Dear readers — immortalising The Mill in a highly-praised new work of literature doesn’t guarantee you an appearance in these pages, but if we’re being completely transparent, it helps. On page 258 of Sufiyaan Salam’s award-winning debut novel Wimmy Road Boyz a character is excited to find his exhibition has been getting rave reviews in a series of esteemed publications, namely “the mill, the guardian, dazed”. He’s “proud”, Salam writes. As he should be.
Beyond being easily bought, the other reason we went to meet Salam to talk about his novel is because it’s actually really good (as irony would have it, the book has now been praised in the mill and the guardian, so dazed needs to get its act together). Salam is a 28-year old author from Blackburn, and his book plays out across one night on the Curry Mile. It’s out now, and you can buy it at all the main places, and you should.
But first your mini-briefing, which includes even more people being nice about us….
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Your Mill briefing
🫡 After ten golden years, The White Hotel is bowing out — with only eight more months of operation, according to this feature in the Guardian. “Basically… it’s a swamp,” Ben Ward, the hotel’s ‘caretaker’, is quoted in the article as saying, after which he explains that they could’ve held out a few more years, but decided to go out on their own terms. The first bit is eerily similar to a quote an off-record source told us last month in our article about the so-called Strangequarter: “it will all be fancy flats and new builds and The White Hotel will be replaced by a swamp.” Both are referring to the Strangeways and Cambridge Strategic Redevelopment Framework (SRF) — a 20-year plan to build 7,000 homes and up to 1.75m square feet of commercial space around Lower Broughton and Cheetham Hill, which may involve flattening the White Hotel premises and turning it into a flood plain. We, for one, will miss the club and all it contributed to Manchester and Salford’s nightlife.
🗞️ In a fight we never saw coming, The Spectator have come out full-throttle against the Manchester Evening News, accusing both them and the Liverpool Echo (both owned by Reach) of being “mouthpieces for the region's political elites.” This comes after the MEN published an article calling Andy Burnham “the answer to Labour’s problems”, and makes reference to the fact that the Echo’s political editor Liam Thorp was also the ghost writer for Burnham’s 2024 book Head North. But it’s not all doom and gloom for the local Manchester press. Later in the article The Mill is namechecked as proof that “you can still do proper, sceptical, ground-breaking journalism”. We promise we had no hand in the writing of this piece.
🍏 On Tuesday, the Green party announced their new candidate in the Makerfield by-election, after Chris Kennedy dropped out following online posts calling a recent antisemetic attack in London a ‘false flag’ operation. Their replacement candidate is Sarah Wakefield, a mother of two and a sustainable food campaigner, who just 19 days ago was elected to Manchester City Council, representing Deansgate. However, the party have also announced that they intend to run a “scaled-back” campaign in the by-election, opting to focus instead on the mayoral by-election, should Burnham be elected. That’s likely because campaigners on the ground in Makerfield — who are now in their first official week of campaigning but have been knocking on doors and canvassing for a fortnight — say this is already set to be a dead heat between Burnham and Reform. Though Labour sources are still sour the Greens are running at all, and feel their only function could be to pull votes away from Labour to Reform’s benefit.
🎓 The University of Manchester is rolling out a new requirement that every student does a work placement — even those doing purely academic degrees. Duncan Ivison, the University’s vice chancellor who is behind the move, said that students shouldn’t be graduating having only sat in lectures: “A big ambition for us at Manchester is wanting every single student to have a chance to put their learning into context: an internship, a placement, a joint project or an exchange”, he told the Times. You can read our profile on Ivison here.
🪧 And finally, a protest against Hartshead Meats, the abattoir in Mossley at the centre of an animal-welfare scandal, descended into chaos on Sunday following an alleged BB gun attack. Mel Anderson, a protestor and eyewitness, says she’s been left shaken by the incident. “It was horrible to think that while we were doing a quiet protest… that people would drive past in a white van to shoot at us,” she told The Mill. Mel added that another woman was in tears after being hit just above her eye,and six people were reported to be injured. GMP Tameside has urged witnesses to come forward.” We reported on Hartshead Meats last week, which has come under fire following undercover footage alleging horrific animal abuse inside its gates. The Food Standards Agency is investigating, while Hartshead insists the videos were selectively edited and “lack essential context”.
‘Wilmslow Road feels like a place that should be in literature’
Both Sufiyaan Salam’s agent at Penguin and I thought it was a good idea that we meet up over lunch (me and Sufiyaan, not me and the agent). His new novel is set on the Curry Mile, so it made sense to us that our interview be set there too. This turned out to be a mistake. Salam, who speaks in tangents, anecdotes, family lineages, book recommendations, difficult-to-follow word associations and half-finished sentences, finds himself barely able to eat his food, and frequently apologises for waving his knife around while talking. It’s reflective of his writing style. His debut novel Wimmy Road Boyz flutters rapidly between perspectives, styles, forms; sometimes prose, sometimes play, sometimes poem, sometimes third person, sometimes second. “I just never wanted it to be boring,” he says.
We’re in a restaurant called Ziya, an Indian sit-down affair on the Whitworth end of Wilmslow Road. Salam, who is 28 now, recalls coming here when he first moved from Blackburn to Manchester to study Literature in 2016: “It felt a bit civilized for a student.” As is the case for much of the South Asian population in the north west and indeed across England, the Curry Mile is full of such memories for Salam, spanning the full length of his life so far. “Every Asian person I knew, knew about it, no matter where they were from,” he tells me. He remembers visiting the road as a child, eating ice cream at a sweet centre called Moonlight with his dad, whose family first moved from Pakistan to Cheetham Hill. He can point through the window at Ziya’s to the student flat he lived in for two years, where he couldn’t sleep for drivers doing donuts outside.
And this – the Curry Mile, and South Asian car culture – form the two base pillars of his novel. Wimmy Road Boyz – which won the 2023/24 #Merky Books New Writers’ Prize from Penguin (set up by Stormzy), and saw Salam listed as an Observer Best New Novelist earlier this year –is set across a single night in Rusholme. “Three boyz drive and dream of an impossible night on an endless street,” as the opening line puts it. It follows three friends – Immy, Khan and Haris – who spend a night driving a white BMW up and down a mythical reimagining of the Curry Mile. It was inspired by a similar night on the real Curry Mile, though neither Salam nor any of his friends have a white Bimmer. “The most inauthentic thing about the book is that I’ve never passed my driving test,” Salam tells me. “In a very Pakistani way though, I can drive. But I failed my test.”
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