Manchester’s skyscrapers: towers of homebuilding ambition or ‘high-rise mania’?

The first time that Manchester attracted the undivided attention of the rest of the world was at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Its population was doubling every decade, spilling out into open countryside to swallow up existing towns and villages. Its red-brick mills and back-to-back streets became the explosive prototype for every modern manufacturing city.

Manchester today is in the middle of a violent binge of skyscraper building, which has provoked another equally rapid and rather more unexpected transformation, one that is turning the city’s 19th-century structure inside out. Unlike London, where the tallest buildings are mainly offices for bankers, lawyers and financial traders, Manchester’s skyscrapers are being designed for people to live in. As a result, its city centre is on course to become home to 100,000 residents by 2025. Given that there were fewer than 500 people living there just 35 years ago, it’s a remarkable change.

Since 2018, 27 towers have been built in Manchester, accommodating more than 60,000. There are an additional 20 towers under construction, with proposals for yet another 50 or so in the planning system. The total includes a tower in Salford that would be 264 metres high and another of 71 floors, 250 metres tall, at Great Jackson Street, which would put them among the tallest residential buildings in Europe. And at the end of last year, Salboy, a local developer unveiled a scheme for a 76-floor tower next to the city’s convention centre in an attempt to capitalise on Manchester’s booming buy-to-rent market aimed at affluent professionals in their early thirties.

It’s a persuasive demonstration that for many people, home is not the suburban house and garden model that everybody, from the King in his days as the Prince of Wales to successive advisers to the Conservative government, has been promoting. In comparison with the Manchester experiment, the Duchy of Cornwall’s Poundbury development, accommodating little more than 4,000 people, is a less plausible model for the future.

Friedrich Engels was horrified by what he saw in Manchester in the 1840s, and described the squalor in which most of its people lived in his book The Condition of the Working Class in England. As a careful observer, the political philosopher understood that he was looking at a new type of city, one with a centre that emptied out once the working day was over. The affluent left for their suburban villas. The poor lived in what were little more than barracks.

The pattern hadn’t changed much in the 1960s when Manchester’s mills and factories began closing and the council started planning for a shrinking population. The poor were moved out to the concrete hulks of deck-access council flats in Hulme after the slums were demolished. The wealthy lived in Cheshire. The ambitious left for London.

Real change began while the idea of high-rise living was still regarded as a spirit-crushing failure. When the IRA detonated a truck bomb outside the Arndale shopping centre in 1996, Manchester had only just finished demolishing 3,280 flats in Hulme, 20 years after they were completed. The city’s politicians, who had already been thinking about the future (bidding unsuccessfully to stage the Olympics), commissioned the planning consultancy EDAW and architect Ian Simpson to draw up a vision for what central Manchester could become. Their main priority was bringing people into the city.

The city centre is on course to become home to 100,000 residents by 2025. Given that there were fewer than 500 people living there just 35 years ago, it’s a remarkable change

The first really big tower, designed by Simpson himself, was completed in 2006. With 47 floors and a height of 169 metres, the Beetham Tower, part hotel with flats on top, was briefly the tallest building in Britain outside London. It was regarded by some as a sign of a resurgent city, a conspicuous if none too subtle symbol of vigour. The top section projects out 4 metres into space, giving the hotel bar a cantilevered glass floor with a vertiginous view, and creating a distinctive and recognisable silhouette.

Simpson lives in the Beetham’s penthouse, where he enjoys an enviable version of high-rise living that few can afford. His flat is big enough to accommodate a grove of full-size olive and lemon trees.

He is a militant supporter of building more high-rise architecture in Manchester. “This is a unique opportunity to bring life into the city centre. We can’t afford to miss it [ . . . ] There can never be too many new towers,” Simpson tells me unapologetically in the meeting room of his offices at the foot of a 50-floor tower he has designed.

“Some people think that what I do is the work of the devil. They think we should be building these towers on streets. But we live in a rough tough city and the towers are a kind of refuge. We are designing them in real places. They are not gated communities.

‘Some people think that what I do is the work of the devil. But we live in a rough tough city and the towers are a kind of refuge. We are designing them in real places. They are not gated communities,’ says architect Ian Simpson

“We have created a new typology for high-rises that is specifically Manchester. It's not about the individual buildings, it's about creating a naturally ventilated glass skin that reflects the sky and the weather. At night the individual interiors come alive. We try to create an elegant footprint, and to ground the buildings well,” he says.

It took more than a decade for Simpson and Rachel Haugh, his professional partner, to start building the New Jackson Street development, which is much larger than their first tower. Thanks to Manchester’s opaque contracted-out system, the developer was able to rewrite the planning framework for the site and switch to entirely residential use after an office scheme for the same site had failed from lack of demand. It will eventually have 6,400 apartments stacked in 15 towers, rising to more than 70 floors. Since then the pace has accelerated, with investors from the US and Asia piling in to finance new towers.

The push to build ever taller has became a kind of self-sustaining production line. Each new developer aims to eclipse their competitors by going higher and higher.

Until now, all Manchester’s new towers have been located in clusters along the line of the inner ring road — cut through derelict factories in the 1960s — circling the city centre like a concrete moat four lanes wide. Because Manchester city centre is overwhelmingly flat, this has made their impact on the skyline very different from what it would be in other cities. Instead of forming a recognisable city skyline rising to a central peak, they are at their most visible from long distances.

Gary Neville, the former Manchester United footballer, changed that when he finally secured planning permission for a new skyscraper designed by Stephen Hodder. It is being built on the site of the old central police station and the recently demolished Reform synagogue, close to Alfred Waterhouse’s spectacular Victorian gothic town hall. The first plan for the site, which involved two towers, was abandoned after it provoked a strong push back against the demolitions from conservationists and the local community.

Now the pressure group SAVE Britain’s Heritage has weighed in to question the scale and speed of what is happening to Manchester. SAVE representative Elizabeth Hopkirk launched its study on the future of Manchester by claiming that the “outdated thinking that regards towers as symbols of success is being challenged like never before”.

The buildings loom over the middle of the city like a gang of encircling bullies

Co-author of the report Eamonn Canniffe, who teaches at the Manchester School of Architecture, deplores the impact of the new buildings. “They loom over the middle of the city like a gang of encircling bullies,” he says. SAVE is not against tall buildings in themselves, but argues that the current high-rise mania is taking investment away from the more sustainable strategy of regenerating existing buildings. It is also threatening to overwhelm them. There are still many examples of Manchester’s Victorian past, but even the old brick chimneys are reduced to a toylike scale by the huge glass icebergs that rise above them.

According to property consultants JLL, Manchester’s growing population has boosted demand for new homes, and led to some of the biggest rises in house prices in the UK. In the past five years, the average cost of a home in Manchester has increased by more than 19 per cent, while rents have gone up 22 per cent.

SAVE’s report is titled “Boom not Bust”, which raises the question: does all this construction make financial sense? It depends on who you talk to. Simpson acknowledges that there is a very thin line between making a high-rise scheme viable and losing money on every sale.

“Many cost consultants will say that there is a financial penalty for building anything more than 30 floors. I am fortunate that the developers I work with came from the construction industry and have the experience to know how to build high.” Certainly Manchester’s developers have managed to convince the city authorities that they are making less money than their counterparts in London. They have secured a substantially lower level of affordable housing in their schemes than in London.

For the estate agents trying to sell apartments in the city’s forest of skyscrapers, the new Manchester is defined by two equally slippery concepts. One of them is “world class”, the other is “curated”. New Jackson Street describes itself as “a world-class skyscraper district” and “an aspirational new neighbourhood”. It offers a “curated programme”, delivered by its own head of experience.

In 1967, when this was still called plain Great Jackson Street, social life revolved around the unassuming comforts of the Boatman’s Home, a two-storey red-brick pub that could have been the model for the fictional Rover’s Return Inn, of Coronation Street fame. Now there is free outdoor yoga on the roof garden, an annual cookout and a charity basketball match. As part of the price of planning permission, there is also a developer-funded primary school and an NHS surgery.

Neville’s development offers “highly curated residences”, at prices of up to £6mn. Due to be completed this year, they will be designed by a firm that specialises in hotel rooms in a style that is said to be “Jimi Hendrix meets Twiggy”. Neville’s marketing strategy maps the geography of Manchester as a collection of branded experiences. Live in the W Tower (“the first regional branded living in Britain”) and you are assured that you will be in striking distance of “world class dining”, in the shape of Sexy Fish, Gordon Ramsay’s Lucky Cat and The Ivy. Soho House, the hipster version of Holiday Inn, with 41 locations around the world, is opening in what was Granada Studios next year.

The result, according to its critics, is the great inversion. A kind of urban theme park for Manchester’s affluent singles — Simpson notes the average age of the people who live in his towers is 31. The less affluent are outside the inner ring road, gazing at a spectacle that they can see, but not experience. Meanwhile, Manchester’s characterful Victorian heritage, as well as such impressive pieces of 1960s architecture as the soon-to-be redeveloped former UMIST campus, are being overwhelmed by the glass towers.

“I never thought of myself as a conservationist,” says Richard Brook, architecture professor at Lancaster University, and the author of the definitive guide manchester MODERN, “but these are not places for families, or for people planning to stay for long.”

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