PAG serves up padel pivot at £250m Renaissance
Property Alliance Group and JV partner Starwood Capital want to build two courts as a means of temporarily activating part of the Manchester site prior to its redevelopment into an office.
PAG has submitted plans to Manchester City Council for two padel courts on the site of the former Premier House office building. The former office was demolished in 2022 as part of the £250m regeneration of the Renaissance site off Deansgate.
The long-term plan remains to deliver a new-build 50,000 sq ft office on the site. However, the padel courts will provide a “better utilisation of the space” than merely leaving it vacant, according to a statement from planning consultant AshtonHale.
To learn more about the project, search for planning reference 140249/FO/2024 on Manchester City Council’s planning portal.
“Obviously, the viability of speculative office building is a challenge at the moment despite rents reaching new highs,” said Alex Russell, chief executive of Property Alliance Group.
“As we would with any asset, we discussed the most suitable use in terms of profitability and placemaking that would ultimately activate this corner of Deansgate and Blackfriars.”
The economic climate – high interest rates, coupled with material price inflation – has made it harder for developers to get on-site in general.
The office market has been impacted harder than most given uncertainty about how the asset class will perform in the future amid changing attitudes to work.
While the office market is uncertain, padel appears a much safer bet, at least in the short term. The sport is often cited as the fastest-growing in the UK and courts are relatively inexpensive to build.
There is currently a shortage of padel courts across the country although there has been a recent spike in proposals.
PAG will join Club de Padel at Deansgate Square, and Social Sports Society, which has plans for a site off Peary Street, as providers of facilities to play the tennis/squash blend in Manchester city centre.
Work on the hotel element of PAG’s Renaissance scheme – the conversion of the former hotel into a 216-bedroom Treehouse branded venue – is due to complete later this year.
The padel courts at Renaissance are due to open at the same time as the Treehouse Hotel.
The developer also has consent for 300 apartments within a 27-storey tower.
Would still much prefer the whole site to be demolished and rebuilt!
By MC
This has turned into an absolute farce and disaster. PAG should have demolished all of the buildings, cleared the site, and created a world class development next to the heart of the retail core. Instead PAG kept the dirty looking hotel, put a tree on it, and now want to turn part of Deansgate into 2 paddle courts. Laughable! MCC should refuse this, and tell PAG to get on with the office and residential parts of the development.
By jrb
Ah yes… what better way to “soak up the atmosphere” with a game of padel on an eyesore construction site with a dilapidated concrete shell looming over you. Just what a prime city centre site needs – fantastic stuff.
By js1000
This is a hideous development.
By Anonymous
Am I missing something here? This place was still nowhere near ready, three weeks ago.
By Elephant
This is lame. Have they run out of money?
By KS
Anyone fancy a game of padel in the dystopian surroundings of a demolished construction site? Anyone? No, neither do I
By Alan Partridge
So it’s a truly awful bodge job of something on a prime site which should have been entirely cleared, and now it doesn’t even look like they can get it finished.
Given we’ve reached the limit of how many empty sites you can put old containers on and call it a leisure destination, PAG seems to have gone looking for the next gimmick, in the form of padel.
MCC should have insisted on better earlier with this scheme, but will hopefully take a stronger line now.
By Rotringer
How many more of these padel courts can the city accommodate? Becoming a saturated market.
By New Wave
The developers will be having serious regrets over this whole site. It has been plagued with problems from the outset. All those calling for this hideous eyesore to be demolished say ‘eye’.
By mcleod
This redevelopment is so disastrous I have no words. They didn’t even try to improve the way it looks, I’m sorry but what is that fake plant in a wooden frame and the cheap looking mural, it’s so tacky. This is such a prime location and such missed opportunity, I honestly cannot believe this is what they came up with. It’s one of the worst eyesores in Manchester along Arndale Tower and Albert Bridge house. Shameful.
By Michael
Ouch. Time to do the right thing and drop the lot
By wipe the slate
If anyone in MCC has some nouse, they’d decline this, and make sure the original plans are revoked and it all has to be flattened to restart. It’s not just that the awful tower stays, it’s that the grotesque parking ramps that block any attempt to introduce a connection to the waterfront are blocked too. There was once a great proposal…
By Tom
They should re-think this entire project and demolish the existing buildings.
By hannah
This whole ‘redevelopment’ is so bad is now laughable. Hopefully a proper developer with some funding can just demolish the whole site and build a tall building that opens up access/views to the river.
By Dr B
27 years since the post IRA bomb masterplan the Renaissance (no irony there!) element of the redevelopment comes to this. 3 more years of dereliction on Deansgate. Whatever happened to all the promise and sense of opportunity? Whatever happened to the opened up river frontage? After 30 years it looks like the city will have a plastic tree on a pole and an infill padel court to show for it. I guess that’s what £250m buys in Mcr in 2024. Disappointment after disappointment.
By Anonymous
A safe pleasant walkway beside the rivers should be mandatory for all new river-side builds. As for these monstrosities. Can no body be made accountable for this? Probably not. The system is rigged so that no body is every accountable. Sounds like organized crime 🙂
By Anonymous
Isn’t it supposed to be opening this ‘summer’? There’s a long way to go to make it resemble luxurious.
By Clouded Leopard
The big story here is the viability of speculative new build offices. This fundamentally affects a number of key sites in and around the city centre. We will either have stalled sites or a series of proposals for either meanwhile uses such as in this instance or a shift in land uses away from offices. One for David Thame me thinks.
By Anonymous