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On a summer’s day last year, somewhere near Strangeways prison, Zoë Bread, an online content creator and citizen journalist, was waiting for one of her most valuable sources to arrive. The source was a wealthy commercial property agent — Bread had been tapping him for rumours from Manchester’s property grapevine — and in anticipation of his arrival, she’d plugged all the details she could find about him into ChatGPT and asked it to predict what sort of car he might arrive in.
The chatbot said either a blue or a grey Porsche. When the two-door blue Porsche arrived, Bread got in, and gave directions to the nearest trampoline park.
Bread is not a conventional journalist, or a conventional citizen journalist, or perhaps even a conventional citizen. She carries out all her endeavours anonymously, her face obscured by a piece of bread printed with a smiley face. She delivers her investigations in short TikTok videos over a span of many days. And, since last April, she has come to utterly bedevil Manchester City Council, in a saga that started with her getting a parking ticket, and has brought her to investigate the financing of the city’s biggest developments. People hail her as the only journalist Manchester has left.
But who is she?
The parking ticket
Even before the parking ticket fiasco, Bread was already popular. Her TikToks got consistent four-to-five-figure views, sometimes hitting a million. She made short videos about her random, often ridiculous interactions with the world, and sold t-shirts about them.
She was, and remains, a pedant-provocateur. If Bread can find a rule or regulation, she’ll push it to its limit — like the time she made spoof IDs claiming she’s from Manchester so she could get into the National Football Museum for free. Then, once in the museum, she noticed George Best’s Mini Cooper displayed in its foyer had illegal spacing on its number plate and was driven without an MOT in 2005. She reported the United legend — at that point 20 years dead — to the DVLA.
More or less everything Bread did was deeply unserious, and to treat it any other way was to be baited. The hundreds of angry football fans who commented on her video about Best’s car, failing to see the apparent joke, simply had follow-up videos made about them.
But something changed last April. “I’ve accidentally done real investigative journalism,” she told her followers. To be brief: Bread received a parking fine from Manchester City Council, despite the fact she had bought a ticket. Some misleading signage on Collier Street, near Castlefield, had directed her to another parking machine that was for a different car park nearby, and it turned out hundreds of other people were falling for the same mistake.
She investigated this over a span of more than a dozen videos. Bread, with her squeaky voice and weapon’s grade perseverance, was running rings around the council. She was publishing recordings of conversations with staff in which she quoted council datasets they hadn’t read themselves, then selling snippets of those conversations as merch. For a while, you could purchase a T-shirt on her website that read “I am the council now”, or ones printed with a missing poster for a “John from complaints”, who Bread spoke to on the phone, and who the council later said didn’t exist. Each shirt even links to a video explaining its origin, adding another star to the Bread universe.
Suddenly, people all over the world were transfixed on a battle between a woman disguised as a piece of bread, and Manchester City Council, over a parking ticket. Her TikToks amassed millions of views — one fan dressed up as the misleading parking sign for Halloween. Within a month of that first video, Bread had her own fine reversed, and all the fines given out to people on that road in the 12 months prior were reversed too.
‘I don’t want to get Breaded’
While Bread’s fans fawned, the council, its staff and elected members, wilted. At first it seemed like nothing at all. A TikToker got a parking ticket and made a video about it.
“I kept seeing it,” says a local councillor about the video — who, after everything that followed, would never put their name to a story about those parking bays. “I kept seeing it and thinking: this is a bit annoying.” It was a bit annoying, but it didn’t seem like anything major. Then, a week or so after that first video, the councillor was at a wedding down south, and guests from London were asking him about the ins and outs of Collier Street parking bays. By then, Bread had been featured on Radio 4, and the BBC and MEN had run stories about her.
With her feud over the parking ticket in full swing, the council and its staff were desperate to find out who she was. When I asked one officer about that period, they told me they’d have to “scroll back in the trauma centre” of their brain for the memory. “Institutionally, the council underestimated her,” the off-record councillor said.
In emails from last spring — which Bread obtained afterwards via a subject access request for the council’s internal correspondence about her — officers talk about how to try and get a handle on things, but admit it's futile. Bread was a different beast. One member of the press team said that should they try and parlay with Bread, their “impact would be negligible.”
Bread’s impact, on the other hand, was anything but. And the most impacted department was, obviously, parking. Staff returned home from work to find that conversations they’d had with the woman who knew a mysterious amount about parking regulations in the area around Collier Street had been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people on Instagram, and millions on TikTok.
In all the videos, council staff come across as unhelpful, frustrated, even a bit stupid. This was much to the chagrin of the staff and councillors. When I called one manager from the parking department for this story, as soon as I mentioned Bread’s name they said “oh, absolutely not.”
There’s a broad feeling at the council that while Bread raises legitimate concerns about issues that other journalists aren’t, the way she goes about it is the issue. I doubt this concerns her, but I wouldn’t know because she never responded to my interview requests (I also had a mutual source put in a good word for me, to no avail).
Relevant local councillors in Deansgate told me that none of them have ever had an email from Bread about issues like the one with the Collier Street parking signage. Instead, she opted to record her conversations with admin officers and parking wardens about her tickets and use them for her videos. “She could have just emailed the ward councillors,” one says, maintaining that he and his colleagues never heard from her. “But her first port of call was to harass traffic officers out doing a job.”
Harass is a strong word. There is no law against publishing conversations you have had in a public place, or on the phone, and Bread only uses people’s voices — they’re never filmed, photographed or identified in any other way. But officers have raised their discomfort with conversations they think will be private being broadcast online. Bread apologised for some of these instances, but also continued to do it.
Ultimately, it creates opportunities for more merch. The t-shirts she sells about “John from complaints” and so forth are what her followers most engage with. “And now she has taken it upon herself to do this across a load of other things,” one councillor says, like council’s decision to fence off “Gallagher Hill” during the Oasis reunion gigs and, more recently, the rampant development of the city centre. Enter our source with the Porsche.
The trampoline park
“The whole thing was bizarre, the strangest day in my working life,” our property agent remembers now, laughing. I called him to try and better understand Bread. I had no interest in unmasking her, finding her true identity, or making any attempt to fill out her biography beyond the fact her name is Zoë, she’s 31, and sometimes goes by Mary Greenburg.
What I want to know from the source is what she’s really like. Her online persona is double wrapped in satire. She plays a character. I imagined that after each of her videos she has a kind of “and, scene” moment, shedding her eccentricity. This wouldn’t appear to be the case.
She arranged to meet the property agent in August, and she brought along a sidekick — a well-spoken artist from Bury named Danny Jacobs with a similar penchant for pedantry. The pair apparently wanted to see the property agent in and out of his comfort zone — so, starting with out, they went to a trampoline park. It was a motley trio that entered the arena that day and put on their grippy socks: Bread dressed casually, Jacobs spattered in old paint, the source in a cashmere Canali jumper. The source took three long bounces, and then got off. “I remember thinking: ‘I buy and sell buildings, how has it come to this?’”
Then it was time to see him in his comfort zone: Higher Ground, to be specific, the splashy bistro on New York Street. The property agent had to stop Bread and Jacobs playing their harmonicas too loudly in the sparse dining room. He paid hundreds of pounds for dinner. “I felt like a dad,” he tells me now.
There wasn’t much beyond this for the source to tell me. Bread was very nice, they spoke about her disputes and the info the source had (which appeared in Bread’s later videos). It was a good arrangement for both parties. Bread had more content, training her lens onto development and the money being lent by the GMCA to the owner of Manchester’s most prolific developer, Renaker. Meanwhile the source watched his perspective on an issue broadcast with no opposition to hundreds of thousands of people on Instagram, and millions on TikTok.
In an attempt to see behind the Bread, as it were, I called Jacobs. Jacobs is in his own dispute with Bury council over a former library building it is in the process of demolishing. He is essentially Bread minus the anonymity and the popularity, and he often appears in her videos as a zany sidekick tagging along on her adventures.
“She’s just a piece of Bread,” is all Jacobs tells me, laughing to himself. I pushed him further, and he began to sound uncomfortable: “I’m not allowed.” I asked him about the dinner at Higher Ground with Bread and the source. Could he tell me what they ordered? No he can’t, he says. “She’d be upset.”
Bread’s fierce commitment to her own privacy strikes council people as ironic, given her habit of publishing conversations with unwitting staff. At one point she published part of a conversation she had with council leader Bev Craig, which I’m told Craig understood to be off-record. A councillor who also wanted to stay anonymous out of fear of getting “Breaded”, laughed when I mentioned that Bread never responded to my own requests for an interview via Instagram. “She won’t speak to a journalist, but she’ll record the leader of the council without permission?”
Back to Collier Street
A few days ago, I went to visit the Collier Street car park, the site where it all began between Bread and MCC. It’s just by the old Roman settlement, or down the way from the White Lion, depending on where your interests lie. In fact, if you’re really struggling, you can just search “Zoë Bread’s New Parking Signage,” and it should appear on Google Maps.
Said signage is now plastered with tributes to Bread: a sticker saying “In Bread we Trust”, another saying “free parking”, even a poem in Bread’s name:
The council fines, the charges steep
But Zoes watch is sharp and deep…
That Bread happened to land most heavily on Manchester City Council, like a bout of freak weather, is unfortunate for its officers and councillors, who now live in fear of getting Breaded. But as she moves away from parking disputes and towards the highest levels of regional development and financing, it doesn’t seem she’s going away. After all, the engagement is just too good.
Thanks for reading our story about the menace of Manchester City Council, Zoë Bread.
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