Mayfield Park is the first park to open in Manchester city centre in a century. In it, an unearthed part of the River Medlock flows through a 6.5-acre slice of brownfield land next to Manchester Piccadilly station that had sat empty for decades. The river quickly drew in wildlife, with kingfishers and brown trout among the flora and fauna. Rediscovered Victorian wells water the greenery, saving 3m litres of water and one tonne of carbon a year. A six-tower play area is anchored by an 18m slide across the water.
The public-private partnership behind the park is hoping it will set the tone for the £1.4bn regeneration project planned for its surrounds – one that will make a game-changing social impact on Manchester. By 2030, the Mayfield Partnership seeks to deliver 1,500 new homes, 1.6m sq ft of commercial space, 56,000 sq ft of shops and leisure uses and 13 acres of public realm across 24 acres. Works on the first phase, which will provide some 319,000 sq ft of workspace in two office blocks and a 581-space car park, are set to begin this year.
It has taken just over six years for the partnership – which comprises developer U+I, Manchester City Council, Transport for Greater Manchester and LCR, the government’s placemaking specialist – to get to this point, having inked the development agreement in 2016. During that time, the stakeholders have had to define a clear vision, establish a lot of trust, stay flexible and overcome funding challenges to maintain the project’s momentum.
Crucially, a £23m grant from the government’s Getting Building Fund in 2020 boosted the project at a time of pandemic-driven uncertainty for many developments. And a funding deal with Landsec, which acquired U+I last year, helped unlock the project’s £400m first phase.
Mike Hood, chief executive at U+I, describes the latter as “transformative”. He recalls how he joined U+I in 2020 as a business that had “great vision and fantastic ideas”, but “definitely didn’t have the balance sheet to be able to deliver all of those”.
“We were able to bring the expertise to a project like Mayfield, but not the right type of capital,” says Hood. “That created complexity for us as shareholders. Our deal with Landsec addresses that question and brings capital that is well aligned with all of our partners in creating an amazing place.”
Early feasibility studies for the next stage, 1b, are being carried out. In the city’s strategic regeneration framework, drawn up before the pandemic, that next stage would involve developing more commercial space. However, the partnership says there is scope to pivot to other uses.
“We are not laying down all the deliverables at day one,” says Mike Mellor, head of commercial and real estate at TfGM. “The beauty of our approach is that it is flexible within the constraints and vision. We haven’t nailed down what every phase is going to look like, the size, scale, the use, every plot, so that can involve some extended time frames put in place for five years.”
Peter Hawthorne, chief executive at LCR, emphasises the importance of staying agile throughout. “Sometimes you have to change your tactics to get to the vision,” he says. “You can’t be utterly slavish in saying, ‘I’ve said I’m going to do that and I’m going to come what may’. It doesn’t work that way.”
One city vision
Building strong relationships is essential to ensuring that plots like Mayfield do not sit empty for long stretches of time. Becca Heron, strategic director of growth and development at Manchester council, says the foundation for those relationships is a clear, shared vision, the groundwork for which was laid by leaders such as Sir Howard Bernstein and former council chief Sir Richard Leese.
“What Manchester has done really well, over 20, 30 years, is start with a vision of what it wants to achieve,” says Heron. “It always looks for opportunities to bring forward. There is a really strong partnership approach.
“We are very good at defining a vision and sticking to it, but taking pragmatic routes to delivering it, so we understand what different parties are looking for – certainly our private sector partners will be looking for a return – but for the city and for TfGM, it is what kind of place we shape here. That is what stands Manchester in good stead.”
The Mayfield Partnership is applying that same approach to the project. “You can get sucked into detail quite often – if you put three sets of lawyers in a room, they will always find a reason for you to disagree on something,” says Heron. “That’s why it is important to have a partnership that is pragmatic and constantly comes back to what we are trying to deliver. Every party will have their red lines, but being pragmatic around those to find a way through is at the heart of a successful partnership.”
For Hawthorne, Mayfield is a “perfect example of a complex problem that many of our cities face”. “What we were able to do was bring together skills and capital from the private sector with the land, expertise and local knowledge of the public sector partners,” he says. “Fundamentally, you need to build a partnership based on trust. If you get that right, the complexities can sound simple – they aren’t, but it allows you to navigate them in a way in which you are aligned.”
Hood adds: “We can say with a great deal of certainty that large-scale, complex mixed-use regeneration schemes don’t go as planned. It’s about accepting that, and accepting our job is to guide that project in a positive way to deliver the outcomes.”
A united public sector voice
The partnership is overseen by a board of eight directors, with the public sector partners also having their own board and retaining external agents. A circa 20-strong combined working group sits below the board, focusing on due diligence and making recommendations.
In that structure “there’s not a lot of room for mistakes”, says Mellor. Spending limits without approval from the public sector stakeholders are in the realm of £10,000. “It’s a bit of a burden, to be honest, that level of scrutiny,” he adds. “But there is total transparency, so it creates a lot of confidence.”
The development has been “a meeting of minds” between the public sector landowners, says Mellor. It has come a long way from a site in “mixed ownerships with very low-value uses, and shopping trolleys in the River Medlock”, as LCR’s Hawthorne puts it.
If we as a developer turn up and express the purpose of this project in purely economic terms with our public sector partners, that would be a huge mistake
“There was a holistic approach in terms of the commercial split, where we decided not to have any arguments about where development takes place,” says Mellor. “It was very easy for us to bring our assets together into a comprehensive whole that would prove attractive to the market.”
To maximise efficiency, the public sector partners convene regularly outside of normal meeting cycles to ensure they behave as a single entity. For different phases or activities, one stakeholder usually leads on the trio’s behalf.
“From a U+I perspective, it has been much like having a single partner,” says Hood. “I can’t think of an instance while I have been involved in the project where there has been significant misalignment. Maybe that misalignment takes place outside of the room, but when it comes to our partnership meetings, the public sector partners turn up with one voice, which makes it a far more effective way of working.”
“Some of us on the [public sector] side have been involved in Mayfield in one form or another for quite a long period of time,” adds Hawthorne, who, along with Mellor, has been involved in the project for more than 10 years. “There are relationships that have developed over that period of time that help build trust and give you an opportunity to exchange information in a pretty honest way.”
Those relationships, within and outside of the partnership, will doubtless play a big part in addressing the project’s main challenges over the next few years, which include optimising connectivity between the planned HS2 railway and the site.
Shared values
For the public sector partners, it was essential to secure a development partner that was in it for the long haul. “It’s a long-term relationship,” says the council’s Heron. “You start a partnership with ambition, optimism and excitement and then it’s really rough, when you are dealing with brownfield for industrial sites. It can be many years before you start to see the development coming out of the ground, then you have the macroeconomic climate affecting the market you are operating in.
“Ultimately, it starts with a very clear brief. As you go out to procure a partner, it is about understanding what they are going to bring, and that commitment to the long term.”
A major factor in selecting U+I was its aligned values, where “softer issues were of equal importance to the hard commerciality of what we are trying to deliver”, says Mellor. The park is described as an example of where public benefits were prioritised over commercial undertakings, to become the first element delivered. “U+I was completely on board with the city council’s vision of embracing communities in the area and not creating additional barriers,” says Mellor. Those shared values have led to “very few points of tension” so far, he adds.
Hood underlines the importance of recognising that each partner has different desired outcomes from the project. “If we as a developer turn up and express the purpose of this project in purely economic terms with our public sector partners, that would be a huge mistake because really what we are there to do together is make people’s lives better by creating an amazing part of those cities,” he says.
“Of course, that in turn creates financial value. But value means a different thing to each partner. Recognising that from the outset and making sure we don’t forget that as we go through each decision has meant that, on the whole, we have stayed very much aligned with the original purpose that we set together.”
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