REVEALED | City Centre’s New 130m (426ft) Skyscraper

OPINION:

Salford is going big.

A year or so ago in the Manchester Tennis and Racquet Club (MTRC) I watched a game of ‘real tennis’ between Manchester and Paris. The MTRC is in Salford in Blackfriars Street and used to be one of the biggest buildings in the area. Not any more.

Salford’s planning authority seems to have gone insane in the area contained by Trinity Way and the River Irwell. They're frothing at the mouth granting planning permission. Anything goes it seems, at any height.

The latest mega-structures, this 44 storey building and the neighbouring 34 storey building, will join a jumping skyline that includes the 330ft One Greengate. Maybe there is an analogy with those aforementioned Parisians in the way their city clumped its skyscrapers in La Defense. Maybe. The difference was behind the Paris scheme there was a plan.

If there is any sort of policy other than expediency from Salford it’s hard to see.

Many of the buildings being built have individual merits and OMI, for example, who are delivering Exchange Court and One Greengate, are a considered and fine architectural practice. But this rush to build towers in this area of the city seems to lack any sort of cohesive plan. It’s almost as if the City of Salford is in a panic to let things through before there’s another economic slump.  

Property booms can deliver terrible results.

The former Inland Revenue building, Highland House, now the world’s ugliest Premier Inn, was rushed up in 1966 and has cruelly dominated Manchester’s medieval Cathedral over the river ever since. Let’s hope Salford isn’t repeating history with this slapping up of towers.

I’ve been reading old Manchester Guardian’s during research for a new book and time and again in the early nineteenth and early twentieth century, sometimes with wonder and sometimes with anger, commentators remark how Manchester and Salford appear to have developed with scarcely any limits on what private developers desire. You look at what is happening between Trinity Way and the River Irwell and you can’t help think plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

It's instructive that Manchester and Salford are unusual amongst British cities in having no high buildings policy. Each individual case is looked at on its own merits. Renaker seems to be the developer which is benefitting most from this (more French sorry) laissez-faire attitude, indeed, the secondary city centre over the Rivers Irwell and Medlock is turning into Renakerville.

Build, build, build seems the Manchester mantra. But don't think it's stopping with Exchange Court. We can expect more towering plans very soon.   

One last point.

What's with the names? Exchange Court, what exchange and when, which court? We also hear the neighbouring 34 storey building is going to be called The Residence. How ridiculous. If historical precedent were needed this area was full of ironworks, breweries, cotton mills, dyeworks and tanneries. Any of that is more interesting than the bloody Residence.  

Jonathan Schofield