£1,000 sofas, chic bistros and swooning Guardian features: welcome to the hipsterfication of Stockport
‘I don’t know if Stockport is ready for us, but we’re ready for Stockport’
Dear members — some huge, exciting news to open the edition on: One of our stories was referenced in a debate in Parliament yesterday. Mollie’s powerful and evocative piece on spiking in the city centre could help make it a criminal offence.
MP for Bolton South East Yasmin Qureshi, who we profiled last year, referenced the personal stories from interviewees about drink spiking that featured in Mollie's report.
Of course, this is a testament to the power of our paying members: thank you. Without your support, we would not be able to dedicate the time and resources it takes to investigate, report and write this kind of journalism.
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Your Mill briefing
MP for Bolton South East Yasmin Qureshi yesterday called on the government to make spiking a criminal offence. She drew on The Mill's reporting on the topic late last year, for which Mollie Simpson spoke to spiking victims about the difficulty of getting their cases properly investigated. Qureshi told Westminster Hall: "The pioneering Manchester news outlet, The Mill, covered spiking at length late last year. It told the personal stories of people such as Charlotte, who woke up in the morning after a party with her legs covered in bruises and her memory patchy, and Hannah, who sipped a drink that caused her heart palpitations and prompted her to collapse, feeling paralytic. […] It is important to make this a crime. It will not be the complete solution to the problem of spiking — other things need to be done — but it is a vital start, to ensure that this is criminalised."
As we have reported lots on this week, Places for Everyone, Greater Manchester's grand strategy to grow the city region into the 2030s, is at risk. The relaxation of national housing targets means some boroughs might pull out, causing the plans to collapse. In response, many have asked how Atom Valley — a manufacturing hub energetically backed by the mayor and featured in the Guardian's editorial pages earlier this week — might be implicated. Well…
Atom Valley is set to be a mix of housing, industry and office space, straddling Bury, Rochdale and Oldham and connected by new transport links. The bulk of business and industry will be allocated to Rochdale and Bury. Insiders tell us that this arrangement is another reason Oldham might come under pressure to pull out of Places for Everyone. The council believes it is already building more houses than it needs, so it could be tempted to pull out seeing some of those houses have been allocated to justify the building of warehouses and factories set to employ thousands in Atom Valley. We ought to be clear that this isn’t exclusive to Oldham, the housing allocations across GM and included in Places for Everyone have been drawn up to accommodate these new workers, expected to come to the region to work in the valley. But in Oldham’s case, pulling out would also save the political pain of building houses on green belt land. “Essentially under [Places for Everyone] Oldham is being asked to allocate green belt sites for the development of housing in order to justify employment allocations in Rochdale and Bury from which Oldham derives no direct benefit,” one source told us “They are not going to do that." Howard Sykes, leader of the local Lib Dem group, told us: "I don't have a problem with building houses for folk to live in. But it needs to be appropriate […] if you're not careful you can just turn into a place where people either don't work or it's a dormitory."
A Manchester City Council report has revealed that housing a homeless family in a B&B costs an average of £924 a week. B&Bs are meant to be used only for families in "exceptional circumstances", and stays should last no longer than six weeks. But the report, and our own coverage from last summer, shows that hundreds of families are being housed this way, many for longer than this. Chris Northwood, a Lib Dem campaigner in the city centre, called the situation "the result of a one party state," going on to say: "The Manchester Mill investigation into this shocked me and only now it comes up at scrutiny to be addressed to both save money and better serve those in need. How many other areas of the council would benefit from opposition and scrutiny?"
Keeping the focus on the council a moment: what's going on with Piccadilly Gardens? The clearance of the Christmas Markets (apart from a few dregs left behind) revealed what is essentially a brownfield site smack bang in the city centre. Pat Karney, Manchester Labour Group's secretary, tweeted a less-than-flattering shot of the gardens, saying: "2023 is the year of renewal for the Gardens. We will soon be choosing the plan to refurbish all the space and Piccadilly Area." The Mill has sent countless questions to the council's press team asking for details on who chose the last plan — to cover most of the gardens with a wooden platform only accessible for 3% of the year — but got no answers. Dr Morag Rose, an urban planning expert and leader of the Loiterers Resistance Movement, said: "It's a dull sport to moan about Piccadilly Gardens but it is spectacularly, shamefully shite at the moment. What is happening? Mcr deserves better."
Outside the city centre, Ofsted reports are in for a collection of schools around the borough. Blessed Thomas Holford Catholic College, in Altrincham, has been downgraded by the inspector from "outstanding" to "requires improvement". In Oldham, The Blue Coat School was rated as outstanding in every area, upholding the rating after receiving it in its previous inspection. On the note of Oldham schools, we published an interview with Alun Francis yesterday, the principle of Oldham College who has just been made interim chair of the government's Social Mobility Commission. Read it here in case you missed it.
£1,000 sofas, chic bistros and swooning Guardian features: welcome to the hipsterfication of Stockport
By Mollie Simpson
“Years ago, I remember walking down the Underbanks and saying this place is really scummy, it's rough,” Tim says. “Stockport was always one of those places I didn’t really come to. It’s weird to think in a few years’ time I’d be running a business here.”
Tim is the co-owner of Squound, a mid-century furniture shop that made its home in Underbank in Stockport in July 2022. He’s a forty-something former graphic designer, which you could probably guess, based on his attire: Jack Antonoff-glasses, a denim jacket with a furry collar and a baseball cap. He’s deadly serious about the business of furniture, warning me in advance that he refuses to use words like “retro” and “homeware” when talking about his shop.
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