Is Manchester becoming a victim of its own success?
FEARS THAT BOOMING CITY COULD LOSE THE ESSENCE THAT MAKES IT THE PLACE TO BE
IT seems hard to believe now, looking out over Manchester’s burgeoning skyline. But in the early 1990s, just a few hundred people wanted to make the city centre their home. At the time, reversing that trend was top priority for a city leadership desperate to turn around decades of post-industrial decline.
Less than 30 years later, Manchester now faces the opposite problem. How does it sustain the biggest boom seen since the Victorian era – in which an astonishing 50,000 people now live in the wider city centre, more arriving every day – without destroying its heart and soul?
The debate about the area’s future, as with Liverpool’s centre, is growing ever louder. As the cranes have moved in, a series of controversial planning decisions have been mulled over. Skyscrapers have sprung up, often absent of affordable housing.
Here and there recognisable landmarks, albeit not necessarily with any official architectural renown, have vanished to make way for new flats and offices.
Weighed against that is the fact Manchester is increasingly achieving its ambition of rebalancing the country out of London. Genuinely it is becoming the place to be, as businesses relocate, its political profile rises and more 18-34-year-olds now arrive each year than leave, according to analysis by the M.E.N’s data unit.
So that need to balance Manchester’s character – its essence – with its growth, the need to avoid becoming victim to its own success without turning it into a museum, is becoming one of the hottest topics in town.
David Ellison, chair of Manchester council’s planning committee, is the first to admit that it is a juggling act. He points out that in the coming years 250,000 people are expected to move into the area sweeping round from the border with Salford to the Etihad stadium, a boom he describes as almost ‘Chinese-style’ in its scale.
But at the same time, Manchester has to ensure it does not ruin the very thing that attracts people here in the first place.
“When I was a lad the aspiration was to live in Alderley Edge, but now it’s the city centre,” he says.
“It’s great for Manchester, but it creates the pressures you see all around us. The good news is that Manchester is facing its biggest growth since the Victorian era, businesses are relocating, there’s movement of people from the south east coming in and it’s driving jobs.
“How do you balance that very thing that attracts people to Manchester with the pressures that come with the new development, new retail and residential? If you are not careful you can destroy the very things that make Manchester such an attractive place.”
He points to the council’s city centre strategy, recently revised, that underpins the direction development will now take, one of several pieces of guidance used by the planning committee when taking decisions.
It outlines the council’s vision for each key neighbourhood from NOMA to Ancoats, First Street to Spinningfields, Oxford to Piccadilly, detailing how the city is set to absorb unprecedented demand.
The need for such a strategy – and the fact it will be revised again in a year’s time – underlines the fact that as London’s property market stagnates, Manchester’s is now flying on the back of lower land prices, more available capital and rising demand.
Just as in Liverpool, which is currently enduring its own row between Unesco and development giants Peel over plans for skyscrapers slap next to the city’s famous docklands landmarks, that throws up tensions.
In many respects Gary Neville’s St Michael’s development on Jackson’s Row has become a lightning rod for Manchester’s debate. The original plans, now radically revised in the wake of a public and heritage backlash, crystallised a host of questions about skyscrapers, urban design, public consultation and the relative merits of different types of unlisted heritage, all of which are likely to become wider sources of discussion as the city centre grows. While admitting those proposals – which would have demolished the Sir Ralph Abercromby pub and former Bootle Street police station, as well as building two new bronze skyscrapers near the town hall – were ‘flawed’ and stressing he has listened to the public, Neville also continues to argue the case for big modern landmarks next to older heritage.
The most successful and prominent buildings around the world ‘annoy’ people, he said this week, adding: “I wanted to reach for the skies and basically polarised opinion.”
What had polarised opinion was the design of the skyscrapers, their location and which heritage should be kept, all questions that are rising up the city’s agenda.
Lesley Chalmers has worked in development and regeneration for more than 30 years, including as chief executive of the English Cities Fund and on the regeneration of Hulme, alongside legendary former Manchester council chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein. She was one of the first to vocally object to the original St Michael’s plans when they were first unveiled last year. A resident of the nearby Great Northern tower, she is at pains to point out that she would have objected regardless. “We now have to think about the quality of the design, because we are in danger of losing both good design and heritage in pursuit of money,” she says. “It’s the old cliche of the baby with the bathwater: we need to keep that distinctiveness. That now needs to be recognised if we are to stay in front, because if we are just the same as everywhere else, why would people come here? “Just because there’s a billionaire behind it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for the city. It’s about boom and downturn. We can afford to be much more selective when there’s people queuing up desperate to build houses, but are we?” Chalmers is part of a growing chorus calling for Manchester to have a tall buildings policy that designates areas suitable for skyscrapers. In the 1970s and 1980s, planning officials had a rule that nothing higher than the city’s historic Victorian buildings should be built in an attempt to preserve the past, a restriction the city leadership overturned in the 1990s as it sought to usher in investment.
Since the economy recovered from the 2008 crash, some believe the city now needs to tighten up the rules again.
Catherine Dewar, north west planning director for Historic England, formerly known as English Heritage, agrees Manchester ‘absolutely’ needs a tall buildings policy in line with other towns and cities. As development booms here, the body is increasingly assessing proposals that impact on heritage buildings.
“We are having to take more and more judgements on that and we have to understand the impact on the setting of a listing building,” she says, adding that a key part of that is looking at what makes an historic landmark special in the first place.
She uses the Palace hotel as an example. Historic England objected to plans for new skyscrapers on the neighbouring former BBC site last year, due to the effect they would have on the setting of the Palace, although they were ultimately passed by the council’s planning committee.
“If you take the Palace, why was it designed like that? It was about civic pride and power and wealth, so how would a development effect that element of its significance?” she explains.
It isn’t just about listed buildings. How does the city assess landmarks that have other kinds of cultural or social value, such as pubs, bits of artwork, cinemas and former music venues?
On Oxford Street two former cinemas, neither of them the finest architectural example of the road’s silver screen heyday, are either vanishing or under threat. The Cornerhouse looks likely to be swallowed up by a new mixed-used development around Oxford Road station, while demolition of the former Odeon began a couple of weeks ago.
Dr Matthew Jones, associate professor of film studies at De Montford University, studied the public’s memories of the area’s cinematic past as part of a project at University College London.
Manchester is ‘bizarre’ in allowing its remaining old cinemas to disappear, he adds, at a time when most cities are looking to retain them.
If you are not careful you can destroy the things that make Manchester an attractive place David Ellison
“I think too often we only think about economic value and not human and social value,” he adds.
“It’s very difficult to make visible what a building has meant to a city, compared to saying ‘if we redevelop this it will be worth X millions of pounds.’ You can’t put a statistic on its meaning to a community.”
Tim Heatley, owner of Manchesterbased developer Capital and Centric, believes Manchester needs to tread carefully. His firm specialises largely in taking over old buildings – sometimes listed – and redeveloping and adding to them.
Buildings can have a significance that isn’t immediately apparent, he says, one that can often only be teased out by talking to people before finalising plans.
“You don’t need to demolish what’s there if you want to create new space, you can add to it,” he says.
“In some ways if you knock it down you’re destroying a lot of what people actually want to be part of and why people move to Manchester in the first place, its uniqueness.
“Who’s associated with it? It might be because ‘that’s where Joy Division played their first gig’ or whoever. People value that, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t move here.
“It shouldn’t just be about property, it’s about people. If you’re doing well in property it’s often because you understand human behaviour.”
One answer suggested by Heatley and others is a form of ‘social listing’ that would help preserve buildings that don’t meet the criteria for Historic England listing, but which have a particular significance to the community.
But council leader Sir Richard Leese points out a strong dose of pragmatism needs to be applied when weighing up what to keep.
“It’s always been difficult, that’s for sure, to strike a balance,” he says.
“You can maintain heritage in different ways but buildings need to have a purpose, so just keeping a building as a piece of sculpture doesn’t do anybody any good.”
He vehemently doesn’t believe Manchester now needs a tall buildings policy, adding: “No, I don’t. I think a lot of what the heritage lobby say about tall buildings, say about views, is nonsense anyway.”
Sir Richard is scathing about the behaviour of Historic England regarding the original St Michael’s plans, to which it has objected on the grounds of ‘substantial harm’ to the setting of the town hall, fuelling national headlines.
In his opinion the way the body has behaved is ‘almost scandalous,’ adding: “They gave clear guidance in the preplanning application stage and its advice on the level of harm later changed significantly.
“Their problem seems to be if you can see big buildings and heritage buildings at the same time and that appears to me to be nonsensical.”
Such debates are not going to go away anytime soon, however.
Previously the M.E.N. has covered the ongoing arguments about the absence of affordable housing in the city centre boom, a row that is also live in London - particularly in the wake of the Grenfell disaster - and a looming question over who the city centre is actually for.
Grenfell has further brought the human element of cities into sharp focus, believes Lesley Chalmers.
“What is the city but its people?” she asks, quoting the Manchester International Festival’s 2017 slogan. “It’s not the fault of the council that planning law is so restrictive but the council can take a view to look at things more widely and with more thought.”