Therme Manchester to include more than 25 pools, 30 multi-sensory saunas, a snow room and a “garden of wellbeing”

New plans for the £250m Therme Manchester resort were approved at the end of last week

The revised proposals have broken up a previous consent for a single large building into several smaller buildings

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Revised plans by Fletcher Priest and wellbeing developer Therme Group for a £250m spa resort in Manchester have been given the go-ahead.

The 14.4ha complex in Trafford Park was approved in March 2020 but this consent has since expired and the scheme has been significantly redesigned and resubmitted in a new application.

Trafford council voted last week to back the new plans, which landowner Peel L&P described as the UK’s first major city-based wellbeing resort.

The 82,000 sq m complex is set to contain more than 25 individual pools, 35 water slides, over 30 multi-sensory saunas and steam rooms, a 7,300 sq m “garden of wellbeing”, more than 1,500 trees, a visitor and education centre, a ‘snow room’, multi-sensory showers and oxygen rooms.

Therme Group said the resort will offer an “immersive experience” for visitors to unwind in a tropical environment including warm water lagoons, mineral pools, botanical gardens and collaborations with “world-class” artists to promote “contemplation, playfulness and engagement with others”.

Also working on the project team is collaborating architect Mamou-Mani, Therme Group’s in-house architect Therme Arc, the group’s in-house structural engineer Therme DTX, planning and heritage consultant WSP and accessibility consultant Buro Happold.

The initial proposals envisaged a single building with an undulating glazed roof wrapping around a central garden area.

The redesign has seen this concept broken up into several individual buildings around four to five storeys in height with partially glazed roofs and faced with large glazed arch-shaped structures.

How the wellbeing garden would look in winter

Aerial view of the proposals

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Therme said the new plans have been designed to increase material efficiency, reduce embodied carbon and allow the potential for phasing.

The firm said the reduction in glazing on the roofs of the buildings compared to the previous consented plans aimed to provide better thermal insulation and management of heat gain, with both vertical and horizontal areas of glazing positioned to respond to the direction of sunlight.

The resort is set to start construction later this year and take around two years to complete.