In 1973 the University of Manchester’s Medical School moved from overcrowded Victorian premises into Europe’s largest building for medical education and research. The Stopford building, named after the anatomist and University Vice-Chancellor, John Stopford, promised to significantly expand the educational accommodation and provide adaptable research spaces with the latest technology. Histories of medicine have explored the place of hospitals within cities and histories of medical education have examined the development of pedagogies mainly in national contexts. This paper uses the micro-geography of a small area of Manchester to explore how physical space has acted as an agent for, and as evidence of, change in medical education. It considers how the architects and their clients saw the medical pedagogy of their present, what they presupposed about the future of medicine, hospitals and the city, and how their design fared. The paper is based on archival research and oral history interviews with the architect, key decision makers and the building’s users. The plan for the new Medical School was based on years of research in Europe and the USA by an architectural practice well known for its educational buildings. Their design was radically different to the previous Victorian gothic medical school: it was vastly bigger, requiring the demolition of eight city blocks, but allowed the School to triple its student numbers and provided generous space for research; it was physically imposing, but simple in design and used technology to ensure that the building was equipped for the latest research. However, education does not happen in isolation and their proposals had to negotiate with plans to radically change Manchester’s transport infrastructure around and underneath the site, whilst ensuring close proximity to the region’s main hospital. Despite innovative design features, forty years on the building is seen as aesthetically displeasing, unsuitable for current needs and costly to maintain. The architect tried to make the building flexible, to meet the ways in which medical education was expected to evolve, but so radical were changes in bioscience research and medical curricular that the building came to hinder the purposes for which it was designed. This paper explores prophetic attempts to provide a building for the future, and uses the building’s physical evidence to examine the interaction between space and medical education.