University of Manchester to develop £1.5bn city centre business district

Manchester’s largest university is embarking on a joint venture to develop a business district on land it owns in the centre of the city, as UK higher education providers expand their commercial involvement and pursue a greater role in local business and innovation.

The University of Manchester will on Thursday announce Bruntwood SciTech, a partnership between property company Bruntwood and financial services provider Legal & General, as its preferred partner for ID Manchester, a £1.5bn “innovation district” dedicated to the growth of the science and technology sector.

The project marks a push by the university to commercialise research and development and shape its local area, as higher education vies for a clearer role in industry amid a government push to boost R&D, “level up” regions of the UK outside the south east and rebalance education towards applied and vocational learning.

“We wanted to create the biggest city centre innovation district in Europe,” Nancy Rothwell, the university’s vice-chancellor, said.

By 2025 we see that ID Manchester will become one of the world’s most renowned applied innovation districts.

The university and Bruntwood SciTech will create a joint venture to develop the innovation district, which will include 2.6m square feet of commercial workspace and a £28m investment in space for public events.

The initiative, enabled in large part by the serendipity of a disused university site in central Manchester, is the UK’s most ambitious attempt at anchoring business development in universities.

It is not the first effort of its kind by Manchester, which is a joint shareholder with Bruntwood in the Manchester Science Partnership, an incubator for the “commercialisation of knowledge and ideas in the science and technology sector”.

The ID Manchester site is formerly the home of the Manchester Institute of Science and Technology which merged with the University of Manchester in 2004. It lies between the university’s main site and the Piccadilly train station, the local terminus for HS2, the high speed railway to London that is under construction. The partners said the development had the potential to create over 10,000 jobs over the next 10-15 years.

Rothwell said the university was talking to a “number of” companies interested in setting up offices on the site. She said the development would complement the recent creation of Northern Gritstone, an investment company created by the universities of Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield, which is dedicated to financing academic spinouts in growth technology sectors.

“I think that critical mass is really important,” she said, adding that “very fast growth in digital companies” and proximity to the university was crucial to the project’s success.

Chris Oglesby, Bruntwood chief executive, said the ID site had for several years been a “strategic priority” for the company, which has developed a similar project at a nearby location previously occupied by the BBC.

“By 2025 we see that ID Manchester will become one of the world’s most renowned applied innovation districts,” he said.

The UK government aims to increase total public and private investment in R&D to 2.4 per cent of GDP by 2027, and at the same time has increased pressure on universities to create local impact.

But Kieron Flanagan, a lecturer in science and technology policy at the university, said that while the university would play a key role in producing talent, knowledge and expertise, the project was ultimately a “property development” that would depend on a range of factors for its success as an innovation site.

“It will happen if it’s attractive to the right tenants, and that will depend on the quality of the offer and on the attractiveness of Manchester for these wider interests,” he said.