Dear readers — hello and welcome back to the elitemost tier of Mancunian society. We hope you have been delivered from your rainy, blustery weekends renewed and ready for the week, starting — as it simply must — with our briefing. We’re taking you on the usual varied tour of Greater Manchester’s news-scape, including the cornerstones of any local news diet around these parts: rogue landlords, dangerous drivers, overpriced Oasis merchandise and misleading headlines in the MEN. On we go!
⛅️ This week’s weather
Tuesday🌧️Muggy with patchy rain and cloudy skies. Max 20°c.
Wednesday🌦️Warm and mostly cloudy with occasional periods of light rain. Breezy. Max 22°c.
Thursday🌦️Breezy and fresher with sunny spells and a few showers. Max 18°c.
Friday🌤️Much Warmer and breezy with good spells of sunshine. Max 24°c.
Weekend🌥️Warm and largely dry with variable amounts of sunshine. Temperatures will peak in the low twenties.
We get our weekly forecast from Manchester Weather.
Your briefing
🚗 Five of Greater Manchester’s boroughs ranked in the top ten areas with the most dangerous driving offences in England and Wales. 672 of the 6,200 incidents of dangerous driving reported in 2024 happened in Greater Manchester. Analysis by the MEN showed that Bolton had the highest rate of dangerous driving offences in the city region and the 5th highest in England and Wales. It paints a bleak picture of Greater Manchester’s road safety. Indeed, all ten of the region’s boroughs rank amongst the top 20 areas with the highest rates of dangerous driving, with 65 offences causing death or serious injury. Surprisingly, these numbers are actually a decrease on 2023.
🏠 The Times joined Greater Manchester’s housing enforcement officers as they embark on a new pilot that gives them increased powers to crack down on “rogue landlords”. Under the pilot, the officers can caution, interview and fine landlords up to £30,000. Over the last two years, the pilot scheme has seen £1.5 million in fines issued to landlords who have allowed their properties — and their tenants with them — to descend into substandard conditions. Helen Baskett, an enforcement officer in Wigan, says the scheme is having a positive effect on landlord behaviour. “Word gets around,” she told the Times. “We used to send an enforcement letter telling [landlords] to repair something after an inspection and just be ignored. Now the landlords talk to each other. They’ll say, ‘I got fined £10,000, so you’d better do as they say or it will be you next.’”
🧢 The first Oasis merchandise store opened in Spinningfields on Friday, ahead of the Gallagher brothers’ reunion tour next month. There were bucket hats, baby grows and cutlery, reports the Guardian (in fact, bucket hat sales are up 275%, apparently). Following the saga around the surged prices many fans had to swallow when the tickets for the tour went on sale (some sold for as much as £337.50), the new merch seems like a fitting addition to the broader cash-in. Indeed, it's estimated the brothers could walk away with £50m each.
Quick hits
🛹 Skateboarders at the Gooseside DIY — a community skatepark on the former site of the Ancoats Central Retail Park — tell the BBC they are “heartbroken” to see it demolished to make way for new offices. Read our longread about the plight of Manchester’s skateboarders here.
🔵 Bolton’s Conservative leader Nadim Muslim received death threats after he chose to abstain from a motion calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. He said he was "sick of having sectarian motions brought to this council that are not related to anything Bolton has control over".
🛬 “The Manchester Evening News should be embarrassed”, opened a viral LinkedIn post over the weekend. The paper ran the headline “UK Ryanair Boeing 737 flight crashes at Greek Airport”. Except, the plane didn’t crash — it wasn’t even delayed — and, it didn’t take off from Manchester. The MEN were accused of “pushing it out with the broadest possible audience framing it to trigger maximum panic”
Home of the week
This 3-bed terraced house in Worsley is within earshot of the Bridgewater Canal, if you don’t mind being woken up by geese. £495,000.
Our favourite reads
‘Get ready to sweat!’ The animal mega-marathon stampeding from the Congo to the Arctic — The Guardian
Guardian writer Kate Wyver spends a week as an antelope, as art project The Herds approaches the UK. The “theatrical mega-marathon” consists of life-sized animal puppets travelling 20,000km from the Congo Basin to the Arctic Circle — and passing through Market Street next week, as part of MIF. Not sure that’s the fastest route, I’d have gone via Balloon Street personally, but fair enough.
The undercover vagrant who exposed workhouse life — BBC
The latest episode of BBC Radio Manchester’s Hidden Manchester series is out. This time they’re covering the story of Mary Higgs, a minister’s wife in Oldham, who went undercover to expose the dire conditions in women’s workhouses.
The 10 best cafés and coffee shops in Manchester — The Telegraph
Seeing as we don’t write listicles ourselves, here’s one from the Telegraph on the top ten cafes in the city (centre). Our writers uncharacteristically don’t have strong feelings on this particular subject, but our Operations Manager Maisy has offered her alternatives to the list: Idle Hands, Duke Street Coffee, and the cycling-and-coffee-shop Rapha, probably because they give us a locals discount.
Our to do list
Tuesday
☁️ Over at the Carlton Club we’ve got Brume: an evening of three live music acts, including local artist Jamie Finlay. They’re also offering a special £4 Brume pint from Weekend Project Brewing Co.
🎤 And soul singer Macy Gray is heading to New Century, to celebrate 25 years since the release of her hit album On How Life Is. That’s the one with ‘I Try’ on it, of course.
Wednesday
🍳Personally we can’t tolerate having other people in the kitchen while we’re cooking — although we’d make an exception if it was Masterchef winner Simon Wood. He’s hosting a Cooking Together class at Deansgate Square.
🧵And The Manchester Lit and Phil are giving a talk on the city’s Arts and Crafts revolution, and the creation of the Northern Art Workers’ Guild.
Thursday
🚂 Daring escapes, hijacked trains, and spy trials: The John Rylands Library are hosting their most exciting drop-in yet.
🧠 And Social Refuge are putting on their popular Ancoats Quiz Night — £2.50 entry, and the prize is £125.
Got a To-Do that you’d like us to list? Tell us about it here.
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