IN Brief:
- The Great Jackson Street proposals comprise five towers delivering 2,388 apartments.
- Completion of the Section 106 agreement follows the council’s in-principle planning approval in August 2024.
- The planning barrier has been removed, although the scheme still faces a possible legal challenge and has no announced construction start date.
Manchester City Council and Renaker have completed the legal agreement needed to advance a five-tower residential development at Great Jackson Street, ending a prolonged planning hold on one of the city’s largest high-rise schemes.
The development comprises 2,388 apartments across five glass towers designed by SimpsonHaugh Architects. Four buildings form a group known as The Green, with two rising to 47 storeys and two to 51 storeys, while the separate Lighthouse tower is planned at 71 storeys and will contain around 640 apartments.
Renaker first submitted the applications in 2023, and Manchester City Council’s planning committee backed the proposals in August 2024. Formal completion of the Section 106 agreement has taken roughly two years from that committee decision, considerably longer than the approval process for several of the developer’s other high-rise schemes in the area.
The agreement is a necessary step because committee approval alone did not allow the scheme to move into delivery. Until the associated planning obligations were settled and the formal decision completed, Renaker could not progress the project on the same basis as other developments within its Great Jackson Street pipeline.
The five towers form the latest major component of the wider New Jackson neighbourhood, where Renaker has already completed or advanced a series of residential skyscrapers. The company says it has delivered more than 8,500 homes across its developments, with Great Jackson Street accounting for a substantial share of its Manchester workload.
The newest scheme pushes that density further. Earlier planning material placed the five buildings on a little over an acre and also included a separate office element, creating an unusually intensive mix of high-rise residential development within an area that has changed rapidly over the past decade.
Viability has been a central part of the planning process. None of the 2,388 apartments is currently designated as affordable housing. Manchester calculated that a policy-compliant contribution would equate to about £33m, but the developer’s viability case concluded that on-site provision or an equivalent contribution would make the project unviable.
The signed Section 106 agreement therefore contains a viability-review mechanism rather than a fixed affordable-housing contribution at the outset. That mechanism allows the council to revisit the financial position and potentially secure money for affordable housing if scheme viability improves as development progresses.
The arrangement has been contested by Weis Group, which has challenged the viability assumptions and indicated that it may seek judicial review. That leaves a potential legal issue even though the local authority has now completed the approval process required on its side.
No construction start date has been announced. A project of this scale will require substantial mobilisation, detailed design coordination, procurement, logistics planning, and sequencing across a tightly constrained high-density site before all five buildings can progress either simultaneously or in phases.
High-rise residential construction in this part of Manchester also creates major interfaces between structural engineering, façades, vertical transportation, fire engineering, building services, and public realm. The project team already includes structural, transport, environmental, fire, landscape, acoustics, air-quality, lighting, and heritage specialists, reflecting the technical breadth needed before full site activity.
The five-tower format magnifies programme dependencies between shared access, public realm, utilities, and tower-specific packages. Even where buildings are phased, early decisions on logistics, craneage, temporary works, and servicing will affect later plots, making the eventual construction sequence a substantial part of the scheme’s commercial planning.
The lengthy planning period shows how far a committee resolution can sit from a buildable consent on a large urban scheme. Negotiation of legal obligations, viability, public-realm commitments, and potential challenges can add months or years between the political decision and a firm construction programme.
Completion of the agreement removes the main planning obstacle attached to this stage of the scheme. The remaining work is more directly tied to mobilisation, detailed delivery planning, commercial conditions, and any legal challenge that follows.
If construction proceeds, the project would add almost 2,400 homes and another 71-storey landmark to an area already defined by dense residential development. Its scale also means the construction sequence will influence local logistics and subcontract demand for several years rather than through a single short build cycle.
The immediate milestone is no longer the council’s planning decision but the move from consent into a defined programme. Whether that follows quickly will depend on legal certainty, procurement, and Renaker’s chosen sequencing across the five towers.
