Sunrise On Kinrise As Birmingham Gets Another Hipster Cluster

A developer that made its name converting historic city centre blocks into thriving hipster hubs has made its Birmingham debut.

Kinrise bought the 46K SF Citadel building, Corporation Street, Birmingham in a £3.9M deal with Lasalle Investment Management.

The block will be refurbished ready to welcome tenants later this year.

"We hope Citadel will be the first of many projects in Birmingham as we build a collection of buildings in key cities across the UK," Kinrise co-founder Sam Lawson Johnston said. "We typically like to find buildings over 50K SF with no upper limit, the bigger the better, and we love iconic buildings and buildings of character." 

Kinrise has been pioneering flexible leasehold approaches, blending traditional leases with more modern alternatives.

Kinrise currently operates in Manchester and Leeds but has been looking for a route into Birmingham since early 2019. The business also plans to expand into Bristol and London.

The landlord-developer has been rolling out the approach that saw it successfully transforming a collection of historic buildings around Albert Square in Manchester, a portfolio that now makes up The Albert Estate.

The Kinrise portfolio is growing from a pre-pandemic base of 215K SF.

“We choose cities to operate in based on a number of factors: cities that have the right economic, market, political and social dynamics, and where there is a lack of quality workspace — but also cities with real prestige, power, soul and history; cities which have always been central to the UK’s identity and are home to creativity, culture and community spirit,” Kinrise co-founder George Haddo said of the expansion plan in 2019.