As a Brit, I can confirm that this is most certainly not a well respected institution; the UK has some of the best universities in the world, but this is not one of them.
Well it depends, all the UK universities have strengths and weaknesses. In some cases there are straight up practical reasons. Years ago my university's chip fab caught fire and burned to the ground, because chip fabs do that sometimes, and obviously that significantly reduced the ability to expose students to practical skills in a clean room and so on. But most UK universities don't have a chip fab at all, which means they don't have academic staff who need one, which means undergraduates are also not getting classes with people who have that knowledge at the front.
MMU has a bunch of expertise in subjects like textile making and some practical engineering disciplines, where as I wouldn't necessarily regard some of the UK's more famous universities as good on those subjects.
Textile making isn't an academic discipline, and historically would not have been taught at a university at all. If you want high quality academic research and rigour, you're far more likely to find it somewhere other than MMU.
This is an unfortunate truth, but a truth nonetheless.
It's definitely true that "historically" textile making wouldn't have been taught at a university. Sure looks like a real academic discipline to me though, at least as much as say, law (maritime law being another of Soton's specialities) or indeed electronics. It so happens our culture prizes knowledge of electronics very highly and the development of new textiles much less so, but it could be otherwise.
As a Brit, I can confirm that this is most certainly not a well respected institution; the UK has some of the best universities in the world, but this is not one of them.