HSBC, gone. Grant Thornton, gone. Pinsent Masons, gone. Is Spinningfields in trouble?

“How are you going to make it attractive to occupiers who now want something different to what they wanted a few years ago?”

Dear readers — when Spinningfields was launched in the early noughties, it was heralded as Manchester’s answer to Canary Wharf. It quickly became clear that people wanted to buy what Spinningfields was selling, as top-end financial and legal firms piled into its glassy office blocks. But two decades on, a lot of those leases are expiring — and many of the big names have taken the chance to get out. Quite a few of the buildings are now unoccupied, or only partly occupied. Has the district lost its way? Our data reporter Daniel Timms answers that question today. But first, your Mill briefing.

---

Your Mill briefing

🏡 On Tuesday, Andy Burnham announced he would build 10,000 homes for social rent and lobby the government for powers to scrap Right to Buy for new council homes, and in areas of Greater Manchester where housing stock is already strained. He said that if Right to Buy remains in place on these homes, solving the housing crisis would be “like trying to fill a bath but with the plug out”. The i’s housing correspondent Vicky Spratt pointed out Burnham’s pithy analogy was nabbed from former Welsh Minister Carwyn Jones, who said it 2016. As Spratt also points out, Labour are still keeping Right to Buy under review, with no mention of scrapping it in their plans, which casts some doubt on Burnham’s plan to get the right to scrap it devolved to the mayor’s office.

🤑 A report by the Royal Academy of Engineering has found that universities have raised the amount of equity entrepreneurs have to give back when they found companies using university resources or off the back of university research. This is despite the treasury asking for this spin out “tax” to be cut. The University of Manchester takes a 35% stake in its spinouts, whereas the University of Sheffield usually takes a 15-20% stake. Go deeper, and read our piece about the University of Manchester’s drive to develop more spinouts into the AI sector.

🐝 An FOI by the Local Democracy Reporting Service has found that re-painting 93 buses the signature yellow colour of the Bee Network cost the taxpayer £558,000, or about £6,000 per bus. The FOI also found that the rebranding of one tram cost £20,000. A TfGM spokesperson said increased passenger numbers after the launch of the Bee Network will pay for the rebranding in under two years. 

⚽️ Two premier league clubs are interested in signing Mason Greenwood, the Manchester United striker currently on loan, who in 2022 was charged with attempted rape, coercive and controlling behaviour and assault. Greenwood denied the accusations, and the charges were dropped by the CPS after witnesses withdrew their involvement. His return to the Premier League is likely to draw criticism; United fans protested his return to the club last year.

---

By Daniel Timms and Alex Pendleton

“‘Death of Spinningfields’, is it?” the lawyer asks with a smirk when I explain why I’m here. “Not exactly,” I reply, declining to admit that was precisely my working title for this article.

I’ve wanted to write about Spinningfields for about six months, since a well connected Mill member presented me with a list of companies:

Pinsent Masons. Grant Thornton. BNY Mellon. Santander. Deloitte. HSBC. NatWest. 

What do these all have in common? They’re all either banks, or very high end professional firms. They all have a base in Manchester. And in the last couple of years, they’ve all made the same decision: to leave Spinningfields. “It’s not a stampede, but there’s been a gradual exit of the original occupiers,” a source in Manchester’s property scene tells me. The biggest loss, in terms of occupancy, is NatWest, who still have their flagship site on Deansgate, but have vacated a bigger block to the back.

Last week, Spinningfields was hit by another blow, as WeWork announced they would be leaving too. The troubled provider of office space is trying to divest some of its sites to shore up the balance sheet. Of four locations in Manchester, it was Spinningfields that was given the axe. Is it just bad luck — or is there a pattern emerging?

Spinning out

When construction on Spinningfields began in the early noughties, it was a bold statement about the kind of city Manchester wanted to become. Stretching from Deansgate to the River Irwell, and bounded by Bridge Street and Quay Street, it was bringing something totally new. The very name of the company developing the site — Allied London — hinted at its ambitions. There were clear echoes of Canary Wharf: tall glass towers, next to the river, designed to attract the big names in high finance and law. But it was a gamble. 

1 Hardman Boulevard, currently empty. Image credit: Daniel Timms/The Mill

“It was a first mover,” says Simon Bedford, a Partner at Deloitte who has followed the city’s development closely. “It provided the kinds of spaces we hadn’t been able to benefit from previously.” That included bigger floorplates, and a prestige design for companies that wanted to make a statement.

The gamble paid off, handsomely. Offices filled up quickly as Manchester’s job market boomed. Between 2011 and 2022, the number of jobs in the city grew by 39% — more than twice as quickly as the rest of the UK (15%). Clearly, there was more business to be done. “People began to think, ‘Well, the city’s growing… Why don’t we do a few more of those?’” Bedford tells me.

Today, there are newer, shinier, greener buildings available for prestigious businesses looking to burnish their credentials. Will Lewis, who works in Transactions and Asset Management at agency OBI, says that if a firm is looking to downsize post-Covid, the best way to make that feel like a positive move is go to a better quality office, even as you reduce the quantity of space. For many, that has looked like moving out of Spinningfields as the original leases expired, with the older buildings now being the emptier ones. “It’s a function of the age of the buildings,” Lewis tells me.

So has the city’s original swanky office district lost its cachet? And is it in danger of being hollowed out?