Walk north from Victoria station, past the Printworks and the National Football Museum, and the city centre starts to thin out. The buildings get bigger and the streets get quieter. You’re entering NOMA — a 20-acre regeneration zone that wants to be Manchester’s newest neighbourhood. Whether it’s actually a neighbourhood yet, or still a development site with branding, depends on when you visit and how generous you’re feeling.
NOMA stands for North Manchester, though the area it covers — roughly bounded by Victoria station to the south, Rochdale Road to the east, and the River Irk to the north — has never been called that by anyone who lived here before the developers arrived. It was simply the area around the CIS Tower: the Co-operative Group’s headquarters, a cluster of mid-century office buildings, and Angel Meadow, a small park with a history that makes your skin crawl.
The Co-op’s Kingdom
The Co-operative movement has its roots in Rochdale, but Manchester was its operational heart for over a century. The CIS Tower on Miller Street, completed in 1962, was the tallest office building in the UK when it opened. At 122 metres and 25 storeys, it dominated the Manchester skyline for decades. The green-tinted glass curtain wall was a modernist statement: the Co-operative Insurance Society was big, serious, and here to stay.
Around the tower, the Co-op built its empire: New Century House (the original 1960s conference and social facility), the Co-op Bank headquarters, warehouses, and ancillary buildings. The complex employed thousands of people and functioned as a self-contained campus within the city. If you worked for the Co-op, this patch of north Manchester was your world from nine to five.
The decline of the Co-op Group’s commercial fortunes in the 2010s — the near-collapse of the Co-op Bank, the corporate governance scandals, the financial restructuring — left the property portfolio in play. The Co-op still has its headquarters here, in a new building called One Angel Square that opened in 2013. But the older buildings needed repurposing, and the wider area needed a plan.
New Century
The most visible result of the NOMA project so far is New Century, the music venue and food hall that opened in 2022 in the shell of the original New Century House. The venue occupies the upper floor: a 1,000-capacity room with high ceilings, a proper stage, and a sound system designed for live music. The food hall fills the ground floor with a rotation of street food traders and a central bar.
New Century has been a genuine success. The music programming is sharp — mid-size touring bands, electronic nights, comedy. The food hall works as a daytime and early evening destination: the traders are mostly good, the space is well-designed, and the central bar keeps things social. On a busy Friday evening, with music bleeding down from the venue upstairs and the food hall packed with after-work crowds, it feels like the kind of place NOMA needs more of.
The venue also demonstrates that this part of Manchester can attract people who aren’t just passing through to Victoria station. That’s significant, because for decades this area was a transit zone — you walked through it, you didn’t stop in it.
Angel Meadow
Between the new developments, there’s a patch of grass with trees, paths, and benches. Angel Meadow looks like a pleasant city park. It is not a pleasant story.
In the early nineteenth century, Angel Meadow was one of the worst slums in England. Friedrich Engels described the area around St Michael’s church in his 1845 work on the condition of the working class, noting the overcrowded cellars, the open sewers, and the crushing poverty. The population density was staggering: thousands of people crammed into courts and alleys with no sanitation. Disease was constant. Life expectancy in the area was estimated at under 20 years.
The slums were eventually cleared, and St Michael’s churchyard became Angel Meadow park. But here’s the detail that catches people off guard: the park sits on top of a burial ground containing an estimated 40,000 bodies. The churchyard was used from the 1780s to the 1850s, during the period of maximum overcrowding and epidemic disease. The burials were shallow, stacked, and poorly documented. When the park was landscaped in the late nineteenth century, the graves were simply grassed over.
Archaeological investigations in the 2010s, conducted ahead of the NOMA development, confirmed the scale of the burial ground. Human remains were found close to the surface. The development had to work around the archaeological constraints — you can’t build foundations through 40,000 graves, ethically or practically.
Angel Meadow has been tidied up as part of the NOMA project. New paths, better planting, interpretive signage explaining the history. It’s a more dignified space than it was a decade ago. But there’s an unavoidable tension between the park’s past and the shiny development growing around it. The marketing brochures for NOMA apartments don’t dwell on the burial ground beneath the park outside.
What’s Built, What’s Planned
One Angel Square, the Co-op Group’s headquarters, was the first major new building in the NOMA scheme. Opened in 2013, it was designed as one of the most sustainable office buildings in Europe: a massive atrium, natural ventilation, rainwater harvesting, and a rating that the Co-op was keen to publicise. The building is impressive, though its ground-floor public impact is minimal — it’s a corporate HQ, not a community hub.
Since then, the development has added residential towers, more office space, and the beginnings of ground-floor retail and hospitality. The masterplan calls for over a million square feet of mixed-use space, including affordable workspace for smaller businesses and startups. The River Irk, which runs through the site largely underground and in culvert, is part of a long-term plan for daylighting and greening — bringing the river back to the surface and creating a linear park.
But the development is proceeding in phases, and right now, walking through NOMA feels like walking through a place in transition. Completed buildings sit next to construction sites. Finished public realm ends at hoardings. The food hall is buzzing but the surrounding streets are quiet. It’s the awkward adolescent phase of regeneration: too far along to ignore, too incomplete to fully judge.
The Gap Between Ambition and Reality
Every urban regeneration project in Manchester faces the same question: who is it for? NOMA’s marketing positions the area as a creative, community-oriented neighbourhood. The reality so far is more straightforward: new-build apartments at city-centre rents, a corporate headquarters, and a food hall. These are not bad things. But they’re not yet a neighbourhood in the way that Ancoats or the Northern Quarter are neighbourhoods, with independent businesses, residential permanence, and organic social life.
The challenge is that NOMA is starting from close to zero. Ancoats had its mill buildings, its existing community in the New Islington area, its proximity to the established Northern Quarter. The NQ itself evolved gradually over decades. NOMA has to build everything at once: the buildings, the infrastructure, the reasons for people to come and stay. New Century has provided one reason. The area needs a dozen more.
The dark history of Angel Meadow is, counterintuitively, one of NOMA’s most powerful assets. It gives the area a story that goes deeper than the development brochures. A neighbourhood built on top of 40,000 forgotten graves, adjacent to the places Engels documented as the worst of industrial capitalism, now reinventing itself as a modern urban quarter — that’s a narrative with weight. Whether NOMA’s developers choose to lean into that story or smooth over it will say a lot about what kind of neighbourhood this becomes.
For now, NOMA is a work in progress. Visit New Century on a Friday night and the potential is obvious. Walk the quieter streets on a Sunday morning and the distance still to travel is equally clear. Manchester has pulled off ambitious regeneration before — Salford Quays, Spinningfields, Ancoats. NOMA has the bones to join that list. It just needs time, tenants, and a willingness to let the neighbourhood grow into something the masterplan didn’t anticipate.
