THE SHARP PROJECT, MANCHESTER.

IT LOOKS LIKE NOTHING FROM THE OUTSIDE. The former Sharp facility is huge, at 250,000 square feet, but unprepossessing. Even taxi drivers don’t seem to know where it is any more. It’s so blank, it fades into Manchester’s Tupperware skies. And there’s no obvious entrance – a tidy Miesian gatehouse, then a scruffy car-park, then below some silvery decoration that makes you think of a glitterball, there’s a door that leads into a secure holding pen where you’re told to wait. Apart from the sub-Philippe Starck furniture, the effect is more KwikFit than Google – you might as well be waiting to get your exhaust fixed. Through the secure door, and the tone doesn’t initially change much – it’s a mundane collection of small business offices (an eccentric collection of SME’s admittedly. BetFred?) Then suddenly you’re onto the warehouse floor, where Japanese electronics giant Sharp once…