The North’s most ambitious advanced-manufacturing project has moved out of the planning stage and onto a building site. Construction has begun on the Sustainable Materials and Manufacturing Centre (SMMC) at Kingsway Business Park in Rochdale, the first flagship building of the Atom Valley growth zone. As Atom Valley confirmed, a further £12m has been committed to the centre, with completion due later in 2026.
What is being built
The SMMC sits beside the M62 and is designed as a home for advanced manufacturing, materials science and industrial research. It will house laboratories, workshops, metrology space, design and analysis studios, a lecture theatre, meeting rooms, flexible workspace for start-ups, offices for established manufacturers and a café. The point is to give small and growing firms access to kit and space they could never afford to build for themselves.
The scale behind it
The centre is one building in a much larger plan. Atom Valley, spanning Rochdale and Bury, aims to deliver around 17 million sq ft of employment space and up to 20,000 highly skilled jobs in technology and manufacturing over its lifetime. As the Greater Manchester Combined Authority set out, it is one of the region’s central bets on the next decade of growth.
Why this model works
There is real substance here, not just floor space. Shared innovation centres like the SMMC do something the market on its own rarely manages: they put expensive research equipment and technical expertise within reach of the smaller firms that make up most of the economy. A start-up in advanced materials cannot buy its own metrology lab. It can rent time in one. That is how you turn a cluster of ambitious companies into an actual industry, and it is exactly the kind of patient, foundational investment the North needs more of. Rochdale, a town too often written off, is quietly building one of the most serious manufacturing propositions in the country.
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