“They came up with a policy just as we were going through the system”. George Tyson, project director at Downing Group, is sitting in a site office in the centre of Manchester explaining how the city’s newest coliving scheme came to be.

“[The council] didn’t have a policy on coliving – not many authorities did or do,” he explains. Square Gardens, an 830,000 sq ft site in the First Street district, was one of a few similar schemes coming in for planning during the pandemic and the city needed to figure out an approach to handling a residential typology which remains relatively uncommon in the UK.

“They landed on a policy which said ‘ok, we’ll trial it for a period of time’”. It recommended an initial ceiling of 5,000 units – roughly equivalent to what was proposed in the handful of schemes being brought forward at that time – to be restricted to key areas of employment growth in the city centre. “It’s great for us in terms of competition if there’s a closed shop and we are one of the shopkeepers,” Tyson jokes.