Could Manchester city centre resi featuring 60% affordable be sign of what’s to come?

City council Leader Cllr Bev Craig said Latimer’s 500-home Brewery Gardens development illustrates what can be done with regards to delivering affordable homes and has urged developers to up their game.

Graham Construction has begun building the £140m apartment scheme on part of the former Boddingtons site on Great Ducie Street, which features a whopping 60% affordable provision.

Latimer, part of Clarion Housing Group, will deliver 132 social homes as part of the project and another 171 for shared ownership.

The scheme features the largest number of social rent homes to be delivered in Manchester City centre for 40 years, according to Craig.

Her council has received its fair share of criticism for failing to secure on-site affordable housing in high-rise, high-end apartment schemes in the city centre.

Craig and her officers have tried to hammer home the point that Manchester is much more than its city core – most of its 634,000 population don’t live in the centre – and point to the many affordable schemes coming forward in its district centres as evidence of the good work being done.

However, this has done little to appease some critics who see the city centre as increasingly unaffordable to the average Mancunian.

Craig has a well-rehearsed response to this critique.

“There are more baristas living in central Manchester than barristers,” she said.

“We cannot sell ourselves short that actually there’s a just a bunch of wealthy millionaires, and they’re the only people that rent in the city centre. That’s not the reality.”

The city council is aiming to deliver 10,000 affordable homes across the city by 2032. Craig said Brewery Gardens is proof positive that having a proportion of these delivered in the city centre is possible.

She hopes that more developers in the city will be able to find a way around the viability constraints that so often result in schemes being delivered without any affordable homes.

There are some instances of this happening already. As well as Latimer’s scheme, Salboy is planning to deliver close to 30% affordable in the second phase of Viadux in the heart of the city.

“This should be seen as a success of the market and how that’s been developing,” Craig said.

“[Brewery Gardens] is a massive deal in terms of getting affordable homes in the city centre.

“There’s lots more to come and it is beginning to shift the market.”

From left: Clarion CEO Clare Miller, Cllr Bev Craig, Andy Burnham, Cllr Gavin White, and Richard Cook. Credit: PNW

However, just because Latimer can make 60% affordable work, does not necessarily mean private sector developers will be able to follow suit.

Latimer’s housing association parent has deep enough pockets to subsidise the delivery of affordable homes. Discounted properties are baked into its model, they are its raison d’ être. Private sector developers think differently.

However, Richard Cook, chief development officer at Clarion, said developers struggling to work affordable into their appraisals should “pick up the phone and talk to us”.

The Brewery Gardens scheme will provide 60% affordable but without funding from Homes England and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, that amount would have been closer to 5%.

Latimer made it work and other developers should not be able to get away with hiding behind a viability appraisal, Cook said

“Under a section 106, viability is very challenging [but] unfortunately, ‘computer says no” just doesn’t work,” he said.

“Politically it doesn’t work and morally. That’s the environment we’re in.”

Latimer acquired the land Brewery Gardens will be built on in 2021 but a start on site has been delayed due to the economic and political uncertainty in the proceeding years.

Cook said his team had been through “hell and high water” to get to site.

The biggest hurdle that had to be overcome was new legislation around building safety.

The original scheme, approved in 2022, was designed with a single staircase. With the introduction of the Building Safety Act came the need to redesign the project to add a second.

After a 42 week wait for Gateway 2 approval – the statutory period is just 12 – Brewery Gardens became the first new-build scheme in Manchester to obtain consent from the regulator to start on site.

Four Prime Ministers and eight housing ministers later, Latimer has broken ground, which means Cook can start to pull the trigger on its ambitious expansion plans around the M62 corridor.

Rochdale, Bolton, Stockport, and Tameside are all on its radar but Latimer is far from finished in Manchester – two sites in Gorton totalling around 400 homes are in the works.

Spades in the ground at Brewery Gardens is a sign of the growing momentum in this part of the city.

Manchester City Council has set its sights on regenerating the whole Strangeways area and has drawn up a masterplan in partnership with Salford City Council to map out what that might look like.

The plan is ambitious and features a 60-acre park, as well as 7,000 homes and 3.1m sq ft of commercial space.

However, the fly in the ointment has long been HMP Manchester – still known locally as Strangeways prison – whose mere presence threatens to undermine efforts to transform the area and effectively expand the city centre.

For years the message from Manchester town hall has been that talks with government – specifically the Ministry of Justice – are ongoing. Word from the MoJ has consistently been that there are no plans to move the prison.

However, Craig believes growing development momentum, helped by Brewery Gardens, could have some influence on the MoJ’s thinking.

“This is a real boost for us, it shows that development can happen,” she said.

“It helps us send a message to government that, actually, the issue around the prison and Strangeways is a shorter term problem, not a longer term one.

“You can’t build a new prison overnight, especially when they’ve inherited such a mess of the criminal justice system coming into office, but it probably moves it into a problem to think about within five years, rather than a problem to think about within 10 years.”