For years, Manchester's businesses have been targeted with baseless accusations. Who is behind them?

Dear readers — for the last three years, an odd sort of vigilante vandalism has been sighted across Manchester and Salford: tags dubbing independent cafes homophobic with no evidence, or calling for the boycotting of popular community spaces with no clear reason why. When the situation escalated over the last two weeks, with multiple fresh graffiti-based allegations appearing across the two cities, we decided it was time to do a little digging into who’s behind it. Was it a student? A man with a Pomeranian? Or a certain strangely-clad individual with an axe to grind? That’s all to come.

Quickly before you dive into that one though, please make sure you’ve read Mollie’s latest instalment on the University of Greater Manchester from yesterday. This time she brought news of the latest scalp claimed by our year-long reporting on the university’s finances: William Morris, the chair of the board.

“A fascinating series of articles,”  was the kind assessment of one Mill commenter. “The apparent lack of proper financial procedures is amazing. Where was the regulator (OfS) whilst all this was going on. Do other universities operate without supervision and inspection?” (this, incidentally, was the very question posed by Bolton West MP Phil Brickell at a parliamentary committee earlier in the week). Another commenter said it was “great reporting” and urged us to “keep digging”. That we will!

For years, Manchester businesses have been targeted with baseless accusations. Who's behind them?

Early one morning last summer, Andy was in the Islington Mill community garden when he heard a strange sound coming towards him — or rather, a sound that would have been strange were it not by this point so familiar. It was 5am, the nights were short now and the mornings mild, and he’d taken to waking early to tend to his plants. Out from by the garden gate came first the peculiar shouting and then an even more peculiar sight: a man of about 50 wearing a mirror around his neck, his face painted in garish colours, equipped with a novelty hat. And what was the man shouting up towards the windows of the mill, where its residents were surely still sound asleep? “You’re all wankers, you don’t know what art is, I’m a real artist,” Andy tells me. “Or something like that.”

Over the past few weeks there’s been a spate of graffiti across Manchester and Salford, casting aspersions against various local businesses — crude tags calling Pollen Bakery “Homo-Phobic”, or claiming that The White Hotel “hate Palestine”. At first we, The Mill writers, weren’t sure what to do about this issue, and wondered if it was best left alone. But then we decided that if graffiti appeared on the side of the Royal Exchange implying that we’re bigots (or in the worst of recent cases: nonces) we’d probably try to put such nefarious rumours to bed.

It came to our attention on the very first day of this year. A man had just been spotted on Cheetham Hill Road, “[s]ome young looking lad in a balaclava,” tagging a slogan rather “sheepishly” before running off, according to a Reddit eyewitness. The slogan read as follows: “They hate Palestine! Fuck the White Hotel!”

I had questions. Principally: how can a man possibly be deemed to look young while wearing a balaclava? My first port of call was to consult my various graffiti writing acquaintances on the subtle nuances of the tag. No one recognised the style; one writer described the tag as simply “studenty”; and another told me that it was the work of a man who'd barely held a spray can before. All graffiti experts questioned told me that the work was from the naive art school — ie. unaffected, unpretentious, and ultimately, not very good. Bad even. I put the matter out of mind.

Then the vandal seemingly struck again. Last Sunday I was sent a picture of a second, similar tag by a colleague who lives in Ancoats. It had just appeared on New Islington Marina, and simply read: “Boycott Pollen, Homo-Phobic”. Pollen is an independent bakery in Ancoats with a commitment to artisanal bread, according to their website, and a penchant for viennoiserie. Next to these words was your standard-issue warning sign: an exclamation point drawn inside a triangle. This is important, as this symbol would soon become our nameless artist’s undoing.