Eye Hospital development praised
CHIEF Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander praised the ‘amazing’ potential of the former Manchester Royal Eye Hospital site, which is due to be transformed into a bio-medical research facility.
The £21m project, led by developer Bruntwood and backed by Manchester City Council, will see the historic building on Oxford Road – at the heart of the academic and clinical campus, will receive around £2m from the Government’s new Regional Growth Fund.
Visiting the site where he was shown around by Bruntwood chairman Mike Oglesby, director of special projects Colin Sinclair and Sir Richard Leese of Manchester City Council, Mr Alexander said: “This new centre will build on Manchester’s tradition of excellence in life sciences and will sit at the heart of a world leading biomedical centre of excellence.
“It will also create and sustain hundreds of jobs in the construction and science sectors.
“Bringing balanced, sustainable growth back to the UK economy is the Government’s overriding priority. By supporting developments such as Manchester’s Former Royal Eye Hospital, the Government is helping the private-sector lead the economic recovery.”
He pledged to return to see the development when it is completed in two years.
Asked what had ensured the scheme had won support from the RGF, he said: “It has enormous potential create jobs in a sector, biomedical research, which is very important to the future of the Manchester economy and in the North West too.
“Secondly there has been very close working between a whole range of different organisations – the private sector developers, with the universities and hospitals and local authority. “
Sir Richard Leese and Mr Oglesby lobbied Mr Alexander for more support to held address skills and worklessness issues and SME funding in Greater Manchester.
Mr Oglesby said: “The success of this project has been a real team effort and the result of a lot of hard work from Bruntwood, the city, the university and the hospitals trust.
“It’s very unusual to see a building of this nature that is able to combine both the private and public sector in this way.
“Historically I think if you look at this project it would have almost entirely been a public sector project and it’s great to see public and private investment going into a development of this nature.”
Over the next two years the 100,000sq ft building will be transformed into research laboratories and clusters for high-tech, bio-medical companies.
More than half of the building is set to be occupied by two tenants – one an international clinical research organisation – the other a training provider.
There will be 25,000 sq ft of space set aside for research-led companies, in any combination of high specification wet labs, write-up space and offices.
