Manchester could have been Barcelona, not Dallas

Charlie Baker on Homes for Change and the path not taken

Dear readers — over the weekend, a piece I’d written about the highs and lows of Manchester’s largest housing co-operative came out (in a nutshell: cheap rent, no landlord vs. cat poo feuds, impenetrable admin process). I’d invited one of the founders, Charlie Baker, to our office in the hope of adding a couple of sentences to the first piece about how it was set up. Cue: two hours later, Charlie talking at the speed of light, me frantically trying to make notes. He was so funny and knowledgeable that a follow-up went from improbable — we tend to only follow up on really enormous investigations, which this wasn’t — to inevitable. We chatted about cereal packet architecture design; how to make a building more sociable and why Whitworth Street has the greatest view in the city.

But before we get there, your news briefing.