When One Angel Square opened in Manchester’s NOMA district in 2013, it didn’t just set a new standard for sustainable office design in the UK — it set a world record. The Co-operative Group’s headquarters achieved a BREEAM Outstanding score of 95.16%, the highest ever recorded by a major commercial building at that time. More than a decade on, it remains one of the most technically impressive examples of low-carbon construction in British history.
Here’s a look at what made it so remarkable, how it actually works, and what the rest of the industry can take from it.
What One Angel Square is
Designed by 3DReid and completed at a cost of around £100 million, One Angel Square is a 16-storey, 328,000 sq ft office building sitting at the heart of the NOMA mixed-use development in central Manchester. It houses the Co-operative Group’s staff across multiple floors of open-plan workspace, with retail and public spaces at ground level.
On paper it looks like a standard large commercial development. What makes it different is almost entirely invisible from the street — it’s all in the engineering.
The building’s core sustainability features
A double-skin façade that breathes
The most distinctive visual feature of One Angel Square is its double-skin glass façade — essentially a building within a building. The outer glass skin creates a buffer zone of air between itself and the inner structural envelope. This cavity acts as natural insulation in winter and a ventilation channel in summer, reducing the need for mechanical heating and cooling significantly. The design allows fresh air to circulate through the building passively for much of the year, which directly cuts energy demand.
On-site biofuel power generation
Rather than relying on grid electricity, One Angel Square generates a large proportion of its own power through a combined heat and power (CHP) plant fuelled by biodiesel made from rapeseed oil — sourced from Co-operative farms in the UK. The plant simultaneously produces electricity and captures heat that would otherwise be wasted, feeding both into the building’s systems. This approach, known as trigeneration when cooling is also included, dramatically reduces the carbon intensity of day-to-day operations.
The result is an 80% reduction in carbon emissions compared to the older offices the building replaced.
Water recycling and rainwater harvesting
The building collects rainwater and recycles greywater for toilet flushing and irrigation, reducing mains water consumption considerably. Water-efficient fittings throughout contribute to an overall reduction in water use that helped earn maximum marks in BREEAM’s water category.
Waste and materials performance
During construction, the project achieved a very high rate of waste diversion from landfill — a criterion that often trips up large developments. The specification prioritised materials with low embodied carbon and high recycled content, which contributed to strong scores in the Materials and Waste categories of the BREEAM assessment.
How it scored so highly under BREEAM
BREEAM — the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method — evaluates buildings across ten categories including Energy, Health & Wellbeing, Water, Materials, Transport, Waste, Land Use, Ecology, Pollution, and Management. An Excellent rating requires a minimum 70% score; Outstanding requires 85%. One Angel Square reached 95.16%.
To understand what that figure means in practice, it’s worth knowing that the majority of new commercial buildings in the UK don’t achieve Outstanding at all — fewer than 1% of assessed buildings reach that tier. If you want a broader picture of where BREEAM sits alongside other schemes like LEED and WELL, the Green Certificates in UK guide is a useful starting point.
One Angel Square didn’t just score highly on energy — it achieved top marks across multiple categories simultaneously. That’s unusual, because high performance in one area (say, energy) can sometimes come at the expense of another (say, materials). The building’s design team, including Buro Happold as engineers, managed to optimise across the board.
The building also became the first in the UK to simultaneously achieve maximum ratings under BREEAM, an EPC A+ energy certificate, and an A-rated Display Energy Certificate — three separate assessment frameworks, all at their highest possible level.
The practical impact on building occupants
Sustainable design can sometimes prioritise numbers over people, but One Angel Square was explicitly designed around occupant wellbeing. The double-skin façade provides good acoustic insulation from street noise. High-quality daylighting across the floorplates reduces reliance on artificial lighting. Air quality monitoring helps maintain fresh conditions throughout.
The Co-op reported genuine improvements in staff satisfaction following the move from their previous Manchester offices. That’s not surprising — there’s a growing body of evidence linking well-designed, low-energy office environments with productivity and reduced absenteeism.
Why Manchester, and why it matters for the wider city
Manchester has been ahead of most UK cities on sustainable construction for some time. It was the first city in the country to mandate BREEAM assessments through its planning framework, and the council’s target to reach net zero carbon by 2038 has kept pressure on developers to take certification seriously.
One Angel Square helped establish what was possible in a regional city at commercial scale. It demonstrated that ambitious sustainability targets didn’t require London rents to be financially viable, and it gave subsequent Manchester developers — including Bruntwood SciTech and Allied London — a local benchmark to aim at.
The NOMA estate, of which One Angel Square is the centrepiece, has continued to develop along similar principles. 4 Angel Square, completed in 2023, became Manchester’s first operationally net-zero carbon office. The area now functions as a genuine cluster of low-carbon commercial space, which matters for tenants looking to meet their own sustainability commitments.
If you’re looking to understand what green office space is currently available in Manchester more broadly, the Manchester office space map from Level Workspace gives a useful current picture of availability across the city centre, including in and around the NOMA area.
What other developers and building owners can learn from it
A few things stand out as lessons from One Angel Square that aren’t always reflected in newer commercial developments:
On-site generation matters more than grid tariffs. The biodiesel CHP plant was a significant capital investment, but it gave the building genuine energy independence and locked in predictable operating costs in a way that purchasing renewable electricity from the grid does not.
The envelope is everything. The double-skin façade is expensive to build, but it reduces mechanical plant requirements substantially. Getting the building physics right at design stage avoids years of costly energy management after occupation.
Integrated assessment from the start. The project team worked with BREEAM assessors from the earliest design stages, not as a box-ticking exercise at the end of construction. That integration shows in the breadth of the final score.
Operational performance needs to be tracked. One Angel Square was designed with extensive metering and monitoring built in, which meant the building could be managed in real time against its design targets. Many buildings achieve a good BREEAM score on paper but underperform in use because monitoring systems aren’t in place.
Is it still relevant today?
BREEAM Version 7, introduced in mid-2025, has tightened requirements significantly — particularly around whole-life carbon and fossil-fuel-free design. A biodiesel CHP plant, however innovative in 2013, would score differently under current criteria that favour fully electrified, zero-fossil-fuel solutions.
But that doesn’t diminish what One Angel Square achieved. It proved, at a time when many were sceptical, that a large commercial office in a regional UK city could be built and operated to genuinely low-carbon standards. The building pushed the industry forward, and the industry is now building on what it learned.
For anyone working in sustainable construction, facilities management, or commercial property in the North West, it’s still worth visiting — or at least studying in detail. There aren’t many buildings that set a world record and still hold up as a reference point more than a decade later.
