The ugly south Manchester tower which was 'very special' to many

The Owens Park Tower has been a totemic figure on the south Manchester skyline for more than half-a-century.

To some students, it was their beacon for navigating their way to the infamous Friday Night BOP. To others, it was the ultimate symbol of Manchester’s student world, the largest tower of its kind in the UK, a place where the rules of the outside world did not matter.

But, to many students who gazed upon the 18-storeys of 1960s brick, it was something a lot more simple and a lot more meaningful: It was home.

READ MORE: The end of Owens Park Tower

That view will soon disappear, however. Demolition work has started on ‘The Tower’ — as it was affectionately called — three years after the last students moved out.

In its place, is coming a series of new buildings, 'delivering 3,300 updated bedspaces to meet the growing demand for high-quality, modern bedrooms across the popular campus’, according to the University of Manchester. The Tower will be gone by Spring 2025.

To mark the occasion, the University collected and released some of its alumni memories.

“I met my future wife Katharine, in the tower five [fifth floor] common room where she was doing the everyman crossword in my Observer,” said Danny Dicks, remembering 1984. His contemporaries were Paul Carr and Jeni MacQueen — who now share the same surname, having been married for 36 years now.

“It’s a very special place for us, for obvious reasons,” Paul reminisced. “In early October 1983 Jeni and I met for the first time in one of the two lifts in the Owens Park Tower.

“It was my first day back in my second year as a Botany student, and Jeni’s first day in her first year to study Economics. She asked in that brief encounter if I was a first year student. At that moment I knew I’d met my future wife.”

A year earlier, when Paul first moved in, he had a baptism of fire: “I’ll never forget the first night when, after our familiarisation walk around the OP site, followed by an evening in the bar, a few of us stood waiting to cross the road to get a Prairie Dog from the Canadian Charcoal Pit opposite. Yes, we were somewhat worse for wear, but I’ll remember the unicyclist who almost collided with us forever!”

Now, the Manchester Evening News has delved back into its own archives to uncover more imagery of the iconic structure.

Take a look at the gallery below to see how Tower changed over the decades.

Were you a student in Owens Park? Tell us your memories of Fallowfield in the comments below.