They decided what our city will look like, then people started asking why
Do Manchester’s foremost architects get preferential treatment?
By Jack Dulhanty
“If you want to look at any two people responsible for the way Manchester looks,” says Andy Spinoza, the author of Manchester Unspun, the chronicle of Manchester’s lightspeed development over the past four decades, “it’s predominantly SimpsonHaugh.”
In a 2021 article about city centre development, the writer Jonathan Schofield describes a cluster of skyscrapers going up in the city centre as being designed “inevitably again, by SimpsonHaugh Architects.” Similarly, reflecting on the practice’s 37 years working in the city, architecture critic Phil Griffin says “there hasn’t been another architect, or architectural practice across that timespan, that’s had even half the impact that SimpsonHaugh has had.”
At the end of the road of the Deansgate coffee shop where I’m meeting Spinoza, four of SimpsonHaugh’s glittering glass towers are visible. From The Mill office in the Royal Exchange, there isn’t a window I can look out of without seeing a SimpsonHaugh creation: Beetham Tower, Deansgate Square, No.1 Deansgate, No.1 Spinningfields, Urbis. These multi-storey glass buildings, which have started to surround the city centre more and more over the last decade, have come to define modern Manchester. They are seen as an indication of where the city is today, and what its future will look like. As Spinoza puts it: “The towers demand a response.”
Some have wondered whether SimpsonHaugh has too much sway over the city’s skyline. Onlookers and competitors alike wonder if they’ve been receiving preferential treatment from Manchester City Council’s planning team.
They aren’t the only ones thought to be receiving this treatment. In Manchester Unspun, Spinoza describes a “Manchester Mafia” — a clique of council bigwigs, developers and designers who have an almost dictatorial power over how our city looks, and by extension, how the rest of us experience it. In 2018, the council’s director of planning David Roscoe had to deny that the city had any preferred architects.
But SimpsonHaugh says that it’s more complex than this — that the towers would be built regardless, and they are merely the firm behind many of the designs. For Ian Simpson and Rachel Haugh, the practice’s founders, it’s simple: if not us, then who?
The cities we live in were all once lines on a page. Before that, they existed only in the minds of the architects, planners and builders that hoisted them into place. From my desk at The Mill’s office, I can see an apartment that once existed in the imagination of Ian Simpson. With its seven-metre-high ceilings and garden of olive trees, the 47th and 48th floors of Beetham Tower form Simpson’s personal penthouse.
“Beetham Tower is one of very few examples of a building in the modern day, the outline of which has come to characterise a city,” says Griffin — who, besides being an architecture critic, is also a friend of both Simpson and Haugh.
Completed in 2006, Beetham Tower defined not only SimpsonHaugh’s practice, but the city itself. Its silhouette — which juts out in the middle, making it look like two mislaid Tetris blocks — is instantly recognisable. When it was first built, it was the UK’s tallest building outside of London. It seemed to indicate that Manchester had become a truly modern city. I remember my mum and dad driving my sister and I into town to see it. We weren’t able to get low enough to see the top of it out the car window.
Manchester wasn’t a stranger to tall buildings at that time — after all, the 118-metre CIS Tower has loomed over it since 1962. But Beetham Tower, at 169 metres, was distinctive in that it sat in the centre of the city, on its busiest street. What’s more, it stood alone. When the Great Recession struck in 2008, city centre development was reduced to virtually nothing; Beetham Tower had the skyline to itself for many years, which likely helped cement its place in the public imagination.
This also makes the current number of high rises in the city even more striking — they have sprung up in the last decade alone. In a report last year, SAVE Britain’s Heritage, an organisation dedicated to the conservation of heritage buildings, estimated that 27 towers over 65 storeys high have been completed since 2017, with 20 more under construction and 51 granted planning permission. Beetham Tower was the gateway drug to this current addiction to vertical development.
But its designers keep a low profile, usually appearing in the odd trade magazine when they get planning permission for a new building, or when the practice reaches an anniversary. They are essentially the draughtsmen of our skyline, but what do we know about them?
It’s a late Monday afternoon in the boardroom of SimpsonHaugh’s offices, overlooking the River Medlock and their Deansgate Square development. Simpson and Haugh are between meetings. Haugh, who is in her early sixties, is softly spoken and mostly unflappable, with short and ashy blonde hair. She is always dressed impeccably, in dark cashmere with minimalist jewellery and a pair of wire-frame glasses.
Simpson, who is nearing 70, is tall with a leonine head of grey hair. His voice is resonant; he’s more likely to go off on a tangent than Haugh, and to speak with more candour. They are described as two sides of the same coin. Haugh is soft-spoken, while Simpson is a little more gruff. One ex-employee of the practice tries to find a way to describe the pair: “What do they say? Brains and brawn?”
A clue to their contrasting personalities may be in their upbringings: Simpson and Haugh tell me how they grew up on opposite sides of Greater Manchester: the former in Heywood, Rochdale; the latter in Bramhall, Stockport.
Simpson's family was working-class with parents and five children living above a transport cafe run by his mother. His father worked in demolition, mostly mill chimneys. The irony of a father knocking down the Manchester of old and a son designing what replaced it isn’t lost on anybody. Haugh’s family were from Liverpool and were more middle class — her father moved to Manchester to work in the textile industry, after being a spitfire pilot in the war.
Haugh’s interest in architecture came from her mother’s discomfort in libraries. From a young age, Haugh was sent into libraries to pick up books on her mother’s behalf — Margaret Haugh avoided libraries because she felt surrounded by knowledge she didn’t have.
When Rachel Haugh was 11, Margaret enrolled on a mature training course at Elizabeth Gaskell College. One of the modules was architecture, and she needed books for research. The younger Haugh was sent to get them for her — key books about Mies Van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier — which she leafed through herself.
She studied architecture at Bath University. “All I wanted to do was get out of Manchester because it was dead,” says Haugh. She remembers the city centre in the early ’80s, when it was a few pubs and a weather-stained town hall. “It was on its knees, nothing happening at all.”
Simpson says he became interested in architecture at a similar age to Haugh. He was taken by the idea that his sketches could be made real. He went to Liverpool Polytechnic, now John Moores, and excelled. After graduating, he got a job at the prestigious London firm run by Norman Foster, the designer of the Gherkin and Millennium Bridge.
They met in 1985 while working at a practice in Warrington called Austin-Smith:Lord, and shared frustrations about the industry, as well as shared ambitions. “We were both desperate to achieve the very best we could,” Haugh says. So, in 1987, “we set up the practice,” says Simpson. Then named Ian Simpson Architects (the name would stick until 2016), with an office in Orient House on Granby Row.
To support the new practice, Simpson worked as a lecturer at The University of Manchester while Haugh was working at the studio. They designed houses in south Manchester for owners wanting to make use of their garden space, and renovated old warehouses in Ancoats and Castlefield. Their work redeveloping the corner of the city where they have their current office attracted the interest of other landowners.
They shared that office — on Commercial Street, off Deansgate — with the structural engineer Martin Stockley. The three of them would go for lunch together and take walks into the city. They’d talk about what they would change about how the city was organised. Then, in 1996, the IRA detonated the largest bomb in Great Britain since the Second World War, and the city council set up a design competition for the rebuild.
The three agreed to work together on a proposal. The plans, made in partnership with planning consultancy EDAW, included an upmarket thoroughfare of designer shops connecting St Mary’s Gate and St Ann’s Square to Exchange Square and the Cathedral.
The post-bomb regeneration, in the words of former council leader Richard Leese, “unleashed a wave of investment” into the city centre. It was at the beginning of a transformation, from home to about 500 people (mostly cleaners and security guards) to almost 70,000 today. SimpsonHaugh, at the centre of this change, were well-placed to benefit. Particularly now they were known to the council — more specifically to Sir Howard Bernstein, a council officer who led the rebuild, but later to become Manchester City Council’s chief executive.
Sources say that Bernstein operated an informal system of referral, often mentioning planners, architects, to those looking to invest in the city. Stockley, who knew Bernstein, remembers one developer calling him and saying: “I don’t know who you are, but Howard Bernstein told me to ring you.”
This set-up is what Spinoza means when he refers to the “Manchester mafia”. Stockley, however, says there was nothing inherently corrupt about the arrangement. “Those stories started in the offices of not very good architects who weren’t doing well,” he says. He doesn’t see any corruption, and certainly nothing that would fit the ‘mafia’ description: “In a mafia, even if you’re bad at the job, you’re kept in the family.”
Post-bomb, SimpsonHaugh was commissioned to build a residential building in the city centre. No.1 Deansgate, as it came to be known, was a pioneer of what would become the practice’s main product: residential blocks sheathed in glass. They divide their work as follows: Simpson is the big thinker, Haugh handles the details. “Rachel is that annoying kind of architect that will say ‘Can you move those screw heads up a bit?’” says Stockley. “Ian was always the big picture stuff.”
“Ian draws architectural responses incredibly swiftly,” Griffin tells me. “He drew one competition-winning building whilst sitting next to me on a very short flight.” To Simpson’s mind the response to most briefs from a client can be handled in five minutes; the rest is just details. “It takes real confidence to do that.”
It also requires the skills of Haugh, who fills in the blanks within Simpson’s visions. She’s described as starting each work day with an in tray a metre high, and leaving only once it’s done. “Ian was always the face of it,” says one person who managed one of the buildings the practice designed. “But you always got the impression Rachel was the one doing all the work. When she came into meetings, it was pretty hardcore. Ian would sort of come in as the rockstar.”
Work began on Beetham Tower in 2002, the same year No.1 Deansgate and Urbis were completed. It was the practice’s most ambitious piece of work at the time. “That was a difficult period,” Haugh remembers. “We hadn't had any experience, up to that point, of seeing that scale of development coming forward.” From her apartment in No.1 Deansgate, looking down to the opposite end of the road, she would have been able to see the tower climbing higher and higher.
Simpson, on the other hand, had already placed a £100 bet with the family behind the Beetham organisation, who commissioned the building, that it would get planning permission. The two £50 notes are still in his office, cast in resin. Plus, early in the designing of the tower, he began to think about building a flat for himself at the top, it would mean he and Haugh would live on either side of Deansgate, facing each other.
Simpson excuses himself from our interview to give a seminar to some students. In his absence, Haugh gives me a tour of the office. It’s like any other, the key difference being that scattered around is the city’s future. Today, these miniature models of upcoming projects are no bigger than the takeaway coffee cups and Tupperware they share desks with, but tomorrow they’ll loom over us.
Griffin recalls a time he and Simpson were at MIPIM (the annual real estate expo in Cannes) looking at a digital model of Manchester together. Users could fly in from the airport and look around the city. “When you allow an architect to do that,” he says, “they immediately go looking for their own building.”
Simpson went to Beetham Tower. Drawing nearer the building, he noticed the finial — the part that sticks out from the top of the roof, and lets out an awe-inspiring hum when the wind hits it right — wasn’t there. “They left off the fin!” he said. “I wish I had”.
The hum (which sparked headlines, dedicated Twitter pages, and some ridicule) only happens in particularly high winds coming from the south west, passing through the finial’s slats at just the right angle to turn it into a giant, demonic harmonica. Because it happens so infrequently, there isn’t much incentive to fix it, though I’m told Simpson has spent a fair few nights in a hotel as a result. He says it’s the only thing he regrets in his time designing buildings, seeing he’s the one most intimately affected by it. “There is something poetic about that,” he laughs.
At one point, Simpson takes out a piece of paper, then a pencil, and draws a line. “What you’ve got to realise,” he says, “is every time an architect draws a line, that, potentially, is an instruction for someone to make something.” He puts the pencil down. “So you have to be careful about the lines you draw.”
Those lines have drawn their own criticisms. A big one being the practice’s work is repetitive. “There’s a question about the aesthetic qualities of what they do, the sort of copy-and-paste nature of what they do,” says the source who once managed a SimpsonHaugh-designed building. There may be subtleties that the trained eye can see. But to the layman, they’re big shiny towers. And it feels like they’re cropping up everywhere.
“I think that poverty of ideas is really problematic,” says the same source, “and I’m not saying that comes from SimpsonHaugh as much as it comes from their relationship with the council.”
They are talking about that supposed system of referral within Manchester City Council. In his book, Spinoza writes about seeing this in action: “In 2018, a developer who had emerged from a meeting with senior council planners to discuss his plans for a new Manchester hotel told me, ‘I can’t believe what I’ve just heard. I’ve just been told that I have to drop my architect and use one of three named firms’.”
When I bring this up, Haugh shakes her head and Simpson gives a dry laugh. “Nobody has been told to use any particular architect. I wish they had,” says Simpson. “There’s alway talk about the ‘mafia’ and this, that and the other. To be honest, the only advantage we have is that we have been here for 37 years and people trust that we believe we have a civic duty, not just a duty to our clients.”
And from the council’s perspective, referring to a trusted local architect tends to see things done faster and more cheaply. “There’s a behind-the-scenes school of thought that says if you’re working with a UK developer, a Manchester one, a Manchester architect, a Manchester supply chain [...] that’s the way you get things built,” says Spinoza.
This is unlike when the council tries to get big name architects, or ‘starchitects’, only for their plans to backfire. Again quoting Spinoza: “It takes their pants down on costs, it’s incredibly tortuous, and the public purse gets walloped.” Take Aviva Studios (née Factory International), in which the renowned Dutch architects OMA went £100m over budget on a building that the Guardian’s architecture critic described as a “missed opportunity”.
When we meet, Simpson seems embittered about Aviva Studios. “We did the piece of work that got the £79 million off George Osborne for the city council. We then did the competition and came second,” he says. “Of course, you’ve got OMA — international architects — but they don’t care about the city—”
“I don’t think you can say that, they’ve just got different drivers,” Haugh interrupts, speaking to Simpson but looking at me.
“They have a philosophy whereby they don’t care about working in any city again once they’ve worked in it—”
“The city wanted, I think, an international profile. And that’s fine. They chose OMA, you know—”
“You have to accept that.”
Simpson and Haugh aren’t idealists, they’re pragmatists. “I’m actually interested in tackling those developers and contractors who are rebuilding our cities — irrespective of architecture, quite often,” Simpson said in one interview after finishing Beetham Tower. “And I think that if we as architects can get in there and demonstrate that we understand their aspirations, programmes and costs, we can contribute positively.”
But that can feel a bit bloodless, where architects are working to meet the specs of developers who ultimately want to make money, in a city where such a pursuit seems to have taken priority. Besides, it’s hard to accept that Simpson and Haugh are doing this purely out of civic duty. They have both made a lot of money: Simpson has a taste for Ferraris (he used to buy new ones, now he buys old ones that appreciate in value), while Haugh has a bolthole in Montreux.
One architect who worked briefly at SimpsonHaugh, before going on to practices all over the world, remembers their time at the company as deflating. “I mostly felt like I was making floorspace for corporate developers,” they tell me. Another staffer, on the jobs site Glassdoor said: “Checkerboard glass towers are not going to be a thing forever.”
Maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t feel that way right now. The buildings the practice is currently working on, mostly on the edge of the inner ring road, are designed to be backdrop buildings; so reflective and smooth as to become virtually invisible.
I ask if they feel fulfilled in pursuing these residential buildings, which they estimate takes up 75% of their workload. “I think responding to the demand is really quite fulfilling,” Haugh says. Plus, Simpson adds, if they didn’t do it, “the developers would be doing it. And probably to a lesser quality than from our involvement.”
The working day at SimpsonHaugh is coming to an end and the few final employees and partners are sitting in loose knots on swivel chairs talking. In Simpson and Haugh’s personal offices, Ian Simpson is still giving his seminar. His office is backdropped by a huge bookshelf, with leather chairs surrounding a glass coffee table. Haugh’s is more sparse. Tacked to one of the walls is a column cutout from the Financial Times talking about how building more homes actually reduces housing costs (almost none of SimpsonHaugh’s buildings contain affordable housing).
Back in the main office, I look at the models on the shelves. Behind me is a bigger model, about two feet tall, of the top few floors of Viadux II. Last month, Viadux II’s developer, Salboy, were preparing to submit plans for the building. If approved, it’ll be Manchester’s tallest. I lift my camera to take a picture. Haugh jumps in front of the lens like a bodyguard taking a bullet. Photos are not allowed just yet.
The tower will probably be the city’s tallest for a few months, until something else beats it. In fact, a taller tower will probably get planning permission before Viadux II is even completed. And, if history is anything to go by, that building will exist first in the minds of Ian Simpson and Rachel Haugh, and its model will sit on these same shelves. Then we’ll be living in it — or, more likely, in its shadow.
Correction: An earlier version of this piece said Rachael Haugh owns property in St Moritz, she in fact owns property in Montreux. An earlier version also referred to the architectural practice OMA as Danish, they are Dutch.
Really interesting piece, this. I think I would've liked to have heard their response to critics who talk of the structures all falling into a narrow range of designs, but also - you can't always get what you want from an interview!
I do find a lot of sniping about the towers very dull, though. Lots of this country is covered in identikit housing (endless rows of terraces, vast swathes of mock-Tudor semi-detached, legions of Washington/Peveril/whatever marching over a hillside) and yet somehow the ire is focused on these shimmering structures. Every age produces a lot of average, some terrible, and some good architecture, this age is no different. Yet the presumption in a lot of critiques is that somehow what went before is better - no, just much of what survives tends to be the better stuff, the past generations were equally as capable of creating structures without "human scale" or aesthetic appeal to anyone. York Minster is well, well out of human scale, yet I'm not sure we'd see many folks demanding it be torn down! It is a stunning building for its own reasons; and I think some of what has been built may well enter the canon of "good" rather than "average" over time; and as other things come through to change what we build.
I still can't look at the Beetham Tower without cringing. The first outbreak of the Japanese Knotweed now strangling the amazing wildflower meadow that is/ was our city centre. It needed refreshing, growing and managing with love and care; not swamping with alien invasive species out of all proportion to human scale.