High-rise safety across Manchester's towers

Seen from above, the centre of Manchester has changed shape in a decade. Where the city's skyline was once defined by a handful of landmarks, the area around Deansgate and the Green Quarter now reads as a cluster of residential towers, with more still rising. Manchester has become one of the densest concentrations of tall residential building in the country outside London, and that density is the backdrop against which the building-safety regime has to be made to work, block by block.

What the cluster is made of

The towers below the camera are overwhelmingly residential and mixed-use: apartment blocks over ground-floor retail and amenity, often arranged into estates that share podiums, plant and access. Many comfortably exceed the threshold that makes them higher-risk buildings under the Building Safety Act 2022, at least 18m tall or at least 7 storeys with at least two residential units. A single development can hold several such towers, each its own higher-risk building, sometimes with different accountable parties for different parts.

That arrangement is where management starts to get intricate. A podium shared between two towers, a plant room serving three, a car park beneath all of them: these create overlapping responsibilities that have to be mapped clearly. Where the structure and common parts are divided across owners, each is an Accountable Person for their part, and one must be the Principal Accountable Person carrying the building-wide duties. Getting that division recorded accurately is the first management challenge a Manchester estate poses.

The duties that follow the height

For each high-rise residential building in the cluster, the same standing obligations apply. Under the Building Safety Act 2022 the Accountable Person must register the building before occupation, assess and manage the fire and structural safety risks, and hold a safety case from which a report can be produced for the Building Safety Regulator. Alongside that, the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, in force 23 January 2023, require the responsible person of a high-rise residential building to:

• Share external wall system information and floor plans electronically with Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service.
• Keep hard-copy floor plans and a single-page orientation plan, with contact details, current in a secure information box.
• Carry out monthly checks of firefighters' lifts and key firefighting equipment.

Multiply those duties across a cluster of towers under common management and the cadence becomes the hard part. A single tower's monthly checks are straightforward; twenty towers, each with its own lift, its own secure information box and its own plans to keep current, is a coordination problem that defeats a spreadsheet.

The external wall question

Manchester's growth came largely in the period when external wall construction was under the closest scrutiny, and the city has been at the centre of the remediation story. For management purposes the practical point is that the external wall position of each tower has to be known, recorded and reflected in the fire risk assessment, which the Fire Safety Act 2021 confirmed must cover the structure, external walls including cladding and balconies, and flat entrance doors. Where remediation is in progress, the record has to track it, because the building's safety case is describing a moving target. We look at the wider picture in EWS1, cladding and the external wall review.

Density turns small failures into pattern failures

The thing a satellite view makes obvious is proximity. These towers sit close together, often under shared or related management, and that changes the nature of risk. A single out-of-date floor plan in one secure information box is a local failure. The same gap repeated across a portfolio of nearby towers, because the same process was used for all of them, is a systemic one. Dense estates reward consistent process and punish inconsistent record-keeping at scale.

This is the case for a single source of truth rather than a tower-by-tower patchwork. When every block in an estate is managed to the same standard, with the same cadence and the same record structure, a manager can see the whole portfolio's compliance at a glance and spot the one tower whose monthly checks have slipped. When each tower is its own island of paperwork, that visibility is gone, and the gap is found by an inspection rather than by the manager.

Running an estate as one record

The management challenge in Manchester is less about any single tower than about holding a cluster of them to a consistent standard without losing the detail of each. Each tower needs its own classification, its own plans, its own assessments and its own statutory checks; the estate needs all of that visible in one place so nothing falls between towers.

SAMRISK is built to hold a portfolio that way: each building has its own record, its own plans and its own compliance calendar, while the whole estate sits in a single view, with a free site shell underneath to tie the shared land and podium together. You can see how multiple buildings are organised on the buildings page, and how shared land is handled on the sites page. The Manchester picture is also a national one, and the same logic applies wherever towers cluster, as in Stratford's towers and the management they demand. This is general guidance rather than legal advice, and any specific building's obligations should be confirmed against its own measurements and the current rules.