Gary Neville is well known for making his mark on the football pitch for Manchester United and England.
The £250m phase two is a 41-storey tower which will be home to a 162-bed, five-star international hotel brand as well as 217 residences and an additional 75,000 sq ft of office space. As well as Neville's Relentless Developments, the scheme is being brought forward by US investment giant KKR and Salboy, the Salford developer co-founder by Fred Done, of Betfred fame. Manchester City Council is also a key stakeholder."In Relentless Developments we have never taken on another project because we want to focus solely on this," Neville added. "We see it as a great responsibility. We always have and we didn't want to become distracted.
"Every business I've been a part of has been a start-up. We've had eight of them and you do along the way hit obstacles and you make mistakes," Neville said. "Start-ups are bloody hard, they really are. I don't know why I keep on investing in starting up businesses because it's hard enough investing in a business that's already on the track and running and have already gone through the pain at the beginning.
"When we started the project 15 years ago you didn't get world class hospitality bleeding into commercial or residential buildings", he said. That has changed and there's no doubt now that there have been some brilliant developments that have changed that. "I used to come back to Manchester and think 'why have we not got these hotels?' and it used to bug me that people thought of Manchester as just a regional city."
"The real problem is the central government policies around affordable and social housing and not really creating the environment to build houses. They're not interested and they've not built enough houses.