Avenue of skyscrapers will lead to city centre
DRAMATIC plans to connect Hulme to Manchester city centre through a new neighbourhood of skyscrapers will go before council bosses today.
Town hall proposals would fill in the gap between the Mancunian Way and Knott Mill with towers up to 50 storeys high.
Ultimately, 6,000 new rental apartments and a series of public spaces would be created as part of the huge new Great Jackson Street district, named after the road that runs through its centre.
Bounded by the River Medlock, City Road East, the inner ring-road and Chester Road, development of the largely-vacant triangular swathe of land is among the council’s key regeneration goals.
The tallest buildings, of between 30 and 50 storeys, would sit along the site’s edges, particularly at its frontage to Mancunian Way and Chester Road.
Residents have raised concerns, however, arguing demand may not actually exist for so many new city centre flats - and warning of increased traffic and a lack of schools, GP surgeries or affordable housing. The start of the area’s wider transformation began in earnest last year, with work starting on a cluster of new skyscrapers around Owen Street, close to the city centre.
Development giant Renaker - the firm behind that scheme - has also been acquiring sites between those blocks and the Mancunian Way and now holds most of the land.
The council’s blueprint for the district, which will provide a framework for future planning applications, earmarks it for dozens of rental apartment blocks, clustered around a network of new green spaces.
Those will be linked up to the Hulme bridge over the Mancunian Way, connecting the communities.
New pedestrian routes are also promised between the neighbourhood and Castlefield, Deansgate and First Street.
Taller blocks would sit along the frontage to the Mancunian Way and Chester Road, although not as tall as the tallest skyscraper - 64 storeys currently being built at Owen Street.
Much of the land is currently either cleared or taken up with surface car parks, although some industrial businesses still remain.
A consultation on the council’s vision has prompted a number of criticisms from residents, however.
Among them are concerns that too many apartments are now being built in the city centre, over-estimating future demand.
“There is a risk of many unoccupied units as the proposals are based on an optimistic guess,” according to one respondent quoted in a covering report going to the council’s executive committee today.
Another resident states more ‘investor-purchased’ rental apartments will not benefit the local community or first-time buyers, arguing it would lead to a ‘transient’ population.
Others have asked how demand for new schools and doctors will be met.
The plans also make no mention of ‘affordable’ homes. One respondent says they ‘appear to provide a large quantity of upmarket housing, which does not meet the city’s need for affordable and social housing.’
Concerns that an already-congested area will be clogged up further by up to 3,000 new cars - the number of new parking spaces identified in the framework - have also been raised.
Regeneration chief Eddie Smith dismisses the concerns in the plan’s cover report, however.
Already the area is full of surface car parks, it points out, concluding the development is ‘unlikely to increase traffic congestion.’
It says the council’s analysis shows ‘there has been a historic undersupply of new units in the city centre over recent years, meaning there is a shortfall of residential units,’ adding: “Demand for rented accommodation has soared in recent years and ‘build to rent’ will continue to be important.”
The Great Jackson Street blueprint will go before council bosses at today’s executive meeting.