A brighter future

As a celebration of Manchester’s cotton mill past, this major residential scheme by shedkm combines respect for historic fabric with striking minimalist additions to help catalyse regeneration. Stephen Cousins reports.

Back in the 19th century, Manchester and the surrounding towns in south and east Lancashire were the largest and most productive cotton spinning centre in the world.

Nicknamed Cottonopolis, this industrial powerhouse was able to flourish thanks to the infrastructure and particular geographical layout of the region, with sloping hills and streams that provided the city’s mills and factories with water to drive their processes. Abundant coalfields meant that collieries could supply the coal to run steam engines and the digging of canals allowed easy transportation of cotton to UK ports and then across the globe.

Fast forward to the Manchester of today, and many cotton mills and associated warehouses still survive, albeit converted and renovated for new uses including commercial or residential premises, to meet the needs of a bustling, modern city.

Crusader Works, by architects shedkm who have a local studio, sets a new standard for such adaptations with its strikingly contemporary, yet sensitive regeneration of a collection of cotton mill buildings from the 1840s into new housing.

Developer Capital&Centric (C&C) conceived of the 123-home scheme, located in Manchester’s emerging Piccadilly East district, as a catalyst for the wider regeneration of a rundown urban area.

The overarching ambition was to celebrate the listed buildings’ character and avoid invasive penetrations through the historic fabric, which is characterised by original brick and cast iron structures, timber beams and staircases.

A key design move was shedkm’s decision to run access corridors along the outer facades of the warehouses, facing onto a new communal courtyard, in contrast to a traditional internal route. These ‘cloisters’ are linked via new steel footbridges to bright yellow cores, which stand as separate architectural elements in the centre of the courtyard.

This design device helps liven up residents’ journey from the street to their flats, explains Mark Sidebotham, practice director at shedkm: “I’m really passionate about the journey the resident takes from the pavement to their front door, it’s more important than the experience inside the flats themselves. Walking along the cloister, you’re always connected to the courtyard as the main central space, and the upper bridge links afford great views back to the city.” He adds: “It’s a really lovely route to take, not just a generic corridor that could be inside any building.”

The project proved complicated and costly, due to unexpected issues with existing timbers, the contractor going into administration, and the onset of the pandemic, but shedkm’s design vision ultimately paid off, and the project took home two RIBA awards in 2024.

Experienced hand

Adapting historic buildings has been a key focus of much of shedkm’s regeneration and placemaking work, and this project focused on the refurbishment of one of the earliest and largest purpose-built textile machinery works in Manchester.

The mill was built in the 1840s by Parr, Curtis and Madeley, but a fire destroyed it in 1861, requiring a rebuild. John Hetherington & Sons, another leading textile machinery manufacturer, continued to use the mill until the early 1920s when the industry fell into decline. The buildings were listed in 1994 as a rare example of a large, mid-19th century works.

The works were earmarked to be incorporated into the HS2 regeneration framework, with the adjacent land to form part of the new route into Manchester Piccadilly Station. However, cancellation of the rail project’s connection into Manchester forced the local authority to look at alternative opportunities for development.

C&C saw great potential in the rundown area, which was characterised by derelict industrial sites and dilapidated buildings, identifying Crusader Works as the catalyst for a wider regeneration to include more homes and apartments, schools and a hotel.

The scheme is one of five Manchester mills being reinvigorated by C&C and the latest phase in its relationship with shedkm, the pair having previously collaborated on Talbot Mill; the £250m Kampus development with joint venture partner Henry Boot Developments; and C&C’s ‘Bunker’ offices in Liverpool.

c A series of one-, two- and three-bed apartments (singles and duplexes), are distributed across the site. The next door plot is occupied by the Phoenix building, a new 10-storey apartment block also designed by shedkm for C&C, providing another 75 apartments.

Initial space planning studies looked to use all the mill buildings, however, to help balance the project appraisal it was decided to replace one three-storey unlisted mill structure with the new Phoenix building. This helped support the relatively high investment that was going into the dilapidated listed buildings and made the overall scheme viable.

The special architectural interest of Crusader Works lies in its scale, industrial character and the aesthetic effect of the repeating bays and windows. Sidebotham describes the building as “a classic mill building, with chunky, thick walls, cast iron columns, timber beams and floors, and some amazing roof trusses.”

An early decision was to make the scheme car-free, encouraging residents to use bikes and local transport infrastructure including the tram and Piccadilly Station just a few minutes walk away. This revealed an opportunity to transform the existing central space between the mill buildings, then being used as a car park, into a landscaped communal courtyard for residents. The multi-use space is intended as a contemplative garden with communal activities including barbecues, fire-pits, cycle facilities and wi-fi access.

Two bright cores

Visitors to Crusader Works are immediately struck by two bright yellow cores that rise up from the centre of the courtyard plan. These form part of a simple circulation strategy connecting steel footbridges and cloister walkways running behind the existing masonry facades.

Locating the yellow cores within the central space, rather than within the existing building, avoided the need to carve out large portions of the existing historic fabric of the mills, says Sidebotham, explaining that “trying to put a perfectly square steel frame core through a cast iron and timber floored building is always complicated.” The move also increased the net area of the scheme and made it possible to separate the living accommodation from lifts and refuse stores.

Where standard layout solutions for apartment blocks rely on a central corridor with single-aspect apartments, the cloister and courtyard configuration gives most apartments a dual aspect, also improving natural light and cross ventilation. It also made it possible to retain more of the exposed brickwork than if the walls were penetrated by apartment windows.

A new thermal wall forms the back wall of the cloister at the rear of the apartments, boosting the scheme’s overall thermal performance. “When you analyse the apartments from a SAP point of view, 50% of the building is thermally insulated,” says Sidebotham. “If all of the apartments had existing exposed brick walls, we’d have ended up having to do a lot more insulated dry lining etc, thereby losing the exposed brick aesthetic.”

A typical two-bed flat in the former mill has bedrooms positioned against the thermal wall, with the living space positioned along the outer perimeter wall.

But what of the bold colour scheme for the cores, which is also picked out on elements of the Phoenix building? Yellow is one of shedkm’s signature colours, explains Sidebotham: “We’re modernists; using primary colours in a succinct way is something we’ve always done.”

The courtyard runs north-south, limiting the amount of sunlight, but according to the architect, even on a dull day daylight reflects from the yellow onto the warehouse bricks, brightening up the space. Alongside the cores, the steel frame bridge links are another contemporary motif, helping differentiate the new additions from the heritage buildings.

Unpredictable structure

Understanding the structural make up of historic buildings is notoriously difficult due to a frequent lack of surviving construction documentation and the fact that many structures are hidden from view, requiring intrusive investigation work.

Things were further complicated on Crusader Works because intrusive surveys and materials testing were not carried out until a relatively late stage and the results revealed major issues with the structural timber, which was relatively low grade.

“This was difficult to understand, because the timbers had been carrying all this massive machinery from the mill industry,” says Mark Sidebotham; “Normally, there would just be some rotting at the beam ends, not something so structural.” As a result, new steel frame propping was inserted to support the original structure along the cloister line.

Other ‘higgledy-piggledy’ building features also demanded the attention of the designers. Raised floors were installed over existing undulating timber floors throughout the scheme making it possible to set a new datum for installation of a new staircase. This also provided a zone for concealed services, and helped improve acoustic performance.

A survey of the existing windows revealed a range of different shapes and sizes, and the scans were used to develop a common square window that would fit any of the openings.

A sensitive approach to the historic fabric helped win over the planners and heritage experts, who nevertheless pushed the architect to ensure correct detailing and materiality.

“Introducing a thermal wall internally meant we didn’t have to do any dry lining on the courtyard facade, which meant all the bullnose reveals could be all kept in place, in tune with what the heritage people wanted,” says Sidebotham. The original staircase treads on the lower level, which have become dish-shaped with wear, are also retained, adding in new handrails and lighting to ensure safety.

As part of the drive to adapt to, rather than fight against, the existing building, the mill’s structural layout largely dictated the different scales of flats, in turn informing a range of price points for the properties.

“We worked with the structural grid and the rhythm of the windows,” adds Sidebotham, “When you enter an apartment you align with the centre line of a window on the outside facade. This is slightly different for different apartments because the grid changes slightly as you go along.”

To ensure a level of repeatability in the design, each flat has a standard-sized kitchen and bathroom, and the spaces around them increase or reduce in size according to the physical constraints of the mill’s structure.

Duplexes in the upper two levels of each of the buildings were treated slightly differently. To raise the height of the roof space, terraces are formed from recessive cut-outs, using a steel ‘goalpost’ spanning between the existing timber trusses to support the existing roof.

The duplex living and kitchen spaces are located on the upper level, while the terraces provide private amenity spaces and views back towards the city centre.

Industrial aesthetic

The material palette for the refurbishment sticks to and celebrates the ‘mill template,’ with cleaned up brickwork and new windows and slate roofs in the same language as the original. The 10-storey Phoenix building on the adjacent plot takes a more contemporary approach, but inspired by the industrial aesthetic.

The focus is on the precast concrete structural facade divided into rectangular sections of blue engineered brick cladding. The concrete is tied back to an internal steel frame and carries the weight of the masonry cladding and the glazing, plus bolt-on balconies on two sides.

“You see a lot of buildings in Manchester with external renders and cladding, but we felt the rhythm of the stack-bonded blue engineering brick would mirror the strong rhythm of the warehouses,” says shedkm’s Sidebotham.

The fact the steel frame is only carrying the floor plates, not the facade, allowed for more slender steel sections on the interior, which are expressed as part of a general drive to express the structure and services, including precast concrete soffits, sprinklers, ventilation ductwork, and pipework.

“It took real work to coordinate the services to make it look clean, including the exposed conduits with lighting and smoke detection, sprinklers are even aligned with holes in the steel work,” says Sidebotham.

The internal layout on each level of the Phoenix comprises six two-bed apartments arranged around the perimeter with two studio flats around the central core. Living spaces have full height glazing wherever possible to improve the quality of light within units. The single staircase configuration has since been superseded by Building Safety Act regulations on fire requiring two staircases.

C&C has admitted that Crusader Works is probably one of the most challenging projects it delivered, taking a lot longer to build than planned. The developer won planning consent in 2016 and the conversion began in earnest in early 2018. But delays ensued in 2019, after much of the timber was found to be unusable, and a year later the pandemic hit.

Despite these setbacks, the finished scheme proved a knockout with the RIBA, which awarded it the RIBA North West Award 2024 and the RIBA North West Conservation Award.

The RIBA judges said the project is “exemplary, not only in the way the architects have conceived its layout and details, but also in terms of a developer’s vision to use the project as a catalyst for changing a wider, previously rundown urban area.” The Piccadilly East area of Manchester may no longer be hitting the enviable highs of the 19th Century ‘Cottonopolis,’ but Crusader Works is helping reinstate it as a much more vibrant and desirable part of town.

Project team