Brunswick at 10: Andy Avery

It has been over a decade since our work began at Brunswick – a residential regeneration project on the fringes of Manchester city centre.

Creating the new Brunswick was a collaborative effort between the design team, the client and residents so we have spent the past year celebrating every one of those efforts. In December, we walked around the neighbourhood with Buttress director Andy Avery to talk about our work and how it feels to be celebrating over a decade spent on a project.

What did our work at Brunswick involve? How did this change and evolve over the decade?

Our involvement at Brunswick began two years before the project formally started. The bidding process was lengthy and involved to ensure the best solutions were brought forward. It was such a big project with not only time and money but existing resident’s lives invested in it too – so it was important to get the right people in to work on it. The community had a say in the outcome of the bidding process with their involvement continuing beyond the appointment of the winning development consortium.

Our work – in summary – was to revitalise the Brunswick area with a programme of new build housing and refurbished properties. We built more than 450 new homes and refurbished 690, as well as creating a new extra-care facility. It was important to ensure that these new and existing homes became embedded in the place and there was strategic master planning involved where we prioritised people by making streets that connected the area and its residents to each other and the wider city beyond.

How was it to work with the community on the project?

The community was involved in the process from start to finish. It was really rewarding to be able to meet them at the beginning of the whole process and hear their ideas for the neighbourhood – and then to see them again at the end of the project with the neighbourhood they wanted having grown around them.

I think there’s an important lesson to be learnt in Brunswick about how to retain these communities and replicate this in future projects. It’s not just about listening to residents, although that is a huge part of it; it’s also about facilitating mixed-tenure and multi-generational inhabitation of buildings through a variety built form. It having a variety of people living alongside each other who can socialise and look out for each other makes a huge difference to the daily life of any community.

There's so much new housing in city centres being built that is aimed at single households and young professionals. Brunswick was originally a family-centred community and, as well as welcoming new residents, we wanted these families to keep their homes and have the option to stay in the area especially should their housing needs change.

What were our key priorities for the project?

Our priority for the project was to engender a sense of place and to ensure Brunswick felt highly connected within its Manchester setting. Very selective demolition, and the reversal of some existing properties (where the front door to a property changed to address the street), reinforced the hierarchy of streets and the routes through the area which,  together with the creation of a new linear park, gave fresh identity to the neighbourhood.   It had to be an aspirational place, both in its people and its housing provision, but we had to do this without gentrifying the area. This meant retaining the current community, keeping it family-centred and providing enough accommodation and resources in Brunswick to allow someone to stay in the area from the cradle to the grave.

This was where the role of the extra-care facility came in really useful. Having this facility in Brunswick, in the heart of the neighbourhood, means that the residents get to spend time within a community and around other people.

Is there anything in the project you’d do differently if you were starting again today?

Creating a sustainable, connected place was important in determining the way the area was re-planned and this would fundamentally be our approach today. Standards inevitably change over the life of such long term projects and whilst thermal performance across the new and refurbished properties was substantially uplifted against the norms of the time, if we were starting again today from scratch, we would be pushing for a more radical approach to the housing design. This might be to seek fully accredited Passivhaus adoption to further address fuel poverty and support a carbon zero future.