£31.5m Investment Secured for Oldham's Prince's Gate as Part of Greater Manchester's £1bn Good Growth Fund

Oldham has secured £31.5 million from the first wave of Greater Manchester's £1 billion Good Growth Fund, money that will turn the Prince's Gate car park beside Mumps tram stop into 331 new homes, 75 of them for social rent. The grant, announced on Monday, is the single largest slice the borough has drawn from the city-region pot and is meant to trigger the wider decade-long plan for 2,000 town-centre homes.

Work has already started quietly; the council closed the pay-and-display car park last week so engineers can prepare the site before building contracts are signed later this year. When finished, the five-storey blocks will sit within a minute's walk of the tram platform, giving future tenants a 20-minute ride to central Manchester without needing a car.

Council leader Arooj Shah said the scheme answers the 'urgent' shortage of affordable homes and shows the combined authority 'backing our plans and backing our future'. The 75 social units will be kept by the council or a registered provider, while the remaining 256 flats and houses will be sold or let at market rates, helping to cross-subsidise the affordable quota.

Prince's Gate is the first visible project inside a larger pipeline that includes the proposed Sports Town Mayoral Development Zone at the former Alexandra Park site and the Northern Roots urban farm on Union Street. Together they are meant to stop the drift of shoppers and residents to neighbouring towns by stitching new housing, leisure and green space around the transport hub.

Across Greater Manchester the initial £400 million from the Good Growth Fund is expected to unlock 3,000 homes, 22,000 jobs and two million square feet of workspace. Oldham's slice is modest by comparison, but for a borough that has seen more plans stall than start, the shovels now moving on Prince's Gate feel like a rare moment when paperwork turns into brickwork.