‘Unlocking the Rylands’ is a restoration and upgrade of the grade I listed John Rylands Library in Manchester. The project provides both a new build archive extension, and a new roof constructed in a traditional form over an elegant neo-gothic Victorian stone structure.
The client is the University of Manchester. The £15.6 million project has funding of £8.3 million from the HLF, and £3 million from ERDF.

‘Unlocking the Rylands’ involves three principal structural elements, together with improvements to the permanent exhibitions, namely:

• A new entrance building to improve physical access to the Library, in which there is three floors of archive rolling shelf storage, plus a new reading room. This building will also provide a conservation studio for restoration of the artifacts.
• Conservation repairs to the external stonework and internal fan vaulting.
• A pitched slate clad roof. The original roof was not Champney’s design intention. This completes his vision.
• The new archive building is 33m long by 19m wide with 4 storeys. As an archive, it will house documents such as the St John’s Fragment, the earliest extant piece of the New Testament, together with the Methodist archives. Many documents are up to 2000 years old and will be on permanent display in the building. The client requirements were for 10.5 Km of 2.4m high static and mainly mobile shelving to increase the existing archive by 25%.

This project comprises major repair and alteration work to the grade 1 listed building and the creation of a new library extension to comply with BS5454.

New building works:

• Demolition of existing 1970’s building.
• Construction of a new 4 storey archive storage building with a new library entrance.
• Formation of a major opening between the new and the grade 1 listed building.
• Construction of a new glass bridge.

The project requires the use of precast coffered floor units made from white concrete and designed as a composite element. The coffer provides a feature and acts as the main fire resistance to asymmetrical shaped steel beams. These floor elements have been designed to tight deflection criteria to suit the heavily loaded mobile shelving on 3 of the 5 floors. Elliptical precast concrete columns with a bronze etched rain screen create a dramatic external façade.