Delivering a sports-led regeneration with major brand pulling power

The redevelopment of Manchester United’s Old Trafford Stadium provided a launchpad to explore the wider Western Gateway regeneration project – a mayoral development zone – in one of the closing sessions of Healthy City Design 2025.

Simon Bedford, a development consultant and chartered town planner, introduced the Gateway project, which, over the next 20 years, will involve key projects including Port Salford, the redevelopment of Eccles town centre, the City of Salford Community Stadium rugby venue, and the New Carrington development. Then, on the other side of the ship canal, the further development of everything around the Trafford Centre, Trafford City, Trafford Waters, and back into the city towards Old Trafford and the eventual redevelopment of Old Trafford football ground.

The projected numbers are impressive: around 70,000 new jobs; 1.065m m² of employment space unlocked; almost 15,000 tonnes of annual carbon savings; plenty of opportunities for people to walk, cycle, and move around in different ways – and all underpinned by a huge investment in new infrastructure. Further development will take place around the Trafford Centre, Trafford City, Trafford Waters, and the eventual redevelopment of Old Trafford, a project that Lord Norman Foster enthuses about, not least for its health and sustainability benefits.

Speaking on a video about the redevelopment, he said: “As you move away from the stadium, it’s not a fortress surrounded by a sea of cars. It’s open and contained by an umbrella, which harvests solar energy and rainwater but is protective and encloses arguably the largest public space in the world.”

The stadium is to be built in five years – half the time it usually takes to build such a structure. “How do we do that?” asked Lord Foster. “By prefabrication. By using the network of Manchester’s ship canal, bringing it back to a new life, shipping in components – 160 of them, Meccano-like.

“And then we rebuild the Old Trafford station. That becomes the pivot, the processional way to the stadium – welcoming and at the heart of a new sports-led neighbourhood.”

Connectivity and easing congestion

Richard Roe, corporate director of place at Trafford Council, had a similar take but also talked of connectivity into the existing local community, which he believes will not only benefit from the economic influence of Trafford Park but will also no longer suffer quite the same impact “from 75,000 fans turning up into a very small geography ever two weeks”. He added: “We need to think through our plan about how we create new opportunities for existing residents, new jobs, new leisure spaces, new public realm, but minimise the impact of those events and with an expanded stadium.”

One exciting new leisure space in Trafford Park is Therme Manchester, set to complete construction in late 2028. Featuring a warm indoor climate all-year round, made possible by a sustainable glass design, the inclusive wellbeing resort combines the ancient tradition of healing thermal waters with large multi-sensory saunas, steam rooms, water slides, a wave pool, spa therapies, and other health and fitness experiences, along with a roof terrace and landscaped boulevard.

Rob Creber, head of social value and partnerships at Therme Manchester, commented: “We’re very focused on delivering social value and wellbeing. But we’re also part of a green and blue revolution in terms of bringing nature, trees, gardens, and green spaces back into cities. So, we’re really excited to see the ways that developments can start to join up green spaces and start to represent a better public realm than necessarily we’ve been afforded over the years.

“And we’re super excited in terms of the link-trip idea that if we can work as a wellbeing organisation with football clubs, the shopping facilities and other leisure facilities, then we’re starting to put Manchester on a really good global footing as a fantastic place to come for a weekend, do lots of different activities, and hopefully leave a little bit better and healthier.”

Stephanie Mullenger, property director at Salford City Council, is upbeat by the prospect of linking the River Irwell and the ship canal to the rest of the city.

“Then we’re going out to the Crescent and doing a joint development there with the university and English Cities Fund,” she added. “We’re also going out to the rugby stadium, which is on the other side of the motorway from Therme. We want to make that into a national hub for rugby and make it a hub for sports and wellbeing for the community, as much as for the two teams that play there.

“That links automatically into 500,000 sq ft with our strategic partners Peel for the redevelopment of Port Salford, which is two phases of industrial warehousing, advanced manufacturing, data centres, and all that stuff that you need for a globally recognised and successful city.”

The glue in the relationship

Asked what the glue is keeping the Western Gateway development on track and all projects aligned, Stephen Wild, managing director of Peel Land, stressed the need to make the area a place where people want to come, stay, dwell, and enjoy. Activities they can experience in Trafford include indoor skydiving, skiing, and padel, “but it’s about the connectivity of those activities without using your car to get between them” that’s also important to Wild, as well as the green and blue spaces and nature of job opportunities.

The glue, in Wild’s view, is “the brand and the place at one level” and at another level, “the collaboration, unification of vision, the Old Trafford Regeneration Mayoral Development Corporation (MDC) [which will acquire and develop land and property and oversee the provision of services such as transport and power], and the Western Gateway Mayoral Development Zone (MDZ) – tying all that together and saying ‘this is a growth area’”.

Roe picked up on the MDZ as the main ingredient. “The MDZ is a key part of that because that’s how we ensure with Salford and Trafford coming together that we take a holistic view of place. So, we’re not just looking at infrastructure requirements through a Trafford lens or a Salford lens, we’re looking at it through a place lens. What is the infrastructure we require? How do different bits of infrastructure fit together and lock together, and connect the places we’re developing?”

Much of this is being driven by the modal shift away from cars and the integration of green and blue infrastructure. And there are lessons to pick from MediaCity, which according to Wild had a 50-per-cent modal shift – “unheard of in the UK at the time”.

Property developers often see projects in terms of this many acres and that many square feet, he reasoned, but by flipping that and looking at things through the eyes of someone who is going to use the space, you soon start to say, ‘well, I don’t need to drive anywhere because I can go by bike or I can walk or I can go on the tram’.

Some of these issues might seem middle-class or affluent preoccupations, but how does the regeneration sit with the ambition to address poverty and the cost of living? Mullenger emphasised that Salford is a city of complete extremes. “We’ve got one of the largest growing young professional populations in the country, which everybody wants to tap into, and everybody wants to be near,” she said. “And then you go to the other end, and I would include Eccles in here, we’ve got the 18th most deprived communities in the country. We’re a big city but it’s a small city for that difference, and we want everyone to [experience] the same.

“We want everyone to live well, we want everyone to have a home that they can afford, that they can heat, that they can feed their family, that their children have every opportunity. And that’s what we’re trying to feed into Eccles. We’re trying to make it more balanced because there is a lot of property that’s been put up very quickly, very cheaply, and that’s not what we’re trying to do.”

Salford’s calling

So, given the prize and opportunity on offer, what are the aspects of the regeneration development that central government should be supporting? For Mullenger, it’s infrastructure, transport, and opening up employment opportunities. “The redevelopment and regeneration we’ve been doing has mainly been residential,” she confessed. “I think we need to put something back in around employment and give people a reason to stay in an area, spend in an area, and enjoy an area.”

Creber pointed to the fact that the redevelopment chimes with the UK Government’s emerging agenda around prevention and bringing health into the community. “We want to be part of that,” he said, “and it’s about making sure, at a national level, we’re recognising the value of all of that and making sure that when private companies do make health interventions, it’s recognised and feeds into that overall picture of how we’re measuring success as a city.” 

Wild emphasised that “the investment here is about investing in growth”, another key central government priority, but he cautioned, too, that we can’t keep chopping and changing development strategies with political cycles.

The conversation closed by returning to the significance of the Old Trafford stadium redevelopment and the pulling power that Manchester United as a brand brings to the area. “It’s central to our ambitions,” said Roe. “There is a lot we can do without it, but if we’re really going to deliver what we want to do here, then the stadium is the catalyst for that.

“It’s a fantastic brand and there’s a convening power that comes from that brand, which is critical. It’s not just about the stadium as a building; it’s about the surroundings and the environment of that stadium. It’s how a stadium can be a 365-day-a-year asset – not just an asset when Manchester United are playing at home.”

And so, to give a nod to the Stone Roses’ anthem that announces the team’s arrival on to the Old Trafford pitch every other weekend, as regeneration projects go, ‘this is the one’!