Manchester regeneration: The Three Manchesters - Part 1 of 4

If you want to understand how a city gets built, do not start with a map. Start with someone who has built it.

Manchester regeneration: the fundamentals explained

That four-part series, Making Sense of Manchester, comes from an exclusive interview with Phil Mayall, Managing Director of the developer Muse.

Phil Mayall - Managing Director of Muse

Walk the River Irwell at New Bailey in Salford, or change trains at Stockport's rebuilt Exchange, and you are standing in places Muse put there. This is a developer whose work you can physically walk through.

Through ECF, its long-running partnership with Homes England and L&G, Muse is completing the final phase of the £1bn Salford Central regeneration and starting the £2.5bn, 240-acre Crescent masterplan next door.

Forty years into the business, this is a company that does not discuss Manchester in the abstract. It has helped make it. So when Phil talks about how the city actually works, it pays to slow down and listen.

And the first thing he does is take the word “Manchester” and pull it apart, because it is not one place. It is three, nested inside each other, smallest to largest:

• Manchester the district: the local authority, the ground Manchester City Council actually governs.

• The regional centre: the dense, walkable core, which ignores the boundary lines and runs across into Salford and a corner of Trafford.

• Greater Manchester: the ten boroughs, bound together by the combined authority Burnham led on his way to Downing Street.

There is a reason to get this right beyond pedantry. When Andy Burnham was winning his mayoral elections, the national press kept calling him the Mayor of Manchester. He was the Mayor of Greater Manchester, which is a different job over a different map.

Same word, three places, three different stories. Here is how they differ, and why the difference matters before you commit a pound.

1. Manchester the district: making the centre's success reach the neighbourhoods

At this level, the question is distribution. 

The city centre has boomed. The district centres, the local high streets and town centres like Wythenshawe, Gorton and Withington, have not always felt it. 

Bev Craig made spreading that benefit outward a priority as leader of Manchester City Council, and carried it with her when she was elected Mayor of Greater Manchester in July 2026, succeeding Burnham. 

The logic holds at either level: otherwise the centre becomes a magnet, pulling in the investment while the surrounding communities either miss out, or, just as damaging, feel like they do.

What defines this level:

• The unit is the neighbourhood: individual district centres, each with its own offering, community and challenges.

• The story is distribution: taking what worked in the core and rippling it out, so the whole city feels the benefit and not just the middle.

• The pressure is political and local: as Phil sees it, the political incentives increasingly reward leaders who put visible investment into the places people actually live, so expect the next leader to press harder on this, not ease off.

• The method is playing to each place's strengths: every district has an asset to build on.

Take Wythenshawe.

It is one of the most quietly well-positioned places in Greater Manchester, and once you see what it already has, the opportunity is obvious.

Start with the people.

This is a large and diverse community of more than 100,000, with a deep voluntary and community sector already building civic pride and long-term community benefit, and a real appetite for change, which is the hardest ingredient of all to manufacture.

Then add the physical hand it has been dealt:

• Manchester Airport on the doorstep, the UK's third busiest.

• A major hospital, driving jobs and innovation.

• A tram line running straight into the city centre.

• Some of the most expensive housing outside London, a few minutes away in south Manchester.

  
  

Put the two together, an engaged community and infrastructure that would cost a fortune to build from scratch, and you have the makings of one of the region's strongest regeneration opportunities.

This is not theory.

Wythenshawe town centre is now the subject of a £500m regeneration running over the next ten to fifteen years, serving that community of around 100,000.

It starts with the first 423 affordable homes across three brownfield sites (Alpha House, Brotherton House and The Birtles), delivered by Muse with Wythenshawe Community Housing Group and backed in part by the Good Growth Fund, as a down payment on the roughly 2,000 new homes planned.

The district task, as Phil frames it, is building on fundamentals like these, the people as much as the place, to realise that potential. Every district centre has its own version of that strength to work from.

2. The regional centre: the core runs out of easy land and splits into quarters

Step up a level and the geography changes.

The regional centre is Manchester, Salford and a slice of Trafford treated as a single place, because on the ground that is what it is.

You can walk clear across its heart in about half an hour, straight across the council boundaries. This is the bit most people picture when they say “Manchester”, and its story is a turning point.

What defines this level:

• The easy land is nearly gone: two decades of growth ran on low-hanging fruit, the surface car parks, the derelict plots, the inefficient sheds. That supply is almost used up, so building at scale in the core only gets harder from here.

• The core is splitting into distinct neighbourhoods: much as London separates into its West End and its City, the centre is forming quarters with their own character. Ancoats, once treated as beyond the centre, now reads as part of it and flows into New Islington. Middlewood Locks is doing the same on the Salford side.

• “The centre” keeps stretching: places that were the hinterland ten years ago are, in residents' minds, now central.

• Employment space is the hard part: delivering offices and workspace here is difficult and expensive, and that single tension shapes almost everything. It is the subject of Part 2.

On the Salford bank of the Irwell, Muse's New Bailey has turned a stretch of car parks and sidings into a working office district, and its final piece, Eden, is a twelve-storey tower wrapped in Europe's largest living wall, more than 350,000 plants growing up its face.

Notice where it stands: New Bailey is in Salford, not Manchester, yet nobody walking it would sense they had crossed a boundary. That is the regional centre in one step, ignoring the boundary line. Around it, Salford Central as a whole is set to support around 9,500 jobs.

3. Greater Manchester: the same idea, one level up

Widen the lens fully, and you reach Greater Manchester: ten boroughs and a combined authority.

The striking thing is that its central challenge is the district challenge all over again, just at a bigger scale.

Where the city wants to carry benefit from its centre to its neighbourhoods, Greater Manchester wants to carry growth from the regional centre out to the boroughs, so the activity is not simply dragged into the core like metal to a magnet.

What defines this level:

• The unit is the borough: all ten of them (Bolton, Bury, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford and Wigan), not just the city.

• The story is spreading growth outward: the same magnet problem, one level up.

• The tool is the Good Growth Fund: the £1bn Greater Manchester programme Burnham launched and Bev Craig now runs as mayor, putting in just enough public money to make schemes in the boroughs stack up, so growth lands right across the city region and not only at its heart.

• The stakes are national now: with Burnham in Downing Street, that model carries a profile it never had before.

Head south to Stockport and you can see what that looks like on the ground. Muse's Stockport Exchange has rebuilt the land beside the railway station into a business district: the first four phases are complete, on the way to roughly 375,000 sq ft of Grade A offices, a hotel and a new public square where car parks and sidings used to be.

Growth arriving in a borough town, not just the core, is exactly what this level is meant to produce.

Why it matters

The three nest inside each other, but they are not interchangeable. Which Manchester you mean sets the story, the risk and the return:

• a district scheme like Wythenshawe town centre is about turning strong local fundamentals into social outcomes;

• a regional-centre play like New Bailey is about a fragmenting, land-constrained core;

• a Greater Manchester project like Stockport Exchange is about carrying growth into a borough.

Three different bets, each with its own logic.

The rest of this series works inside it, with Phil as the guide: why the towers really went up, who takes the risk to get anything built at all, and why, on paper, none of it should happen.

This Manchester regeneration series is in Partnership with: