Future Developments

In 2018 a Strategic Spatial Framework was adopted, which provides a guide for future development ensuring good quality design and development principles maintain the area’s unique characteristics.

This has encouraged a number of exciting developments that will offer mixed used space that can be enjoyed by students, workers, residents and visitors. 

New neighbourhood Circle Square is being developed on the former BBC site, with phase 1 scheduled to complete in 2020, creating 1,200 new homes and more than 500,000 sq. ft. of offices, a hotel, shops, restaurants and bars.

The School of Digital Arts (SODA) will form part of Manchester Metropolitan University’s Creative Campus and will be a ground breaking new home for creative digital storytelling. Opening in 2021, SODA will be a purpose-built interdisciplinary school that will address the needs of industry. 

University of Manchester’s North Campus will become ID Manchester as part of a huge £1.5 billion development that will transform the campus to create a dynamic, world-class community with innovation, collaboration and enterprise at its heart. The development is unmatched in its size and scale, and will build upon the area’s proud history of bold ideas, discovery and invention.

Manchester Science Partnerships, in partnership with Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, have started work on Citylabs 2.0. The 92,000 sq. ft. development, pre-let to global molecular diagnostics company Qiagen, will complement Citylabs 1.0. completed in 2015, also fully let, and is expected to complete by the end of 2020.

Other notable schemes that are scheduled to complete in 2020 include: Manchester Metropolitan’s Arts and Humanities building, University of Manchester’s Henry Royce Institute, and a refurbished Contact theatre.