Grosvenor, the property company controlled by the Duke of Westminster, has broken ground on a £40m repositioning of The Hive in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, in a move that takes the group’s directly managed flexible workspace model outside London for the first time.
The Lever Street landmark, which extends to 78,000 sq ft, will be reimagined as a destination office building anchored by 25,500 sq ft of flex space and a hospitality-led amenity offer. Ground-floor units fronting Lever Street will house a deli and a restaurant, both run by what Grosvenor describes as “well-known Manchester names”, with a launch pencilled in for autumn 2026.
For Grosvenor’s UK property arm, the project is the most visible test yet of a regional strategy launched in 2020 that now stretches across roughly 500,000 sq ft in Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and Leeds. The portfolio is currently 90 per cent let, a figure that compares favourably with a regional office market still wrestling with hybrid working and a flight to quality.
The group has appointed x+why, the B Corp-certified workspace operator, to run more than 22,000 sq ft of the flex floors under a management agreement. The deal extends a partnership that began in 2023 at Fivefields, Grosvenor’s social-impact workspace in Victoria, and signals a growing appetite among traditional landlords to plug operating expertise into their own buildings rather than cede space to third-party flex providers on conventional leases.
Interiors will be designed by x+why’s in-house team, whydesign, with a deliberate nod to local craftsmanship. Pieces by Manchester-based furniture designers and artists including Aiden Donovan, Jesse Cracknell, Matt Dennis and Mima Adams will be woven into the scheme, while elements from the fit-out installed by previous tenant The Arts Council are to be repurposed, a small but pointed gesture towards the building’s creative heritage.
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