At a construction site in the northwest English city of Manchester, a huge hunk of steel was being hoisted onto the skeleton of a 12-story office block. When the structure is complete, it will have space for around 2,000 workers in a development with 2,000 homes, a 650-bed hotel and a riverside park.
The buzz of building work on the Mayfield site, a short walk from Manchester’s main railway station, is familiar to the area’s inhabitants. They have seen the city transform over the past two decades, with giant cranes hovering overhead and skyscrapers soaring upward.
The story of how Manchester became one of Britain’s fastest-growing cities is key to understanding the rise of Andy Burnham, the Labour politician expected to become Britain’s prime minister later this month following the resignation of Keir Starmer. For the past nine years, as mayor of Greater Manchester, Mr. Burnham presided over a region whose economy grew an average of 3.1 percent a year — about twice the rate of the country as a whole. Manchester is on track to become Europe’s fourth-tallest city by 2030.
What did Mr. Burnham do as mayor here that put him on the path to Downing Street? Analysts point to policies that attracted foreign investment and prioritized public transport, as well as Mr. Burnham’s gift for communication and building strong relationships, both with businesses and with local power brokers. This economic model even has its own name, Manchesterism, which Mr. Burnham has defined as “business-friendly socialism.”
But the would-be prime minister also inherited a city that was already on an upward trajectory. The foundations were laid for much of Manchester’s growth years before he took office, and some experts question how feasible it will be to reproduce the city’s successes nationwide. And, despite the real estate boom, large areas of Greater Manchester have not shared in the benefits, continuing to have high levels of deprivation compared to the national average.
‘The Leese and Bernstein model’
As mayor, Mr. Burnham became the figurehead for an economic regeneration strategy set in motion three decades ago by a long-serving Labour leader of Manchester City Council, Richard Leese, aided by another senior local official, Howard Bernstein. Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester, said the city understood the needs of business, sought out investors and then lobbied for resources and new powers from central government to amplify the effect. “That’s basically the Leese and Bernstein model,” he said.
But even if Mr. Burnham surfed an economic wave rather than generating it, he used his political skills to sell his vision simultaneously to local voters and to foreign investors.
The city attracts more investment from overseas than any in Britain except London, with the most in the past year coming from the United States, Germany, India, France and Sweden, according to a regional agency, Invest Manchester.
One example of what “business-friendly socialism” might look like was on display last month at the Mayfield site, where an excavator gouged out soil to dislodge a rusty fuel tank. The discovery of the tank required a plan for its disposal and a safety inspection for hazardous waste, meaning a construction delay. But within weeks all the boxes were ticked and work progressed.
“That’s the type of thing that could have been months or years,” in another city, said Henrietta Nowne, development director at Landsec, a real estate firm developing the site. The local authorities work rapidly “to help unlock a problem,” she said.
A Postindustrial Makeover
If he becomes prime minister, Mr. Burnham has promised a “new drive of re-industrialization” in neglected areas that were once a backbone of the industrial revolution.
What that means in modern Britain — which has little heavy industry and has been dominated for decades by services including retail, banking and accounting, as well as leisure and culture — is a looming question. In 1970, services accounted for just over half the British economy. That rose to four-fifths by 2016.
“Eighty percent of our economy is services, so if you want to build a prosperous city it is going to be around services,” Professor Ford said.
However, when Mr. Burnham talks about “re-industrialization” — as he did in a speech in Manchester last week — he can be vague on the specifics of what he means. Professor Ford noted that the actual growth sources behind Manchester’s boom, including financial services, life sciences and the creative industries, were hardly the heavy industries that the term re-industrialization might suggest, particularly to nostalgic Labour supporters. “As is often the case with Burnham,” he said, “part of his job has been papering over the gap between the world as it might be and the world as it is.”
Manchester grew at the heart of Britain’s industrial revolution, with the cotton trade and manufacturing making it an economic powerhouse in the 19th century. But in the decades after World War II, as cheap textile manufacturing moved abroad, the city’s industries declined and its economy floundered.
Lately it has exploited its heritage, repurposing warehouses and factories as luxury hotels, offices and apartments, and building waterfronts alongside the canal that used to shift cargo.
Boddingtons brewery, in the Strangeways district north of the city center, was established in the mid-1800s and once churned out 100,000 barrels of beer a year. Production ceased in 2005, demolition concluded in 2010 and Mr. Burnham was there last year, in a construction worker’s hat, when work started on 505 homes (60 percent of which are expected to be occupied by those unable to afford market rates).
Campfield opened in 1878 as a market hall. After incarnations as a trading area, exhibition center and wartime factory, it is now an airy co-working space.
Sipping a coffee there, Joe Manning, managing director of Invest Manchester, ascribed the city’s success in part to the longevity of its efforts.
“It’s been at this for a long time and it’s had a consistency of approach which has been able to provide certainty and a direction of travel,” Mr. Manning said. The inward investment agency he runs was created under a different name in 1997, well before Mr. Burnham was an elected politician. Mr. Manning sees part of his job as helping investors to navigate structures and to “know who’s who in the city,” he said.
Invest Manchester is owned by the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, which is made up of 10 municipalities in the region and the mayor. That means that all the leading local power brokers contribute and have a stake in its strategy.
The long-term objective has been to favor growing sectors without placing bets on any one industry. “So we have got financial and professional services, we’ve got creative industries, you’ve got a growing tech cluster and A.I. sector here in the city and you’ve got life sciences,” Mr. Manning said. Among the international firms that have set up bases in Manchester are BNY Mellon, JP Morgan and S&P Global.
Collaboration between the city, its universities and the private sector has also helped provide a source of skilled labor including through degree apprenticeships which allow students to gain qualifications while getting industry experience. The population of the city’s very center, thought to have dwindled to around 500 in the 1980s, has now hit around 100,000, including many students.
‘A Mind-set That Leads to Stability’
In Salford, at the site of the old docks in southeast Manchester, a development called MediaCity opened in 2011 and has attracted companies small and large. The BBC produces big TV shows from its northern base here, including its studio analysis of World Cup soccer games, as well as its children’s programming and its flagship BBC Breakfast program.
Alice Webb, chief executive of MediaCity, said the city’s track record attracted investors, as did the willingness of local politicians from different parties to collaborate with business.
“There is a mind-set that leads to stability,” she added, praising Mr. Burnham. “He shows up, he cares — as do the leaders of Greater Manchester, I could name you a dozen,” she said.
In a region with areas of significant deprivation, Mr. Burnham has helped those on low incomes by bringing the privatized transit network under tight public regulation. That has raised punctuality, increased frequency of services and controlled fares.
Sitting by the canal in Salford, Mark Reynaud, a freelance TV producer, reflected on how much the city had changed since he studied here in the early 1990s, when he once had a gun pulled on him at lunchtime. “It feels a lot safer — it’s a confident city,” he said. He is skeptical that the economic benefitsare spreading to the poorest, however. “If you want to do Andy Burnham’s Manchester, it’s going to cost you,” he said, referring to prices in the upmarket coffee shops and restaurants.
Still, “you go into the city center and you feel completely energized,” he said. “That is Manchester — it does feel like a city where anything can happen.”
