Tim Heatley is leaving the city centre and betting on — checks notes — Farnworth. Why?
The outspoken property developer known for attracting young professionals into converted mills says his next trick is luring them out of town
Dear Millers — Manchester is now full of people “from Brighton or Belgium or Bristol or Berlin”, and many of them live in city centre flats built or renovated by the buzzy developer Capital & Centric. But will those people now be open to moving to Farnworth, a “left behind” Bolton town that has been in visible decline for years?
"If it looks good enough, they will,” says the firm’s co-founder Tim Heatley, the man who has become the face of this city’s breakneck regeneration. Heatley tells us he is getting out of the city centre and now wants to focus on building homes for young professionals in the towns and suburbs around Greater Manchester. But can it work? And if it does, will it leave any space for the existing residents, or is Heatley embarking on a massive project of harmful gentrification? In today’s fascinating piece, Jack Dulhanty tries to find out.
As always, our Thursday editions are for paying members, but non-paying Millers can read a few bits at the top. If you’re not a member yet and you want to read today’s feature, get access to our back catalogue of members-only journalism and support the most exciting new media venture to come out of an office on Cross Street since the Manchester Guardian, just hit that button below.
Your Mill briefing
The fate of Oldham Coliseum was discussed on Newsnight last night. "If the Oldham Coliseum does close, you're never going to get a theatre like that again,” said presenter Kirsty Wark. “135 years and it's one of the biggest theatres in England and it will be gone forever". The 138-year-old theatre announced it would be cancelling all of its shows from March 2023 onwards, including its end-of-year pantomime, after losing its Art Council funding. Ever since that funding announcement, there has been a campaign — backed by actors like Maxine Peake and Julie Hesmondhalgh — to save it. "Are we ignoring the grim fate of Greater Manchester’s outer-borough culture?" we asked in a piece last year, which touched on an important point: the kind of audience the Coliseum attracts — including many people who are not prolific theatre-goers elsewhere. What will we lose if these kinds of cultural organisations have to close? “It will mean that culture becomes very exclusive, or more exclusive,” a former Oldham Council leader told us. “These aren’t people who go into Manchester to the Royal Exchange.” Have you worked at the Coliseum or do you know something about what’s going on? Please email mollie@manchestermill.co.uk — she’s working on a piece.
Thousands of teachers and other education workers around Greater Manchester went on strike yesterday for better pay and conditions. There was a protest in St Peter’s Square, with striking workers holding placards reading “if we give up, who will be left to teach your child?” and “R.I.P education. Cause of death: A Tory government.” We could hear the chants of the march through St Ann’s Square from The Mill office. On the picket line in Bolton, teacher Robert Poole told the BBC that the action was not "just about pay, it's about the future of education".
Manchester City Council has published its Active Travel Strategy, an interesting insight into how the council wants the city to change. For example, it says that in 2019, 21% of morning inbound trips into the city centre were made by car and it wants this to fall to 10% by 2040. The document talks about reallocating road space for Active Travel, and it has a map of the areas that are going to be prioritised, in which “infrastructure interventions” such as segregated cycle tracks, modal filters and junction improvements will be considered. Active Travel activist Harry Gray has tweeted his initial impressions about the plans here.
Worth a read for those into their Gothic architecture: this interesting piece in the Telegraph looks at how the works of Alfred Waterhouse — who designed the Town Hall and Strangeways Prison — have survived through to today. “A feature of all Waterhouse’s buildings is the care of his decoration – whether mosaics, murals, sculpture or wood-carving – once one gets inside,” writes Simon Heffer, “and Manchester Town Hall is his masterpiece in this regard.”
Tim Heatley is leaving the city centre and betting on — checks notes — Farnworth. Why?
By Jack Dulhanty
A Thursday in the centre of Farnworth, a town pinched between Salford and Bolton. Most of the high street units are shuttered or lie disembowelled with their windows boarded up with timber. The only ones open are vape shops, barbers or hardware stores. The biggest shop sells — and part exchanges — mobility scooters.
The buildings are squat and worn, with low-slung roofs. The Post Office pub, whose window frames are peeling, is closed for the day due to a family bereavement. People wait at stops exchanging dissatisfied glances because the buses they're waiting for are owned by a company that has just lost its franchise, so they "turn up whenever they want".
After a while, the street opens up to a little square with a central tree planted into a brick pedestal. Embedded in the bricks are tiles depicting pastoral scenes of figures walking in parks and being together. If you pan upwards you see the opposite: a barren thoroughfare, one side of the strip demolished, some bakeries and another vape store, then an Asda at the end of it.
"That Asda killed this town," a man named Schofield, who has lived in Farnworth all the seven decades of his life, tells me while his old Yorkshire Terrier stands dead still as if debating whether to fall asleep. Then he goes to do his weekly shop (at the Asda).
You've heard this story before. The proud market town whose thriving market disappeared, gradually at first, then all at once. By 2019, Farnworth was rated as one of the most deprived areas of Bolton, according to the multiple indices of deprivation, and listed as one of England’s 225 most “left behind” neighbourhoods. In the 2021 census, over 60% of Farnworth residents were deprived in some way. As in so many other “left behind” places, further decline seems inevitable.
Or does it? The high-profile property developer Tim Heatley, co-founder of Capital & Centric and a somewhat divisive star of the BBC’s Manctopia documentary, sees a very different future for Farnworth. He sees it as the next destination for the city centre's professional class — a revamped town that will attract the kind of residents to whom Heatley has been renting and selling flats in converted mills for the past decade. The kind of people with whom Capital & Centric has become synonymous, who will want to move to the suburbs sometime soon but won't want to lose their floor-to-ceiling windows, Juliette balconies and independent coffee shops.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Mill to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.