Dear Millers — We hope you’re enjoying the festive break. Today, we’ve crafted an edition that features our very best stories from this year, including plenty of investigative reporting, long reads and scoops that defined our 2024. There’s been a lot to celebrate this year — we’re especially proud of the new writers we worked with, like Alec Herron, David Rudlin, Robert Pegg and Jothi Gupta, who have all contributed incredible writing to The Mill. This was also the year that we hired Ophira Gottlieb, our third full-time staff writer, whose beautiful chronicle of the history of Rice and Three will be well-known among our foodie readers.
If you’re someone who needs a little break from mince pies and red wine in front of the telly, we hope this list gives you some opportunities for escapism and diversion. So without further ado, here are our favourite 20 stories of this year, selected by Mollie, Jack and Joshi. A very Merry Christmas and a big thank you from the whole Mill team for reading us this year — all this reporting is made possible by our paying subscribers, who fund our work and allow us to take on more ambitious stories every year. If you’re not already a paying subscriber and you’d like to treat yourself this Christmas, please consider joining us by clicking the button below.
Did Sacha Lord cheat his way to £400,000 of public money during the pandemic? — Jack Dulhanty and Joshi Herrmann
In one of our biggest stories ever, we revealed that a company owned by Sacha Lord, night time economy advisor to mayor Andy Burnham, received over £401,928 from a Covid recovery fund using an application that made multiple misleading claims about what the company did. Lord denied the claims and threatened to launch legal action against The Mill, but backed down after a community fact check of the document by Mill readers revealed more misleading claims made in the application, prompting the Arts Council and GMCA to launch investigations into Lord’s application. Both of those are still pending.
How Afflecks went from quirky indie to part of a retail portfolio — Mollie Simpson
There’s a myth about Afflecks that no one has ever quite managed to unpick: that sometime in the 1980s, founder Elaine Walsh placed two relief boards on the outside walls. The next day, they were inscribed with two Banksy paintings. When Elaine Walsh gave up the much-loved quirky indie shopping bazaar in 2008, after a two-year battle over ownership with the building’s landlord, the wealthy property firm Bruntwood, she was said to have walked away with a million pounds and the two Banksys. What right did the property firm have the right to evict its own tenant, then swoop in and run the business itself with new management? And if the Banksys story is true, was Elaine Walsh really a perfect victim?
For 40 years, Rice and Three has fuelled Manchester — Ophira Gottlieb
In the 1960s, Manchester’s textile warehouses attracted a large number of migrant workers. Mostly Pakistani, Kashmiri and Bangladeshi men, South Asian food canteens began popping up in the Northern Quarter to accommodate them. They were built as canteens for convenience and speed. It was a turning point for South Asian Mancunians, who began working for each other rather than white English mill and warehouse owners, and a turning point for Northern food traditions, as people fell in love with what became known as “rice and three”.
What went wrong at the Carlton Club? — Sophie Atkinson
Back in September, Sophie got to the heart of the dispute over the Carlton Club, a social club that has been in Whalley Range community since 1913. The club’s last 25 years have been the most tumultuous, with a skyrocketing membership of newer, younger residents who wanted something beyond the average social club. Their plans clashed with that of an old guard who had been visiting the club for decades, and before long, the club’s locks had been changed, shares the club members thought were theirs had ended up in the hands of others, and a struggle over the club's future began. See also: Jack’s follow-up instalment.
The opportunist: How Sir Howard Bernstein bent Manchester to his will — Joshi Herrmann
When Sir Howard Bernstein died in June, obituaries flooded in. The towering former CEO of Manchester City Council can be almost solely credited, or blamed, for Manchester’s breakneck development after the 1996 bomb. Joshi took a look at Bernstein’s childhood, growing up Jewish in a shtetl in Cheetham Hill, in an effort to find the source of his “striking mix of optimism, singlemindedness and entrepreneurial energy”.
He complained about late night noise. Then a city-wide row erupted — Jack Dulhanty
In March, the saga surrounding the noise abatement notice served to the iconic music venue Night & Day Cafe came to a close. It followed nearly four years of legal wrangling, with the neighbour who made the complaint fleeing the city and the torrent of abuse they were receiving. The narrative had been mostly dominated by the venue, turbocharged by the support of world-famous musicians, celebrities and widespread public support. But when we were able to speak at length with the neighbour of the bar, a different story emerged. One that wasn’t just a much-loved venue put in jeopardy by some out-of-towner, but something much more complex. It includes secret back-room talks and an attempted rescue by a global superstar, somehow dashed by — of all things — the Malaysian government.
Keys Money Lipstick, a no-arsehole policy and queues round the block: Remembering Andy Martin’s Star and Garter — Fergal Kinney
In the 1990s, Andy Martin, a nerdy teen from Blackley and Moston, turned up at the rickety Victorian pub the Star and Garter on a whim to enquire about putting on a Half Man, Half Biscuit show, and never really left. By the end of the decade, he was the venue operator, and would be until until his death this year. He left behind a legacy of a proudly anti-racist, proudly anti-fascist space that held its nerve when threatened with closure by Network Rail. “Andy Martin was one of those giants. In keeping The Star and Garter the same, he changed Manchester forever.”
‘The greatest arena ever built’: Inside the fiasco at Co-op Live — Mollie Simpson
Co-op Live was promised to be the “greatest arena ever built”, but by its opening night in April, thousands of customers walked into a venue that wasn’t ready for opening, with loose wires dangling from the ceiling and smoke alarms missing from the kitchen. In the following days, more gigs were cancelled and rescheduled and the arena’s issues were chronicled by dozens of embarrassing updates in the MEN. Our reporting revealed that construction workers on the project had been warning their bosses that the arena wouldn’t be ready in time as early as Christmas, but chaos and denial at management level forced them to press on.
The enemies within: How the pandemic radicalised Britain — Jack Walton, Dan Hayes, Kate Knowles, Josh Sandiford, Ophira Gottlieb and Joshi Herrmann
In July 2020, Nigel Farage arrived at a hotel in Bromsgrove in a chauffeur-driven car to show that the hotel had been booked out for months for asylum seekers, speculating on the video that some of the people in the hotel might be terrorists. Despite offering no evidence to support this claim, it stuck. In February 2023, an ugly riot started outside the Suites Hotel in Knowsley. Politicians condemned the racist riot but argued “the disturbing scenes in Knowsley aren’t representative of our area or its people”. “But the riot should now be seen for what it was: an urgent, highly visible warning of what was to come,” writes Jack Walton, in the week a frenzied knife attack in Southport set off a mass-chain of racist rioting outside asylum seeker hotels in the UK.
Exclusive: How did a semi in Harpurhey sell for £1.8m? — Joshi Herrmann, Jothi Gupta and Mollie Simpson
In July 2020, HSPG, a fast-growing property firm founded by two graduates from Manchester Grammar School, bought a semi-detached house on a run-down street in Harpurhey for £575,000, and then sold it the same day for £1.8 million, a tidy 218% profit. In this investigation, which was Highly Commended at the British Journalism Awards 2024 for its “brilliant forensic reporting”, we explore the murky world of social impact real estate, big property investors from the City, and how the fates of society’s most vulnerable are in the hands of a poorly-regulated market.
‘I’m going insane’: My afternoon at Manchester’s anti-woke meetup — Jack Dulhanty
In an upstairs room of the storied Britain’s Protection pub, a group meets to talk about their worry that the world has gone “woke”. The group’s attendees — majority white, majority male — used the space as somewhere to speak freely and without fear of cancellation. When we visited in February, a loquacious online educator called Barry Wall addressed the room to outline how diversity, equity, and inclusion schemes established in workplaces and schools across the country were based on “identitarian-based, murderous ideology”. But we found that most of the opinions on offer from attendees weren’t so extreme. But their fears of ostracisation, fuelled by a bloodthirsty news cycle and social media, certainly were.
The short, controversial document that changed the face of Manchester — David Rudlin
In 1996, a little-known document called the Manchester Guide to Development was adopted as policy, changing the face of Manchester forever. It attempted to repair the damage wrought on the city by car-based zones and big retail parks dominating the suburbs, by creating lively, walkable neighbourhoods with low-rise flats with coffee shops and restaurants on the ground floor and balconies overlooking the streets so residents could feel connected to their area. The policy is still in use now, and though it hasn’t been updated since 2006, it doesn’t need to be. “Manchester has changed, and developers follow its principles without being asked.”
Wrestling with the ghosts of Manchester Town Hall — Jack Dulhanty
In October, Jack visited the ever-delayed, rolling, roiling construction site that is Manchester Town Hall. The project team in charge, who have been working on the building since 2018, had recently announced that they would be delaying the completion date of the renovation and requesting a £76m cash injection. What is it that’s been getting in the way? Paul Candelent, the project’s lead, calls them “discoveries”. They are often the result of previous changes made to the building by faceless tinkerers throughout its long history, and Candelent was making discoveries on a weekly basis. “Things have been done to the building in the past,” he said. “That don’t seem to have any logic.”
When Putin came to Manchester for lunch — Andy Spinoza
Andy Spinoza, author of Manchester Unspun, tells the little-known story of when Vladimir Putin — Russian dictator, likely the most dangerous man in the world — visited Manchester Town Hall. Then a 39-year-old international relations advisor to Anatoly Sobchak, Leningrad’s council chairman, Putin stood in the town hall’s hexagon room with the Lord Mayor. Portly, the last of his hair combed over his head and wearing a “ghastly crimplene suit”, it was rumoured Putin wasn’t joining Sobchak as an advisor at all, but as his KGB minder.
The strange death of Levenshulme Market — Mollie Simpson
From a car park next to the train station, Levenshulme Market was more than the sum of its parts, responsible for the success of several high street businesses and for contributing thousands towards creating a recycling compound and tidying up the area. When it received the Great British Market Award in 2020, the judges remarked it had “changed the dynamics of an area, and its environment, by creating a vibrant community hub”. Levenshulme Market represented a local success story, so it was all the more confusing when the directors announced in 2023 the market would take a break after a “painful planning permission process” with Manchester City Council, who had asked the popular weekly market to pay up fees “that would end us financially”. For two years, the council took the blame for the market closing. But is that the full story?
The secret history of the world’s first suburb — David Rudlin
In the early nineteenth century, there was an unspoken rule among the elite: that they resided in the city centre, while the poor lived on the outskirts. But in the 1830s, the merchant and banker Samuel Brooks broke ranks and moved to Whalley Range, building a suburban villa far away from the smog and the dirt of the rapidly-industrialising city, and building houses for his neighbours, too, so they could live permanently in what became the world’s first suburb. “What Brooks built, the world copied”.
Clinging on in east Manchester — Alec Herron
“It will all be coming down soon. The four walls and surrounding estate in which so much of my childhood memory lives will be replaced,” wrote Alec Herron in this plaintive piece about east Manchester, a part of the city that has seen intense renovation in the last few decades. The regeneration drive finally reached the Grey Mare Lane estate, where Herron grew up, in 2017. “Why is any of this necessary? Why does a neighbourhood that was built to rehome Manchester’s inner-city working class, back when their streets were deemed to be slums, now need to be demolished?”
The never-ending editor: What drove Harry Evans? — Joshi Herrmann
Harry Evans, former editor of the Sunday Times and Britain’s greatest modern newspaperman, was born in Eccles in 1928. When he started his career in Manchester, it was a “newspaper city” full of regional titles. It was in that milieu that Evans honed the campaigning spirit that defined his career, starting out by pedestrianising St Ann’s Square, where The Mill’s office is now based.
Do Manchester's theatres have a class problem? — Robert Pegg
In a time full of exciting developments in Manchester’s arts and theatre scene, such as the rise of Aviva Studios and the return of Oldham Coliseum, a few glaring inequalities stand out. Working-class people are still underrepresented in theatre, and the Royal Exchange’s production of Queens of the Coal Age, a play about the exploitation of workers during the miners’ strike, priced tickets so high it would set any working person back a day’s pay. “The problem we have with the arts today is that they have been handed over to the dull men and women, who are in charge of our institutions and so few people get to truly shine unless you have the contacts; the money and the correct opinions,” writes Robert Pegg.
Murder in the playground: Ahmed Iqbal Ullah’s complicated legacy — Jothi Gupta
It has been 40 years since Ahmed Ullah was murdered outside Burnage High School. Stabbed by a fellow pupil, Darren Coulburn, there is still much contention surrounding Ullah’s death. Namely, whether it was racially motivated. This is despite Coulburn slurring Ullah as he lay bleeding on the ground. The police at the time concluded it was a non-racist incident, and newspapers in the aftermath critical of multicultural policies, actually blamed them for the tragedy. “Anti-racist policy led to killing,” read one headline in The Daily Telegraph. But decades later, the community in Burnage remembers it differently.
Comments
How to comment:
If you are already a member,
click here to sign in
and leave a comment.
If you aren't a member,
sign up here
to be able to leave a comment.
To add your photo, click here to create a profile on Gravatar.