Waitrose set for Spinningfields

Food retailer Waitrose will move into Spinningfields in Manchester city centre, as anchor tenant at Allied London’s Manchester House.

The firm will take the ground floor retail unit fronting onto Bridge Street as the building undergoes a refurbishment, designed by the Manchester office of Sheppard Robson.

Part of the ground floor was also used by Indian restaurant Shimla Pinks before the business went into administration earlier this year. The offices also held the Arts Council headquarters in Manchester for a while.

In a design report prepared by Drivers Jonas Deloitte to accompany the planning application to Manchester City Council, Allied London said the building, which has been largely vacant since 2008, has been “underperforming as an asset and as a building for a considerable period of time.”

Manchester House will connect Spinningfields to the rest of the city once refurbished, it said. One floor of the building will be revamped for retail with the other ten floors improved for use as office space.

The report said: “The site's location as a gateway to Spinningfields calls for a design solution that allows it to act as an effective linkage to the remainder of the city centre. The proposals would bring back into use a building which has suffered from a lack of investment and help regenerate an underdeveloped part of the wider Spinningfields regeneration area.”

Waitrose already has a food concession in the Boots store on Cross Street, but this will be its first standalone store in Manchester city centre. It will provide competition for the Co-op stores more than the other medium sized supermarkets in town such as Tesco Metro and will hope its reputation for good quality own brand and bought in foods will tip the scales in its favour.

Certainly it should do a roaring trade to apartment dwellers down the west side of the city, along the River Irwell, in Spinningfields and over the river in Salford.

Manchester House was originally Scottish Life House and was built in 1965 by Manchester architects Leach, Rhodes and Walker.

Occasional Confidential writer Phil Griffin recalled its construction on the CUBE website: ‘Manchester House, just up the road from (the Leach, Rhodes and Walker) office, is an eight-storey cube over a two-storey podium. They erected the steel frame and then cast the floor slabs on-site, and stacked them one on top of the other on the ground, like so many slices of toast. When they were all done, each of them was then craned into place, one after the other, on the same day.’

So Manchester House is stacked like toast, or rare French cheeses, to have a better Waitrose analogy. How appropriate.