BLOG: People of NOMA – Andy Farrington

18 June 2025

Alongside its bustling restaurant scene, streets paved with history, and vibrant offices that stand tall in Manchester City Centre, NOMA has also become known for its lush green spaces. Something that makes this growing neighbourhood incredibly unique in our city’s concrete jungle.

And the not-so-hidden heroes of NOMA’s flourishing spaces are the neighbourhood’s green-fingered gardeners, Plant Co-operative CIC. This not-for-profit urban gardening group was formed in the spring of 2021 when NOMA formed Plant to transform the neighbourhood’s landscapes. Since then, the group has transformed into Plant Co-operative CIC – an independent urban gardening collective with Andy Farrington at the helm.

Today, Andy continues to work closely with the NOMA team to keep every corner of the area blooming. And we’re delighted to introduce him as our next guest for our People of NOMA series!

What work does the Plant team do here at NOMA?

As a team of urban gardeners, we upkeep all the outdoor spaces here at NOMA, helping habitats to thrive for the benefit of those in the area and the nature that lives here. We’re a team of five full time staff and an apprentice and our work is predominately split between gardening and running workshops with charities and the local community.

Most people who live and work in and around NOMA know about our gardening work, whether that’s digging up and replacing dead shrubbery, planting flowers, collecting litter, shaping spaces, and everything in between – it’s hard work! We’re active, we’re on our feet, and it’s often a lot more demanding than gardening within a private garden, but a lot more rewarding too. We get to make the neighbourhood a brighter, greener place, and it brings us a lot of pride to see people enjoy the fruits of our labour.

We’re also incredibly passionate about making gardening accessible to the general public. It’s why we welcome volunteers to come along and get stuck in every Tuesday and Thursday, and why we offer local businesses the chance to volunteer on Wednesdays. We also host evening wildlife sessions, and run lots of interesting workshops throughout the year.

NOMA is a huge support in everything we do to engage the community and has been since the very beginning! We regularly host Kings Trust workshops and invite local schools to come down and get involved in our gardening work and explore the habitats here. It’s so important to show our community what horticulture has to offer – we find that loads of people leave our workshops feeling genuinely inspired by the whole experience.

We’ve also been working with the Ministry of Justice on an apprenticeship scheme where we work with apprentices on probation to teach them some gardening skills and show them a new career path they may not have previously considered.

We’re always saying, gardens don’t need maintenance they need gardening. Ultimately, that’s what we’re delivering here with the help of our community, good old-fashioned gardening.

How did your work at NOMA come about?

NOMA has 4.5 acres of green space, which when you think about it, is a lot for a city centre neighbourhood. And when we first started out four years ago, some of the of the greenery was fairly nondescript, so we saw a real opportunity to enliven the landscape.

What’s amazing about MEPC, the developers and asset managers of NOMA, is they took a chance on us. Our business model was completely new, even now, no one else in the country is doing it. But we showed passion and had a vision for what we could do with the space and MEPC showed us support and confidence in return. Many other developers wouldn’t have taken the chance, but MEPC’s community-focus ethos aligns perfectly with ours, so we all knew this was a great opportunity. The sense of neighbourhood in NOMA is so important, and we love being a part of that every day when we’re out and about.

Tell us about your opportunity at Gardener’s World?

Our team at Plant CIC showcased a mini community garden the at Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) Urban Show in Manchester last year. For anyone who doesn’t know, the RHS is the UK’s leading gardening charity and has been running since 1804, so being part of the show was a huge honour!

And at last year’s show, the RHS were working with Jason Williams, otherwise known as the Sky Gardener, who went viral a few years back for transforming his 18th floor balcony in Deansgate into an oasis of plants and flowers. A concept that he took to the Chelsea Flower Show and won gold!

By working with Jason, the RHS encouraged teams to get involved and display seven different garden concepts at the RHS Urban Show to showcase exactly what’s possible in urban environments to developers. We were one of the seven teams, so we showcased a mini community garden at the four-day show. On the press day, Gardener’s World absolutely loved our mini garden, so we were of course delighted to tell them about the bigger community garden that we’ve crafted at NOMA, and the opportunity grew from there!

We’ll be showing Gardener’s World around all our wonderful green spaces at NOMA in the next month so keep an eye out for us appearing on the telly.

What have been your favourite moments at NOMA in the past year?

We’re always up to something so this is an easy one.

I’ve loved the 10-year celebration of Sadler’s Yard, paying homage to Britain’s first ever hot air balloonist, James Sadler, who famously took flight from Balloon Street at NOMA in May 1785. To create a visual showcase of his legacy, we filled Sadler’s Yard with an allium installation, flowers that just so happen to closely resemble balloons.

Working with the National Trust on the Sky Garden Challenge has also been a real highlight, where we’ve been encouraging people with balconies and window gardens in the city to grow for pollinators. By throwing workshops across the city, we’ve given people who have small outdoor spaces guidance on how to get started and bring some green into their lives, taking away the fear of embracing gardening.

And for a very simple transformation that had a big impact, we recently renovated a 1970s car park here at NOMA that had become a bit of a dumping ground for litter. By stripping out hedging by hand and replacing it with pollinating plants, and overall cleaning up the area, the space now feels so much more welcoming and has been such a satisfying micro-project. This is a great example of how creating vibrant, warm green space in a city doesn’t have to cost a fortune or be a grand scheme, sometimes it’s about giving TLC to small spaces.

How does Manchester City Centre inspire your work?

It’s no secret that the infrastructure for green space in Manchester is not great. Other cities in the UK have horticulture happening in abundance, but we are really lacking that here. So in terms of being inspired by the city, we’ve been very much inspired to make a difference here and give people access to better green space.

At NOMA, we find that connecting with the community is also a huge inspiration for our work. We’re always engaging with the residents, whether we’re out and about with spades in the ground or showing them around the gardens. It’s great to know that our gardening has a real impact and brightens people’s day, and we’ve really become recognisable faces around the neighbourhood which is lovely.

How do you see your work as part of NOMA?

NOMA is known as the growing neighbourhood and that’s partly to do with Plant CIC. Growing… gardening… you get it.

Our work has already seen the public engagement and interaction with NOMA’s green spaces completely transform, with people visiting the gardens just to see and enjoy them. Some feedback from residents shows that one of the selling points to rent homes and offices here at NOMA is the beautiful gardens and community, and Plant CIC is integral to that.

Through our gardening and community initiatives, we’re always around, always doing something in the neighbourhood, and it’s made us part of the fabric of NOMA.

As a bit of a by-product of our work, we’ve also seen a huge increase of wildlife at NOMA. We’ve got blue tits, grey tits, mistle thrushes, elephant hawk moths, the only breeding pair of Peregrine Falcons in Manchester, and this is the first year that gold finches are nesting here. We even found a very rare tree snipe fly here at NOMA recently, a red-listed species never before recorded in Lancashire!

We call it a by-product because attracting more wildlife was never a direct goal of our urban gardening, but by strictly prohibiting the use of herbicides and pesticides, and planting a diverse range of plants, we’ve created a healthy and thriving habitat and helped ecosystems to recover in this corner of the city. In fact, our three-year Biodiversity Net Gain study showed that our work at NOMA has increased the wildlife by 54% since we started which is a huge rise!

What’s next?

Early summer is actually our busiest time! So between the Manchester Jazz Festival, the Manchester Flower Festival, our National Trust Sky Garden Challenge workshops, and loads more, we’ve got tonnes going on in the next few months. Not to mention our stint on Gardener’s World soon!