When I was born in Manchester, thirty-seven years ago, fewer people lived in its city centre than today live in ‘England’s prettiest village’, Castle Combe. In 2026, almost 70,000 now call it home. The central district has grown from a Wiltshire village to a population that would fill the entire metropolitan area of Rugby. Every time I head home and step off the Avanti at Piccadilly, I'm struck by how another piece of the skyline has changed. Another crane has appeared. Another glass tower has joined the horizon.
The Manchester I grew up with has been transformed almost beyond recognition.
Twenty-five years ago, Ancoats - where I was involved in a magazine for North West teenagers in a recently refurbished mill - was shorthand for urban decline: derelict factories, abandoned warehouses and the physical scars of deindustrialisation. Today, you're more likely to queue for a £4 cortado, debate the merits of one artisan bakery over another, or spend an evening hopping between wine bars and restaurants serving whichever small plates are in vogue this month. What was once an industrial wasteland has become one of Britain's most fashionable neighbourhoods.
It is by almost any measure one of Europe's great urban regeneration stories.
Manchester is also becoming Britain's most influential political export, despite a decade of dystopian post-Brexit Britain.
As Andy Burnham's national profile continues to grow, so too does interest in what has become known as the Manchester model or ‘Manchesterism’. The promise is seductive: ambitious local leadership, pragmatic politics, partnership with business, and a city that stopped waiting for Whitehall to save it, instead getting on with rebuilding itself. So seductive that I spent a summer researching the ins and outs of Manchesterism for my Regional and Urban Planning Studies dissertation at LSE.
So, if Burnham's brand of politics is set to shape the next generation of national government, it is worth asking a simple question: What exactly are we proposing to emulate nationwide?