There have been no European handouts for Manchester. EN finds out how else the city is managing to spread the growth.

Manchester: it’s the North West’s great economic miracle. So says everyone, and it’s hard to argue with the streets clogged by Lambos and Humvees whisking the city’s occupants home to their drizzle-soaked penthouses.

But take a look at the Government’s benchmark for quality of life, its “Index of Multiple Deprivation”, and you might get a shock. Manchester comes in fourth (that’s fourth-worst, not best).

Liverpool comes first, of course, despite decades of European handouts, and Hackney and Tower Hamlets in East London score second and third place respectively. But Manchester’s ranking is still a corker – especially when you consider neighbouring Salford manages a meagre 15th. Still, at least things are improving: in 2004, after all, Manchester was ranked no. 2.

The city’s two wards with the highest benefit claimant counts – Moss Side and Ardwick – give a clue as to the problem, located as they are within spitting distance of  Regeneration: Manchester the city centre. While that city centre generates 46 per cent (£11bn) of Greater Manchester’s GDP, its immediate hinterland remains mired in Dickensian squalor.

According to Colin Sinclair, chief executive of Greater Manchester inward investment agency MIDAS, the trajectory of development has been deliberate. “The key to it was always to regenerate the conurbation core,” he says.

“So those developments in the conurbation core, like everything that’s gone on around Piccadilly, Spinningfields, and really the reinvention of much of the city centre and Salford Quays, that was the key thing to achieve first.”

This having been largely achieved, however, the city’s neighbouring areas are starting to clamour for their own slice of the pie, with the loosely-defined areas of “East Manchester” and central Salford the focus of current work to stimulate investment.

“Sportcity”, based around the City of Manchester Stadium and other Commonwealth Games legacy facilities around Ancoats, has been the showpiece of East Manchester’s regeneration to-date.

The supercasino, dealt the coup de grace earlier this year by Gordon Brown, would have built upon this, according to both Sinclair and Eddie Smith, chief executive of regeneration company New East Manchester, creating 3,500 jobs: more than half capable of being taken by local people.

“Inward investment brings in some fantastic high value jobs,” says Sinclair. “But one thing that inward investment struggles to do in the globalised economy is to bring in entry-level jobs for areas that are high on the deprivation indices.

“You can do a lot through business incubators, start-ups, science park links, and a lot of that has been done in New East Manchester and it’s been successful, but is it on a big enough scale?

“What the casino would have done is provided entry-level work with potential to upskill in different facets of the leisure industry. And it would have provided that in massive numbers.”

Although the likes of MIDAS and New East Manchester won’t admit it, the supercasino in Manchester was only a recent development and hardly one on which anyone was banking until the surprise announcement of the city’s victory over Blackpool in January 2007. So surely there must have been a pre-casino plan that East Manchester can just reinstate?

According to Eddie Smith of New East Manchester, “We’ve always seen Sportcity as a leisure and visitor destination, and the casino was a perfect fit for that strategy and aspiration. So the plan was and still is to continue to bring a range of sporting and visitor destinations into that part of the city.

“The casino would have helped reposition East Manchester in the mindsets of developers and investors as a place to invest, so it would have enabled East Manchester to compete in that very competitive office market, because it would have established itself in a very visible way.”

Sinclair takes a similar view, but says he would like to see some serious public investment now move into the area. “I think we could certainly put some significant size government departments here,” he says.

“From the Lyons Review there’s been this mandate to move public sector bodies out of London. Let’s get some big departmental bodies here in Manchester, and let’s put them between Piccadilly and New East Manchester.

“There’s a corridor of opportunity there that we could use for public sector office investment which would then generate demand from the private sector, and which would create skilled employment but which would need to be serviced by a large level of entry level employment, because all of those government offices and facilities that you build need resourcing.”

So much for hopes for the future. What of the area’s present? Eddie Smith points to a trend for architects and developers to set up their headquarters in Ancoats (ASK, for example, has just shifted its headquarters to the area), and also Openshaw Business Park which, he says, is aimed at lower-skilled industries.

Still taking centre stage in East Manchester’s economic development, though, is Central Park, located two miles outside the city centre off the A62 Oldham Road.

“Over the last six or seven years we’ve been focused on the establishment of Central Park as a major business destination – a major urban business park in the heart of the Greater Manchester conurbation,” says Smith.

“And we’re working with ASK and Goodman on what we call Central Park North, and that’s currently the home to the regional headquarters of Fujitsu, relocated from elsewhere in East Manchester.”

As well as the big names, Central Park includes a business incubator facility, One Central Park, co-owned by Manchester Science Park, the Universities of Manchester and Salford and the new Manchester College.

One Central Park is important because one of the underlying criticisms of all public sector-led regeneration is that there is too much concentration on the physical structure and not enough on creating the structures for job creation.

“It’s a very enterprise-focused facility, providing incubation facilities for businesses spinning out of the universities and the colleges,” says Smith.

“At the moment some new phases of development are coming to fruition on that site, in respect of some speculative development that’s going to be available for freehold or leasehold – small units around 15,000 sq ft. That creates quite good move-on accommodation for those businesses based within the incubator.”

To see redevelopment on a massive scale, though, you need to head not to East Manchester but to the centre of the old city of Salford, which borders on the commercial heart of Manchester but, in many parts, still looks like a scene painted by Lowry on a day when he’d forgotten his Prozac.

“In terms of physical development, I guess that the thing that will make us famous is Media City, because we’ve brought in the BBC,” comments Felicity Goodey, chair of urban regeneration company Central Salford.

“But equally important, as far as we’re concerned, are some of the major development projects that we have in train, in particular things like Exchange Greengate, which is an ASK-led development. That is very much a gateway development into central Salford.”

Sinclair says of this, “It’s actually a massive site which is on the border of Manchester and Salford. It’s that huge bit between Chapel Street in Salford and Victoria train station. They call it the Exchange Greengate Embankment.

“It’s one of the biggest sites that nobody knows about in the city centre. It’s between the cathedral and the railway line, and it’s a mixed use scheme of offices, retail, leisure.”

Goodey also points to, “A £1bn framework deal with English Cities Fund, which will see the complete transformation of the Chapel Street Corridor.”

But will any of these developments do much to nurture the entrepreneurial spark in Salford’s residents? Goodey thinks so. “I would have thought there are two major examples,” she says.

“One is that within Mediacity itself we persuaded Peel, right from the outset, to ringfence what was the old Broadway Industrial Park, which was fairly low-grade industry, as an area to encourage new entrepreneurs.

“Another example is up the top of the Chapel Street corridor where again we’re looking to very much encourage young entrepreneurs. We want to see a range of owneroccupier businesses, businesses with their own front doors.”

One of the issues that has dogged regeneration efforts around Manchester is, precisely, the wealth generated by the city centre and areas such as Trafford Park.

Eligibility for European assistance programmes like Objective One is calculated on a region’s GDP as a percentage of the European average. So Merseyside on aggregate qualified easily, but Greater Manchester never stood a chance: meaning leafy parts of the Wirral get assistance while Ardwick and Langworthy remain untouched by European cash.

According to Sinclair this can be a real problem: “I’m not saying money is entirely the solution but, in the globalised economy, inward investors see some grant contribution as a show of faith.

“They might go to Belfast for £8 million, or Glasgow for £5 million, or they might come to Wythenshawe for £1 million, because our talent pool is so much stronger, our airport connectivity’s so much better. But if you can’t even give them that £1 million they think you don’t want them, and that’s part of our problem at the moment.”

But is this focus on deprived areas the right solution for a conurbation like Greater Manchester anyway? Francis Glare, a director at architects BDP, isn’t sure. His firm has been involved in masterplaning Wythenshawe town centre, but he says what we really need is more Chorltons, Didsburys and Heatons closer into the city centre – not so
much creating opportunities for the working class to be a little more industrious as a wholesale programme of gentrification.

He says, “So far we have seen needs-based, bottom-up regeneration. I’d like to see that turned on its head.

“It’s being proactive about areas that can be good as well as addressing those that are bad, which is something the planning system isn’t terribly good at.”

Manchester has, he continues, been hugely successful at attracting a whole generation of entrepreneurs and professionals, who reach their 30s and abandon their city centre apartments for the distant suburbs.

“We need to create attractive centres – and recognise that a rising housing market is a sign of success,” he says.

East Manchester and Salford have been grabbing the headlines, but one other major project underway on the edge of the city centre might come closer to fitting Glare’s bill. Central Spine is a £750 million ASK development to the south of G-Mex, in the zone that Manchester city council had hoped would play host to the BBC before Salford Quays trumped its hand.

This project has just been renamed “First Street” and will involve a 300m pedestrianised boulevard connecting Hulme with the City Centre. It’s also going to include 1.8 million sq ft of office space and 1,500 homes. Located as it is within a stone’s throw of existing canal-side developments, we get the feeling this could provide accommodation for enough frappuccino-toting professionals to make even an architect feel at home.

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