Office figures: Avison Young, The Big Nine Q2 2026 — Manchester office vacancy 12.7%, up 150 basis points on the quarter; take-up 516,152 sq ft across the city centre, South Manchester, Salford Quays and Warrington, with city-centre take-up 33% below its five-year average. No floor-area figure for vacant space is published there. Map built 2026-10-09.
Every building a record says stands empty, one point per building: filter by type, size and how sure the evidence is, and open one to see who says so. “Opportunities” switches to the co-op lens: public land, conversion potential and projects already under way, every source as its own layer.
Manchester City Council publishes no list of empty business premises; manchester.gov.uk answers automated clients with a Cloudflare challenge, so nothing on it could be read.
0 empty buildings · colour = type, dark ring = confirmed
Check any building in Manchester: could it become homes, and could the EHC model work there?
Buildings with evidence that they stand empty — a second source agrees, a public record names them, or we have checked them — ranked by a score you can read: co-op scale, daylight depth, a station nearby, a zone that allows homes, affordable land and an open route in. Checked buildings carry their result; nobody has visited them on site yet. Leerstandsmelder reports join the list when they sit in a large non-residential building and a second source agrees.
| Priority | Building | Floor area | Depth | Station | Conversion check | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 62 | Police and Fire Station, London Road, Manchester Distressed or stranded (named) · Building or structure · 1 other source nearby | 2,685 m² | 22 m | 177 m | A fit only |
Where empty offices, the right zoning and a working neighbourhood come together — and what could go wrong.
The largest unpermissioned brownfield land in the city sits east of the centre, along the canals and the Medlock.
Risk: Most of it is cleared land for new building rather than empty buildings to reuse; ownership is not recorded.
The council's Victoria North programme and the hospital estate make up the city's biggest pipeline of housing land without permission.
Risk: The Victoria North sites belong to one regeneration framework with its own partners; the hospital land depends on the NHS releasing it.
Former department stores and listed buildings at risk are changing use, and office vacancy is rising in older stock.
Risk: Conversions here are mostly to offices and hotels with high land values; small residential upper floors are the realistic co-op scale.
Who controls the space, and what a housing cooperative can actually do with them.
The council keeps a register of land it judges suitable for housing; 302 entries have no planning permission. A co-op can ask the planning team which of them the council or another public body owns (the register records ownership as unknown) and propose a scheme or a joint venture.
Anyone can ask the government to make a public body sell land or property: central-government sites that could be put to better use, and council or other public sites that are empty or under-used with no plans for them. A co-op can use it on an empty council or NHS building it has found on the radar.
Homes England sells its land by the number of homes a site can take; sites under 70 homes go through routes aimed at small and medium-sized builders, which a co-op with a development partner can enter.
Decisions, auctions and closures that change what becomes available, and when.
Plans went in to convert the upper floors of the grade II-listed Winters Building, whose ground floor shop has closed, into apartments.
Manchester office vacancy rose 150 basis points in the second quarter of 2026 while city-centre take-up fell a third below its five-year average.
Manchester had 5,684 empty homes in October 2025 (4,995 a year earlier), 1,900 of them long-term empty; the council itself had 191 empty homes in March 2025.
Relentless announced a Kendals District plan centred on retrofitting the listed Kendal Milne department store on Deansgate, still home to House of Fraser, into 230,000 sq ft of offices.
15 sources connected, 1 waiting for access. We only use data we may lawfully reuse; where a publisher blocks automated access we do not work around it — a person downloads it, or we ask for permission.
| Source | Access | Records | Status | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenStreetMap disused/abandoned tags and brownfields OpenStreetMap contributors | Open API | 247 | Live 2026-10-09 | ODbL 1.0 (© OpenStreetMap contributors) |
| Rail, S-Bahn and U-Bahn stations (OpenStreetMap) OpenStreetMap contributors | Open API | scoring | Live 2026-10-09 | ODbL 1.0 (© OpenStreetMap contributors) |
| Building heights: GlobalBuildingAtlas (TU Munich) Zhu, X. X., Chen, S., Zhang, F., Shi, Y., Wang, Y. (2025), Technical University of Munich GlobalBuildingAtlas: an open global and complete dataset of building polygons, heights and LoD1 3D models. Earth System Science Data 17(12), 6647–6668, doi:10.5194/essd-17-6647-2025. Read from the Parquet copy on Source Cooperative. Satellite-derived heights (typically 1.5–3 m error in Europe), turned into storeys with storey heights fitted on Berlin; used only where no register or official 3D model sizes the building. | Open download | 227 buildings sized | Live 2026-10-09 | CC BY-NC 4.0 (heights); footprints from OpenStreetMap and Microsoft: ODbL |
| Storeys where nothing better sizes the building: EUBUCCO v0.2 EUBUCCO (TU Berlin / ai4up) EUBUCCO v0.2, ODbL 1.0 — Manchester has no open register or 3D model with storeys. Used only for buildings nothing else sizes: storeys mapped in OpenStreetMap, else EUBUCCO’s own estimate. | Open download | 6 buildings sized | Live 2026-10-09 | ODbL 1.0 |
| Road noise (EU Environmental Noise Directive, Lden) European Environment Agency | Open API | scoring | Live 2026-10-09 | EEA standard re-use policy (attribution) |
| Leerstandsmelder.de — public reports of empty buildings Leerstandsmelder (Gängeviertel e.V., Hamburg) Shown while we ask Leerstandsmelder for permission. Reports since 2016 only, with the address, the month reported and a link to each entry; not checked by EHC. Each point says when a report has since been marked demolished, lived in, in interim use or rebuilt on Leerstandsmelder, and the owner type the reporter gave (private owners are never named). | Asking for permission | 0 | Pending 2026-10-09 | Credited to Leerstandsmelder.de; asking for permission |
| Open-ended property funds: buildings they report partly empty Open-ended real-estate funds (each point names its fund and report) German and Austrian open-ended public property funds must list every property with its vacancy (or letting) rate in their annual and half-year reports. scripts/reuse/import-fund-reports.ts reads those lists; properties at 10 % vacancy or more are shown, those at 25 % or more count as evidence. | Open download | 0 | Live 2026-10-09 | Published fund report (KAGB / KARBV property list), cited per point |
| Co-working spaces, department stores, banks, hotels and cinemas listed as permanently closed Overture Maps Foundation (closure data: BrightQuery company records) Places with operating_status "permanently_closed" in the monthly Overture release, read by scripts/reuse/import-overture-closures.ts and matched to the building they sit in. A closed business is usually one unit; names are shown only for companies, never for sole traders. | Open download | 0 | Live 2026-10-09 | CDLA Permissive 2.0 (Overture Maps Foundation) |
| Land without current use and stalled construction, mapped from satellite imagery (Copernicus Urban Atlas 2006–2018) European Environment Agency — Copernicus Land Monitoring Service Urban Atlas class 13400 (brownfields, demolition sites and gaps in the built-up area, 0.25 ha and up) compared across the 2006, 2012 and 2018 editions, so each plot says how long it has stood unused; plus construction sites (13300) already under way in 2012, and 2012 construction sites left unused by 2018. Read from the EEA's open ArcGIS services, the same way in every radar city. The 2021 edition (Copernicus Data Space) drops plots built on since 2018 where scripts/reuse/import-urban-atlas-2021.ts has been run. Points are context, never evidence of vacancy. | Open API | 114 | Live 2026-10-09 | Copernicus open data (© European Union, Copernicus Land Monitoring Service 2006–2021, EEA) |
| Stalled construction and buildings held by insolvent developers EHC research (dated press and court sources per point) Signa, Adler/Consus and other developer insolvencies since 2022 and stalled sites, each with its latest dated status (src/scripts/data/reuse/stalled-projects.json; news leads from scripts/reuse/mine-news.ts are reviewed before they join). | EHC research | 0 | Live 2026-10-09 | Cited publisher per point |
| Church buildings the dioceses and regional churches plan to give up Catholic dioceses and Protestant regional churches (their building plans), via EHC research Buildings a church body’s published building plan or recent reporting names as to be given up, without church funding, for sale or lease, or profaned (src/scripts/data/reuse/church-plans.json and brussels-churches.json). | EHC research | 0 | Live 2026-10-09 | Cited publisher per point |
| Named buildings and sites from EHC research (each with its own source) European Housing Coop research | EHC research | 4 | Live 2026-10-09 | Facts cited to their publishers |
| Year built and listing: OpenStreetMap building tags OpenStreetMap contributors start_date / construction_date and heritage / listed_status of the OpenStreetMap outline a record is matched to, where no register answers. Read with the outline match, not a separate query. | Open API | scoring | Live 2026-10-09 | ODbL 1.0 (© OpenStreetMap contributors) |
| Brownfield register sites without planning permission — Manchester Manchester City Council's brownfield land register, collected by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (planning.data.gov.uk) | Open download | 302 | Live 2026-10-09 | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| Listed buildings and places of worship on Historic England's Heritage at Risk Register — Manchester Historic England — Heritage at Risk Register 2025 (Open Data Hub layers 2021–2025) | Open API | 20 | Live 2026-10-09 | Open Government Licence v3.0 (© Historic England 2026; contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2026) |
| Office buildings mapped in OpenStreetMap OpenStreetMap contributors | Open API | 133 | Live 2026-10-09 | ODbL |
Open data cannot see everything. Tell us about a building in Manchester that stands empty or barely used; once we have checked it, it joins the map under “Reported by visitors (checked)”.
The other radars in the same country and the nearest beyond. All 134 cities in the atlas
The figure on each card: empty buildings on record.