Last year, Greater Manchester’s Mayor (at the time) Andy Burnham hailed Brewery Gardens, a new 505-home development, as symbolic of his push to ensure all Manchester residents have access to good housing.
Developed by Latimer, Brewery Gardens is on the former site of Boddingtons Brewery in Manchester city centre and is remarkable for its 60% affordable housing, including 115 homes for social rent.
Burnham is now the UK’s prime minister with his approach to building large-scale affordable housing becoming national policy. So, will the Brewery Gardens development he described as a landmark form part of his blueprint for tackling the nation’s housing crisis?
Brewery Gardens sits on a 1.24-acre brownfield site in Strangeways, an area once famed for its beer but now designated for regeneration. The £109m development, which broke ground in September last year, is due to be completed in 2028 and consists of two blocks – of 29 and 12 storeys.
The smaller block will house social rented homes, which will be retained and run by housing association Clarion Housing Group, developer Latimer’s parent company. Built by construction company Graham, the scheme will also include homes for shared ownership, affordable rent, and open market sale. It will have retail and leisure on the ground floors and a 900m2publicly accessible courtyard in the middle.
As part of its sustainability credentials, Brewery Gardens is car-free with homes built to energy performance rating EPC B. While the development is striking for its majority of affordable homes (a minimum of 10% is required in major developments), it is worth noting how it incorporates high-density, sustainable, mixed tenure housing on a city centre, brownfield heritage site. It has overcome multiple viability challenges that can otherwise stall the development of large-scale affordable housing.
Public-private partnerships paying off
Tom Webber MRICS, Latimer’s regional director of development, says Brewery Garden’s viability “magic” is down to collaboration and partnership. “Public-private partnerships are considered to be one of the most suitable ways of working here,” he says. A crucial part of this is partnership funding. Latimer, as Clarion Housing Group’s development arm, is a strategic partner of government agency Homes England. This provides grant funding to cover the capital costs of developing affordable housing.
As part of its 2021-26 programme, Clarion received £249.7m in return for creating 4,700 new affordable homes. It expects this partnership to continue to 2036. “Deploying grant funding into the scheme to ensure viability is key,” says Webber. “That’s a fundamental lever that we need, and we have to pull all the levers we can.”
The Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) – the region’s nine councils under the aegis of the Greater Manchester mayor – also invested £4m in Brewery Gardens through its Brownfield Housing Fund. “This support was so important to secure viability and making sure schemes of this scale are delivered, because there’s a lot of complexity and constraints to developing on brownfield sites,” Webber adds.
He concedes that Latimer is not like most private sector developers. As part of a social landlord, 80% of the homes it delivers every year are affordable and the majority are retained and integrated into Clarion’s 125,000 national stock. But it does mean it can build at scale. “We have a pipeline of around 1,800 homes across the country a year, of which most are affordable,” Webber adds. "I firmly believe in a social purpose, in wanting to help address the housing crisis and I understand the importance of giving everyone a good home wherever they are.
“Manchester is a real growth area for us and the city, in particular, has been very supportive of our ambitions and scale.” He adds that they have shared objectives, particularly building to high sustainable standards, while facing the same viability and delivery challenges.
Strangeways regeneration plan
For political leaders in the city, Brewery Gardens is both symbolic and strategically important. Boddingtons Brewery is an iconic, heritage brand with this part of the old site sitting derelict since 2005. It will join the £100m Manchester College city centre campus and the newly completed Waterhouse Gardens, a £195m 556- home high spec development by Salboy, breathing life into the old brewery site.
As part of its sustainability credentials, Brewery Gardens is car-free with homes built to energy performance rating EPC B. While the development is striking for its majority of affordable homes (a minimum of 10% is required in major developments), it is worth noting how it incorporates high-density, sustainable, mixed tenure housing on a city centre, brownfield heritage site. It has overcome multiple viability challenges that can otherwise stall the development of large-scale affordable housing.
Both Brewery Gardens and Waterhouse Gardens mark the first developments in the Strangeways regeneration plan, a long-term joint project between Manchester and Salford city councils. But more crucially, Brewery Gardens is being hailed as proof that the city’s focus on affordable housing, particularly in its centre, can be achieved. “It’s a massive deal in terms of getting affordable homes in the city centre,” says former city council leader and now Greater Manchester Mayor Bev Craig. “We’ve got big plans for this part of the city. This sends a message that the work is starting, it’s not pie in the sky.”
And Brewery Gardens has been a long time coming. Latimer bought the site in 2021, with completion due in 2025. But new building regulations warranted a second stair core in its 29-storey building leading to a redesign, additional planning approval, and a delay of over a year in the programme. It came just as the region was starting to pivot its approach to housing. By then Manchester had experienced a decade-long construction boom, particularly in high rise residential developments, becoming the seventh tallest city in Europe.
But, according to Savills, there has been an 81% increase in Manchester house prices in the last 10 years and 40% rise in private rents in the last three years alone. Affordable housing supply has failed to meet demand, with just 4,093 affordable homes completed since 2018. The result is families priced out of the market, a housing waiting list of 20,000 and a significant rise in the use of temporary accommodation. A housing crisis that is familiar in many cities across the UK.
The city council now has a build target of 36,000 new homes by 2032, with 10,000 of these affordable and 3,000 located in the city centre. The GMCA, as part of its Housing First policy (for everyone to have an affordable home by 2038), is aiming for 75,000 new homes across the city region by 2030, with at least 10,000 of these to be socially rented, energy efficient homes. The city council is already reporting its biggest delivery of affordable and social housing for 25 years with 901 affordable homes completed in 2025/26 (including 439 for social rent).
For prime minister Andy Burnham, Brewery Gardens is proof that his affordable housing drive in Manchester can deliver. So, how will this translate across the rest of the country? In one of his first speeches Burnham has already confirmed that his Housing First philosophy – providing affordable homes as a pillar to support social, education and economic standards – will become national policy.
He’s proposing to launch the country’s largest council house building programme since the end of the Second World War, including high-density developments on already vacant, brownfield public land. More details on how he’ll achieve this are expected in the coming months. “What I think that really means is providing the developing housing associations, like ourselves,” says Webber, “with the capital to deliver these homes at scale across the country.”
“There is a strong trend toward projects with purpose being the hook to attract the very best young talent into the industry” Emma Fletcher MRICS, Octopus Energy
The role of surveyors in social housing
Emma Fletcher MRICS is innovation director at Octopus Energy and chair of the RICS Residential Professional Group Panel. She explains why chartered surveyors are indispensable at every stage of social housing development.
What role do surveyors play in planning and developing social housing projects?
Many surveyors move into planning and development from other competencies and are an asset to the project team. Not only must you understand complex land acquisitions, legal agreements and negotiation skills but you must also manage the entire team of experts, corralling them into a planning application as soon as possible while ensuring you work within budget and provide sufficient detail to secure a planning permission for your client.
It would be easy to say that you are a jack of all trades in planning and development but that’s precisely why this area of surveying attracts some of the brightest and most inquisitive minds. No two sites are the same, no budget or grant scheme is ever the same and every day is a school day even for the most seasoned surveyor.
What value can surveyors bring to a large housing project like Boddingtons Brewery in Manchester and more broadly to regeneration projects across the country?
Regeneration projects are hard. They suggest market failure or a relocation of whatever was there before and they also mark change for the existing community. This means that public scrutiny and feelings tend to be heightened, and the surveyor’s role takes on an added pressure of making an area better than it was before.
Building surveyors are critical for understanding what must be kept, how a project functions, and for ensuring budgets are under control. Complex projects also require compromise and compassion from the front-line planning and development team, juggling the many views of urban design officers, local politicians and architects who may all have slightly different visions for a cleared, but valued site.
When done correctly – as at Boddingtons Brewery – they restore local civic pride, provide local jobs and a new source of life and economy in the area and most importantly homes for local people.
Do you think working on projects with a strong social purpose is important to the next generations of surveyors?
In an increasingly complex built and natural environment, the latest generation of surveyors want to be involved in projects that truly transform lives or improve the planet (ideally both). Yes, the physical impact is important but there is a strong trend toward projects with purpose being the hook to attract the very best young talent into the industry.
It’s not just why, how and when but increasingly whom the project benefits that we should also be asking the client and ourselves. Housing is a particularly hot topic for the newest cohort of surveyors, mainly due to the expense, lack of supply and quality of homes they can rent or buy.
Flagship projects led by housing associations such as Clarion at Boddingtons Brewery therefore tick a lot of boxes for surveyors who want action not words, and front doors not derelict land, in the places they live and work.
Once the project is completed, how do surveyors continue to have a role in social/affordable housing developments?
One of the key areas for surveyors after occupation of the homes is block and tenant management. Both are very separate skill sets that impact the occupier. Without careful planning, maintenance, insurance and cleaning, new developments can quickly look shabby and unloved.
Underestimate the service charge or the insurance cover and the management company could find itself in a difficult situation. Repairs and maintenance, managing tenants and antisocial behaviour can all fall under the role of the residential surveyor together with reletting, managing shared ownership staircasing and the collecting of rent.
Just because the builders leave does not mean the work stops. It requires professional skill, attention to detail and great people skills to keep a development functioning into the future.
