Is Manchester an example to be followed - or a cautionary tale?

A scathing new book says we’ve become a playground for the wealthy

By Joshi Herrmann

If you feel like Manchester is going in the wrong direction, perhaps you should blame Bob Scott.

As a young man in 1968, Scott was sent to Manchester on an Arts Council training programme for theatre management. He hailed from Somerset and had grown up in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, where his diplomat father Sir David Aubrey Scott served as Britain’s High Commissioner.

After arriving in Manchester, he became the administrator for 69 Theatre, a company based at the university. Scott led efforts to find a new venue, and the company moved into the shell of one of the city’s most historic buildings in the early 1970s. Since then, it’s been known as the Royal Exchange Theatre. Scott didn’t stop there, helping to reopen two of our grand Victorian theatres — the Palace and the Opera House — and turning them into hugely successful commercial venues.

But it was in 1985 that Scott’s efforts to resuscitate Manchester from its post-industrial nadir became headline news. MANCHESTER GOES FOR GOLD read the front page of the MEN, reporting that the city had assembled a committee to bid for the Olympic Games. The committee was a bit of a bluff — the result of Scott ringing around some of his influential friends — and Birmingham was chosen as the UK’s candidate city.

Bob Scott in 1990, about to learn the fate of Manchester’s bid for the 1996 Olympic Games. Photo by Bill Batchelor/Mirrorpix via Getty Images.

But Scott didn’t give up. Two more bids for the Olympics were made, the third of which (losing out to Sydney to host the Games in 2000) paved the way for the arrival of the Commonwealth Games in 2002. The Labour-led council had seen an opportunity to prise money out of the government for a massive programme of regeneration in East Manchester, including getting £70m to build an indoor arena, a cycling velodrome, a swimming pool and a stadium site that is now Manchester City’s Etihad, home of the best football team on the planet. 

While Factory Records founder Tony Wilson is often cited as the man who dragged Manchester back from the brink, a new book argues that Bob Scott was perhaps “of far greater significance”. For it was around Scott and his Olympic bids that the so-called “Manchester Model” took shape, believes housing activist Isaac Rose. The relationships necessary for the public-private partnerships that have been central to this city’s regeneration were forged during these bids, and would soon find expression in the redevelopment of Hulme and the rebuilding of the city centre after the IRA bomb.

It was in the “the charmed circles of Bob Scott’s bid team,” that Manchester took its wrong turn, Rose believes, the council leadership getting chummy with leading local businessmen and handing over the city to capital and the private sector. Scott’s achievement­s in Manchester may seem admirable to some readers, but in this telling of modern Manchester’s story, he is cast as a villain.

The poster child 

Rose’s book, The Rentier City: Manchester and the Making of the Neoliberal Metropolis, is probably best seen as a warning. Manchester may be the envy of municipal leaders across the country, but Rose thinks Leeds, Liverpool and Glasgow would be foolish to follow our lead. In his account, Manchester is “the poster child for neoliberal urbanism”, a place controlled by “rentiers” who buy up land and then extract every penny from it, squirrelling it away in offshore bank accounts.

In his day job at the Greater Manchester Tenants Union, Rose has seen the underbelly of Manchester’s boom: the tenants living in substandard flats or being forced out of their homes by eye-watering rent increases. Over the past year, the union has frequently encountered rent rises over 100% in Moss Side and surrounding areas, he writes. "Families, previously paying around £600 per month for a two or three bedroom house are being faced with rents well over £1000.”

Engels looms over Manchester’s new towers. Illustration by The Mill’s Jake Greenhalgh.

He mentions the secretary of the Hulme Tenants Union, who was hit with a 40% rent rise by Thornley Groves, the behemoth that has gobbled up dozens of smaller estate agents to gain a stranglehold over the south Manchester property market. After a legal back and forth between the tenant and the agency, the demand rose to 60%.

Rose doesn’t tell us what the actual rents involved in this dispute were, which is frustrating, because the idea that Manchester’s property-led growth is displacing communities via exorbitant rents is central to his argument. What Manchester has experienced, he says, is “a long-term pattern of generational expulsion of the working class from the inner city." 

The claim that Manchester’s economic model is fundamentally exclusionary — good for property developers and the wealthy and bad for working people — is one that we explored in a long piece of analysis last year. While reporting on that story, my colleague Daniel Timms approached Rose to find examples of people being displaced from city centre communities by unreasonable rent rises and was passed the contact of the Hulme Tenants Union secretary quoted in the book.

Daniel didn’t end up using the anecdote because the rent being demanded by the landlord (£1600 a month for a four-bed in Hulme) didn’t seem particularly high compared to other properties in the area, so the story more suggested the house had previously been undervalued relative to the market. (Editor’s note: The tenant contacted us after this story was published to say that the landlord later asked for £1800 per month. He also said that while the landlord was planning to rent out the property as a four-bed, only three people were living there at the time).

Of course, no one denies that rents have risen fast in Manchester, but what Daniel found is that there are now many more people in lower-paid jobs like cleaners and bar workers living in the city centre compared to 20 years ago. 

Our most unequal city?

The significance of Bob Scott in the book is that he represents the way Manchester turned towards the private sector for its salvation, embracing “urban entrepreneurialism” when the re-election of Thatcher’s government made municipal socialism impossible. Scott was central to what Rose calls "the constellation of private sector actors who came together to exert a profound influence upon the trajectory of the city from 1985 onwards."

It's obviously true that Manchester is a much more privately funded city than it was a few decades ago and that it has worked hard to make itself attractive to outside investors. A striking example has been the rapid rise in the so-called build-to-rent sector in recent years, in which blocks of flats are owned and managed by corporate landlords rather than being sold off. As Rose points out, more than half of the housing units granted planning permission in Manchester since 2012 are build-to-rent (though it’s worth noting that this data only includes schemes comprising more than 15 units). The book predicts further “huge growth in the number of corporate landlords”, and Rose certainly will not be the only person who finds that trend concerning.

His experience as a housing activist means he has seen first-hand some of the ways that a fast-growing city distorts neighbourhoods. He notes that in areas like Moss Side, dozens of houses that used to be family homes have been turned into Airbnb rentals for visiting stag and hen dos, a trend that is causing concern in tourist destinations across the country. He has also spent time with residents in Collyhurst, who understand the massive redevelopment of their area involves intentionally changing the social mix, with the newly built social homes outnumbered by the ones that are for sale.

The author and housing activist Isaac Rose, photographed by The Mill’s Jack Dulhanty.

He’s right to point out that many residents in the fast-changing communities of east Manchester feel a sharp sense of loss about the ways their areas are changing, something I heard myself when I wrote about New Islington. Rose refers to this problem as “indirect displacement, where residents, despite not leaving an area, no longer feel at home there due to the changing feel of the neighbourhood.”

But do these problems amount to evidence that Manchester’s model of development has been as disastrously exclusionary as this book makes out? On page eight, The Rentier City quotes an article asking whether Manchester had “rebuilt London’s housing crisis”, prompting Rose to wonder whether we have “actually built something worse?” This is quite a contention, but for some reason, it’s never pursued. A few pages later, Rose tells us "This is not a book about the housing crisis. There is little need for another one."

Core to The Rentier City is the notion that a particular growth model has “resulted in stark patterns of uneven development”, what Rose calls “two Manchesters — one rich, one poor — rubbing up against one another but rarely crossing, much as had been the case in [Friedrich] Engels’ day.” One of the studies used to back up this claim is a 2009 report by the Centre for Cities think tank showing Manchester as the most unequal English city. If that sounds as implausible to you as it did to me, you’ll be comforted to know that when I contacted the Centre for Cities, an analyst warned me off the data in question, writing in an email: “We wouldn’t advise using that”. Instead, he pointed me to a 2018 report with a more robust methodology based on the so-called Gini coefficient, this one showing Manchester as one of the least unequal cities in the country. (Cambridge, which the previous report had for some reason considered the most equal city, turns out to be the least). 

In the decade Rose has lived in Manchester, rents have risen fast and the skyline has changed dramatically. “These things feel intuitively connected,” he writes. But are they? Intuition can be misleading. Is massively increasing the supply of housing driving prices up as opposed to the alternative explanation that the developers building the housing are responding to rising demand? Quite a few studies have found that building more houses in booming cities makes housing less expensive, but Rose dismisses research like this as the work of “data gurus” and “property developer shills”.

People who disagree with Rose are merely "hypnotised by the ever-growing skyline" when they "breezily dismiss concerns over gentrification as almost a false bogeyman, conjured up by muttering defectors." Where can readers go to find such gullible boosterism? Rose doesn't have time to cite a specific source or to specify which arguments he disagrees with, breezily adding in the book’s notes: "See various articles in Manchester Confidential and The Mill for examples of this discourse.”

Leaders and developers 

The effect of this absence of serious engagement with opposing views is that the city’s leaders are made to look like bizarre and irrational figures. If the Manchester Model is so flawed, why on earth are they pursuing it? A good faith engagement with how Manchester has changed surely includes trying to explain the rationale behind attracting foreign and private investment, even if you disagree with it.

In 1983, Greater Manchester had long-term unemployment rates of 47.6% for men and 29.8% for women and in Hulme, where Rose focuses much of his story about gentrification, 59% of male adults didn’t have a job in 1985. The city’s Labour leaders might not have relished doing immensely developer-friendly deals with sheikhs from the Gulf, but in the absence of public investment, they believed that jobs and livelihoods were what mattered most. Rose doesn’t mention that between 2001 and 2021, Manchester recorded almost 45% jobs growth, vastly more than Liverpool (around 25%), Leeds (around 20%) or any of the other major cities.

He also doesn’t explain that adding tens of thousands of new homes has significantly boosted the council’s income during a period when local authorities are on (or tumbling over) the brink of financial collapse. Manchester’s council tax receipts almost doubled in the decade to 2021, while Sheffield and Birmingham only saw increases of just over 60%.

Two women walk past the Hulme Crescents in 1987. Photo by Tom Stoddart via Getty Images.

Maybe these factors are why Salford’s more left-wing mayor Paul Dennett has pursued the Manchester Model with gusto. Rose is harshly critical of Manchester City Council in the book, but for some reason doesn’t single out the authorities in Salford for any criticism at all, despite the two cities being on almost identical trajectories. In fact, from 2011 to 2021, the number of households renting privately rose by 59% in Salford compared to just 19% in Manchester. Is Dennett, a thoughtful politician hailed for his efforts to build social housing, another dupe of a tawdry neoliberal fantasy?

If the local leaders come out of The Rentier City badly, it’s nothing compared to the property developers, who appear as cynical and sinister figures, "the presented veneer of their cause's nobility a cover for deep exploitation and injustice." The illustration on the front cover, of a controlling hand dropping banknotes which turn into skyscrapers, is presumably meant to represent this group. Rose frequently points to the power of the developer lobby, but these insidious forces are always operating just out of sight. I would have liked to know how this world operates — how does the property industry wield its power? Is it via lobbying operations that hire former councillors? Do they enjoy special access? Last week, we revealed that a property developer donated £1,400 to Andy Burnham’s re-election campaign, and yet that was the only such donation on the list.

Few would dispute that developers are powerful and have been warmly welcomed in Manchester, but Rose seems to give them an almost god-like role. The book argues that as young people move from one form of renting to the next (from Purpose Built Student Accommodation to “co-living” to build-to-rent), they become used to having a corporate landlord, a process Rose describes as “the building of a new renter subject." 

I’m not convinced developers can refashion our dreams like this (surveys show most young Brits still aspire to own a home), and it’s clear many people are choosing to rent from these companies when other options are available. When I was living in the city centre, I wasn’t remotely attracted to the new build blocks, an aesthetic preference more than anything. But looking back, I can see why many people choose a faceless Bavarian pension fund over fielding aggressive WhatsApp messages from a coke-addicted landlord in Stockport.

The book casts our city as the “poster child for neoliberal urbanism” — the “paradigmatic” example that should warn off other cities from following the same path. Rose looks back fondly at the postwar period in which large public housing programmes and strict regulation of the market led to the “euthanasia of the rentier”. And yet, almost nowhere in Britain is that world of social housing still so available to residents as it is in Manchester. At no point does Rose mention that Manchester has more social housing as a proportion of its overall dwellings than any of the other boroughs in Greater Manchester and more than any other major UK city, including Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield.

If Manchester is the paradigmatic “rentier city”, the rentiers in question are in many instances housing associations. As excellent recent reporting by the MEN and our own staff writers has highlighted, some of those landlords have tenants living in shameful squalor. Rose makes one or two mentions of bad social landlords in the book, in relation to members of the tenants union, but says they are “comparatively lucky” compared to private tenants facing skyrocketing rents.

You can order The Rentier City here.

I must admit that I struggled to write this review and twice put off publishing it, mostly because I like Rose as a person and found him to be open and interesting when we chatted for The Mill’s podcast a few weeks ago. Since that conversation, I have read his book again and tried to work out whether — between the references to dozens of geographers, sociologists and heterodox economists — there is something to his arguments that I’ve failed to grasp. Certainly, there is a lot of very interesting detail about the historical development of Manchester that I haven’t focused on here.

I understand Rose’s discomfort with the growing role of corporate landlords and big-money investors in Manchester, and I think his advocacy for tenants who are being screwed over deserves our support. The Mill’s reporting (on stories like flats being marketed to overseas investors, the mistreatment of hospitality workers and the epidemic of homelessness) has repeatedly shown the city not living up to its expertly manufactured hype. 

But in the end, I sense that when we look at Manchester, we see rather different cities. To me, it looks like an imperfect but rather inspiring success story; to him, it is deeply flawed and morally compromised. To him the city centre is “a consumption playground for the wealthy”; I see a lot of chain coffee shops and Greggs. To him, a figure like Bob Scott is a figure of suspicion; to me, he reads like exactly the kind of person a dying city needs to have any chance of reviving itself. 

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I would be interested in what everyone else thinks, please join me in the comments. ‘The Rentier City: Manchester and the Making of the Neoliberal Metropolis’ is available now. You can also listen to my podcast interview with Isaac Rose.

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