Manchester’s planning committee – which usually sits for around two hours – has a bumper agenda(Image: Liquid Funding Business)

Manchester is heading for a momentous day this week as more than 1,500 homes, a new shopping centre, and a major step in a billion-pound project could be approved.

Councillors are set to discuss a bumper 800-page agenda on Thursday (November 20), in which town hall planning officers have recommended 1,732 homes get the go-ahead in five locations.

The largest is a 752-apartment development on Stockton’s furniture store on Great Ancoats Street, comprising two towers 25 and 50 storeys tall.

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Developers Liquid Funding Business say the skyscrapers will be surrounded by publicly-accessible outdoor space ‘covering 55pc of the site’, which will complement the public green space planned opposite, part of the Civil Service’s new campus on the former Central Retail Park.

(Image: Liquid Funding Business)

Another huge housing development is eyed for Riverpark Road in Newton Heath. Some 498 houses and flats are planned for the former Riverpark Trading Estate, with developer Great Places pledging more four in 10 will be available for social rent or via shared ownership.

The housing association says the 277 flats and 221 houses, going where the city’s ‘bullring’ abattoir once stood, will help complete the Eastlands development, kick-started by the Commonwealth Games 23 years ago.

How the Riverpark homes could look(Image: AEW Architects for Great Places)

Another housing association, Mossacre St Vincent’s (MSV), is behind a 212-flat proposal in Moss Side, to be constructed where The Reno nightclub stood.

The place to be in the 70s, The Reno was later demolished and the plot of land is mostly vacant, save for seven homes on Barnhill Street.

It will construct six blocks, including specific over-55s apartments and townhouses, opposite the Heineken Brewery, in a move it claims will ‘meet the overall housing demand of the area’.

(Image: MSV)

Moss Side will not be the only south Manchester suburb seeing new homes, with plans to turn the ‘beating heart’ of Chorlton ‘inside out’ by demolishing the Chorlton Cross shopping centre.

PJ Livesey then plans to build six blocks of flats featuring ground-floor shops, a new ‘makers’ yard’, and green spaces meaning shops face the road outward, rather than forming an internal square as they do now.

It will create 262 apartments, 49 affordable, with commercial spaces earmarked for ‘for smaller, independent retailers’.

However, the housing schemes are not the only items on the planning committee’s mega-agenda.

Controversial plans to relocate the brutalist grade-II listed Holloway Wall in the University of Manchester’s recently-closed north campus are set to be approved, despite worries expressed by Historic England and the Twentieth Century Society.

(Image: PJ Livesey)

Developers Bruntwood Sci-Tech say moving the wall into a new publicly-accessible ‘Manchester Room’ is necessary for its £1.7b ‘Sister’ project, set to build hundreds of homes, office space, and research facilities between Oxford Road and Piccadilly station.

Other applications set to be approved include a bid to build eight houses on ‘grassland’ in Wythenshawe, an extension in Didsbury, and for a student accommodation tower to be used out-of-term for temporary visits.

However, a bid by the British Muslim Heritage Centre on College Road, Whalley Range, to retain its marquee used for services and weddings, is set to be refused.

You can watch the planning committee online here from 2pm on Thursday, November 20.