Revolution heritage and its status as the first global exporter via the canal network — screenprinted on to the cladding.

Alsop says that the Chips design is “an architectural device to break down the scale of a nine-storey building. We wanted humour and attractiveness and the name is an interesting by-product. They didn’t ask me to design a plate of chips.”

His other houses on the site will be urban barns “dangling over wet land”, or at least on stilts seven metres above a garden. They will be some of the most expensive properties in New Islington, although as yet there are no prices for any of the properties.

More apartments, designed by Ian Simpson Architects, will be created in the Grade II listed dispensary of the former Ancoats Hospital. Among the buildings that have already been demolished are the outpatients’ hall, famously painted by Lowry in 1952, showing benches full of patient-looking men and women. The painting is owned by the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester. A battered, paint-flecked photograph showing the same scene was found in Lowry’s studio after his death.

But to create a community of 1,400 homes, housing between 3,000 and 5,000 people, the plan is to “pepperpot” social or affordable housing throughout the scheme. Two architects have already been chosen after competitions for the first two phases.

Richard Hatton, senior development manager for Urban Splash, says: “We have had lots of consultation with the people who live here, who still have a very strong community spirit. Some have said they prefer not to live on a building site and to move away while the work is being done and then move back. Others have opted for just one move.”

Walking around the site, a mix of derelict mills and warehouses and pockets of 1970s boarded-up houses, it is not easy to imagine New Islington in 10 or 15 years’ time, when the scheme should have been completed.

But confidence among Mancunians is already clearly beginning to grow. Overheard in a city bar at the weekend: “That New Islington will be one of the best places to live in Manchester.”

www.newislington.co.uk

www.urbansplash.co.uk

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