In our last meet the place piece, we took a tour of Stockport, exploring some of the important projects in the story of the town’s development over the years. This time, we’re turning our attention to the City of Manchester, dipping our toes into some of the developments we’ve contributed considered engineering designs to.
Considered one of the fastest-growing cities in Europe and the UK, Manchester is a hotbed of development, regeneration and boundary-pushing building design. This piece will spotlight some of the most ambitious and technically complex projects renaissance has designed in recent years – from towers emerging above historic viaducts to carefully calibrated redevelopments on some of the city’s most challenging sites.
A city in transformation
One thing Manchester has never been is quiet.
The birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and the rich heritage that goes hand in hand with that. A city indelibly marked by the music and musical artists it’s inspired. A bastion of educational brilliance, playing host to two of the country’s best universities (and more if you go just outside the city bounds to Salford and Bolton). Above all else, Manchester is made famous by its unshakable sense of identity. There’s a deep and lasting flavour to the city that makes it unique.
In keeping with the rich tapestry of its story, the city has added new chapters to that ongoing tale over the last few decades. In these new instalments, Manchester has stepped confidently into the role of a truly global destination.
The pace and scale of development here is hard to ignore. It’s not just about the skyline getting taller – though, yes, it is – it’s about the remaking and reinvention of place at every level. From dormant brownfield plots to the sensitive reuse of heritage buildings, the city is being reimagined.
With devolution and the Greater Manchester Combined Authority gaining ground, local leadership has increasingly steered strategic investment into infrastructure and regeneration. This has been supported by strategic regeneration frameworks like “Places for Everyone”. This is a long-term plan guiding development across the GMCA, driving the use of brownfield land and urban locations in order to protect the green belt. With design quality and sustainability front and centre, these plans are creating real momentum.
It’s been a privilege to be a part of some of the City region’s biggest and most ambitious projects over the years. As structural and civil engineers, we navigate through the complexity of these visionary schemes, turning constraints into opportunities to deliver considered designs that enable architectural visions to come to life,
Below, you’ll find a selection of some of the most memorable projects we’ve delivered in the city over the years.
Viadux: Balancing scale with sensitivity
Standing proud amongst Manchester’s skyline, the Viadux is an impressive work of architectural and engineering design. But the real magic of the 40-storey residential site is not amongst the clouds, it lies at the base.
The incredibly complex building straddles a set of Grade II listed railway arches. The engineering ingenuity lies in how the team installed the foundations and constructed the substructure with minimal disruption to these historic assets. The challenge was threading the new structure through the old without undermining its integrity. When you’re building something substantial enough to support a 40-storey structure, this is no mean feat.
The structural design was precision-like and informed by extensive research and iterative design to reach the right solution. Sculptured columns rise majestically through the undercroft before passing through the structure and bifurcating to then support the tower above. This was a complex process – the loads, dynamic behaviour and structural sequencing had to be rigorously modelled and coordinated to preserve the listed masonry fabric. The considered engineering on show at the Viadux is a powerful demonstration of working with the city’s rich built history.
You can read on case study on the project here.
Viadux 2B – Engineering up, not out
Just across from the first Viadux tower, the detailed design for its taller sibling is taking shape. Viadux 2B takes everything learned from the first scheme and ups the ante.
Initially proposed as a broader, shorter office block, the revised scheme now features efficiently lean residential tower. The structural demands of such a slender high-rise are significant. Managing sway, dynamic performance, occupant comfort and foundation loading all become magnified issues on such a tight compact site.
Our team approached the design with a forensic mindset: stripping back assumptions, interrogating inherited constraints, and identifying opportunities to do more with less. The goal is always to deliver clarity and cut out needless overdesigning.
This is one of those schemes where the public won’t notice anything for a while. The first year of construction is largely hidden, taking place below and around the viaduct structure. But eventually, steel and concrete will pierce the skyline, supported by the considered engineering beneath it.
St Michael’s: Mixed-use, maximum complexity
Years in the making, this landmark scheme near Deansgate has weathered public discourse, redesigns, and planning negotiations since its inception. Works are now live and boots on the ground on site, finally bringing the vision from Salboy and Gary Neville’s Relentless to life. Behind all the noise, renaissance has been the structural engineers who have instilled a design vigour to bring this project to site.
After taking on the project from RIBA stage 2 onwards, we provided structural designs that developed the design of a new 43-storey elliptical tower rising from a tight, three-storey-deep basement, St Michael’s will sit proudly as one of Manchester’s most ambitious high-rise projects.
The site is extremely constrained and hemmed in on all sides by buildings, making access and logistics a finely tuned operation from day one. The construction required deep perimeter piles – more than 100 of them – to allow excavation without compromising neighbouring structures or highways. The sheer scale of temporary works and sequencing required to deliver the basement to accommodate St Michael’s alone is notable.
Add to that the building’s use – hotel, residential, retail, leisure, cultural and even faith uses – and it becomes a Rubik’s Cube of engineering. Floors change their use, layouts shift and mega-columns emerge to carry transfers across multiple levels. It’s a scheme that demands collaboration, careful planning and a considered approach with no wiggle-room.
With the core rising quickly, it’s becoming increasingly visible on the skyline. But much of the project’s real achievement will remain in the ground, and the time invested in ensuring the structure supported the building’s changing uses while turning tight constraints into smart design opportunities.
You can read on case study on the project here.
The Press: Celebrating the past with a light touch
Just along from Angel Meadows sits The Press, a perfect record of the development of material use through the industrial revolution, reflecting Manchester’s industrial history. Originally constructed for the Co-operative Printing Society, the site expanded and evolved over time, with each addition capturing the engineering practices of its day.
When Salboy acquired the site for redevelopment, they wanted to retain the building’s identity and as structural engineers, it was our job to make that possible.
Each block was uniquely different, so a standardised approach wouldn’t cut it. We undertook detailed investigations into each frame, section, and connection detail to understand precisely how it had been built, and how it might be reused.
The result involved remarkably restrained interventions. Where others might have reached for visually intrusive steel and disruptive retrofitting, we worked hard to fully understand the building in order to retain as much of the original fabric as possible, leaving structure exposed, avoiding intrusive enhancement details and letting the history of the place shine through.
It’s a project that demonstrates how low-impact design doesn’t have to mean compromise. At The Press, it added value aesthetically, materially, and environmentally, with this low embodied carbon approach leading to an Institute of Structural Engineers award for sustainable project of the year.
You can read on case study on the project here.
A continuing evolution
Our work in Manchester reflects a broader ethos: that engineering isn’t just about making things stand up, it’s about making them make sense. What’s more, it’s about designing solutions that respect the past, enable the present, and anticipate the future, through a collaborative approach to design, lean engineering and buildability front and centre.
Whether it’s threading new towers through listed viaducts, unlocking difficult sites, or keeping structural intervention to a bare minimum, the same mindset applies. We can solve the right problems, solve them properly and do so whilst never losing sight of the true value this adds to the place we’re building in – this is key to good engineering.
As Manchester continues to grow and evolve, so too will the challenges. But for renaissance, it’s those challenges that make it all worthwhile.
This city deserves nothing less.
