Brian Groom

Caitlin Morrissey

So we'll begin with the first question then, which is Brian, what do you see as being the DNA of Manchester?

Brian Groom

I think the city at its most creative has displayed an openness to new ideas and new cultural influences. If you go back to the 1840s when it was the shock city of the Industrial Revolution and the world's first major industrial urban centre, it was radically different to anything that had come before. And all things seemed possible. It was throwing up new ideas, new industrial processes, new social and political movements. Now, I'm not saying it's displayed those characteristics throughout its history. It's often been a more conservative place, with a big and small ‘c’ both in the late 19th Century and the early to mid-20th Century. And in the second half of the 20th Century, it underwent a really serious economic decline. But I think there's some of that around today as well.

I mean, one most famous things about Manchester is its music scene from the late 20th Century. And it's often said that played a big part in the city's recovery. It's often said that it rose out of a sort of response to hardship combined with an openness to new influences from around the world. So whereas it once imported raw cotton and turned it into textiles and re-exported those, now it was taking musical influences from around the world and turning them into new music and exporting that.

So I think, as part of that, at key points then and now, it's been a pretty cosmopolitan city. In the 1840s, you'd had internal migrants arriving from Scotland, Wales, other parts of England, especially Ireland, and you also had lots of traders and others coming from Germany, France, Russia, Italy, Greece, all over Europe. And today it's slightly similar. It's a place where more than 150 languages are said to be spoken, second only to London in that in Britain. So I think there are quite a lot of parallels between then and now.

Greg Clark

If I may, Brian, just going to ask you one very obvious follow-up question, which is what ignited your fascination with Manchester? Why have you written a book about Manchester?

Brian Groom

Well, I'm Mancunian for a start and I love history, and I'd previously written a history book. It was actually my publisher who came up with the idea of doing this one. I proposed a slightly broader book about the whole of the British and Irish Isles, which I'm working on now. But my publisher said, ‘Yeah, we can do that, but we'd love you to do a history of Manchester as well’. They're a Manchester-based arm of HarperCollins. And they said, if you do that first, we'll give you a two-book deal. So that was too good to turn down, really.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you, Brian. What it is that makes Manchester, Manchester and how many Manchesters are there? If there is more than one, how can we understand that? And then what is the tapestry that holds these different Manchesters together?

Brian Groom

Well, I think, I mean, like most cities really there are a lot of different Manchesters. I mean, you've got people whose families have lived there for generations alongside people who arrived from various different parts of Britain and the world. And it's become a kind of, a bit like it was in 1840s, a kind of test case for how post-industrial society cities can reinvent themselves. And it's controversial again. To some people, it kind of exemplifies a smart and pragmatic way to use knowledge-based businesses and culture and leisure to build a 21st Century economy. But other people see what they might call Manctopia or Manc-hattan bristling with all these new skyscrapers that seem to spring up overnight. They see it as a kind of supposedly neoliberal playground for property developers and other newcomers, while being also riddled with poverty and inequality. So there's a lot of different Manchesters going on there.

The city does have a sense of its own personality shaped by its past. I mean, it has a particular reputation for boastfulness. If you think of the Victorian phrase ‘what Manchester thinks today, England will think tomorrow’. That can be exaggerated. It was often used about Lancashire as a whole, but it's-- and there have been periods like in my youth in the 1970s when the city seemed in almost terminal decline, so it had nothing to boast about. But then you had the sort of the swagger of Liam Gallagher and Ian Brown and the proper Mancs and all that. And the city kind of plays up to its own image. So you had t-shirts in the 1980s proclaiming ‘On the sixth day God created Manchester’ and then there's that phrase you hear all the time, ‘This is Manchester we do things differently here’, which is usually misattributed. It gets attributed to Tony Wilson, the music impresario. But actually, it was made up by the writer Frank Cottrell-Boyce for the film 24 Hour Party People. But as with all these things, there is something in it, I think.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you very much, Brian. In Manchester we hear over 150 different languages and people from all over the world now call Manchester home. Who lives in Manchester? If there's anything else you’d like to say about that. And what is the promise of Manchester and why have they come here?

Brian Groom

Well, I think the growth's been huge in parts. The City of Manchester's population is up by about 30% over two decades to about just under 550,000 and Greater Manchester is up by 14%. That's about just under 2.9 million. And I think something like just over a fifth of them are born overseas. So it's a mix of people who are already here and new people coming in.

It's worth saying that the whole question of identity is extremely sensitive around Greater Manchester. Most of Manchester and all of Salford are in the historic county of Lancashire. In the surrounding towns, they're variously located in historic Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire, and a lot of people, a lot of older people in particular, were resentful that in 1974 it all got thrown into the Greater Manchester County Council area. That was disbanded by Margaret Thatcher but the council carried on working together. They formed a Combined Authority in 2011, and then Andy Burnham became the first directly elected Mayor for Greater Manchester in 2017. But that change still rankles with some people.

And it's also worth noting that the social divisions are absolutely huge. Astonishingly, the City of Manchester, the borough, ranks as the second most deprived of 317 local authorities in England after Blackpool for deprivation, according to the Government's most recent indices. And that's pretty much where it's always been. There are swathes of North and East Manchester in particular, and parts of Wythenshawe that remain pretty poor. So that's one of the big challenges facing the city now. Can it spread its prosperity more widely across the city region and across the social scale?

Greg Clark

Can I jump in with a couple of just questions asking you a bit more, Brian, about it? Just going back to the sort of the local identity issues and your comment that for some people it rankered to be, you know, lumped in with Greater Manchester Council and then the return of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. What's the kind of the seed or the nucleus of that difference of opinion or that conflict or that difference? People value a different notion of locality or they don't like to be taken out of their traditional county settings, what's the content of it?

Brian Groom

I think, well, it's particularly pride in the town they're brought up in and lived in. I mean, it varies a lot. For example, I'm from Stretford which in my youth was a county borough of Lancashire. But I didn't know anybody in my childhood that didn't really think of themselves as Mancunian. But then we were mostly from Manchester families that had moved out to the suburbs. Just over the Ship Canal in next door Salford, it’s completely different: an ancient city, it was the senior town in the Middle Ages. Manchester was just a small town in Salfordshire. And it's a city now, there are two cities in the region. So it tends to be quite sensitive about that.

Just after coming back north a few years ago, we went to a folk concert, the Songs of Ewan McColl concert at the Lowry in Salford Quays and one singer came up to the microphone and said, ‘Hello Manchester!’ and the entire audience bellowed back, ‘Salford!’ And it's strong in places like Bolton as well, which sees itself as having a very separate identity from Manchester and a lot of people hate you describing it as kind of as if it's a kind of suburb of Manchester.

Greg Clark

Brian, thank you so much. And then there was just one other question I wanted to put to you before we carry on that you've quite correctly, and I think very importantly, stressed what was happening in the 1840s in Manchester and, in a sense, the rest is history. But from your reading of the history that's pre-industrial, what explains why the things that then happened in Manchester in the 1800s did happen? Was there some combination of ingredients that made it inevitable that Manchester would be such an important city in the Industrial Revolution from your point of view, or are there other ingredients that you would point to?

Brian Groom

Yeah, I mean, it's certainly extraordinary. I mean, we're talking about cotton textiles and never before had such a huge global industry been built more than 2000 miles from where its nearest source of raw materials was. There's a huge debate among economic historians about why the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain before other places but you can point to certain factors for Manchester and the north-west. For one thing, it had already built over the previous centuries an existing cottage-based textile industry. So to some extent, it had the skills and the commercial expertise. The geography and the geology were important as well. It had rivers to provide water power. It was close to sources of coal for steam engines. As a kind of newly growing town or city also, it had no craft guilds and didn't have regulations aimed at keeping newcomers out. And importantly as well, it's close to Liverpool which gave it easy access to a growing supply of cheap and slave-grown cotton from the West Indies and the US, as well as a place where it could export its goods through. So I think those kind of factors were all important. It wasn't inevitable by any means, but they'd go quite some way to explaining why it happened around the Manchester region. 

Caitlin Morrissey

Thanks, Brian. You began to mention there the geological and geographical features that have played a very influential and prominent role in shaping Manchester's evolution. And this is just an invitation to invite you to say more if you would like to about that.

Brian Groom

Well, yes, as I say, those rivers and the coal and also some minerals were terribly important in building first a cotton textile industry, on the back of that building engineering industry that built the equipment for it. The region also used water to pretty good effect in the 18th and 19th centuries in building canals, notably the Bridgewater Canal, which is Britain's first purpose-built industrial canal built in 1761 between Manchester and Worsley which was mainly to transport coal and halve the price of coal in Manchester. And then there was the Manchester Ship Canal, a waterway between Manchester and the Mersey Estuary which opened in 1894. It was one of the 19th Century's most massive engineering projects and eventually that enabled Manchester and Salford to become, though it was inland, to become Britain's third-busiest port. And industry grew along its banks, notably at Trafford Park, which attracted engineering, chemicals, food processing firms. By its peak in 1945, it was employing about 75,000 people. Now, those physical attributes are probably a less important today now it's a services and ideas-led economy, but they have been pretty crucial in building the city that it is.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you very much, Brian. And as we come onto this question about architectural features and infrastructure, there's sort two parts to this question. One is about the vernacular of Manchester, but also what do we learn about its DNA from its built form?

Brian Groom

Well, there is a huge debate going on about architecture in Manchester centred on the tower blocks, skyscrapers I was mentioning before. The data that I dug out for the book was that in 2022, there were now 55 city centre buildings above 20-storeys, and most of them have been built since the year 2000. And if all those with planning permission get built, then that figure will more than double. It seems like, you know, one new one goes up every time I go into town. Now, the debate around that is around, are these skyscrapers distinctive of Manchester or is its own distinctive architectural history getting submerged? Is it becoming another Shanghai or Dubai or whatever? And also, what happens when all these newly built blocks get old together? And for some people, the pace of change here has been quite disconcerting. I quoted the folk singer Mike Harding complaining that the ‘Big money moved in and the dream was hijacked. Now Manchester looks like a city designed by a schizophrenic drunk with attention deficiency disorder’.

But it's worth saying also that on the other side that Manchester does have a tradition of building big and brutal since the Industrial Revolution, with its factories and its 300-foot chimneys. So when the first cotton spinning mill opened in 1781 it was a source of wonder and crowds gathered daily to stare at the height of the mill chimney being built. But there were dozens of them by the 1800 and eventually Manchester had a total of I think it was 108 cotton mills by the mid-18th Century, mid-19th Century. Though at that point the production was shifting towards nearby towns and the city was becoming more of a financial marketing and warehousing centre.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you very much, Brian. In your research, was there much in there about the shaping effect of the railway and the trams of the early 20th Century and obviously the new Metrolink in shaping the DNA of the city?

Brian Groom

Yeah, quite a bit, and they tie in in some ways with some of the identity questions I mentioned. In around about sort of the early 20th Century, for instance, if you wanted to get a tram between Salford and Manchester or the other way, you had to get off and walk across the boundary and get onto another one because it was not an integrated system. They developed their own separate tram systems. And the coming of the railways in particular kind of shaped the social geography of the city as we see it because once the railways came, the merchants and manufacturers who lived close to the city centre originally started to move gradually in stages further out, particularly into Cheshire. So you see all those commuter lines growing. And the kind of social mix and the differences between the places that we see today were shaped during that period. Now we've got a new tram system now since the 1980s and that helps to a degree in pulling the city region together. But it's still quite a big and slightly sprawling place.

Caitlin Morrissey

We’re going to come on to ask you the question about the role that Manchester plays in its nation and in its region. But of course, we wanted to ask you as well about the role of Manchester in the north.

Greg Clark

And especially as your previous book, Brian, is on northerners and Manchester's role in the north and the north's role in Manchester I think is what we’d love to hear.

Brian Groom

I mean, certainly in terms of its national influence, it’s ebbed and flowed. The peak was really the first half of the 19th Century, when the city's merchants and manufacturers created what Disraeli called the Manchester School of pro-free trade economics. And you had the Anti-Corn Law League, led by Richard Cobden and John Bright, based in Manchester. The Corn Laws were introduced at the end of the Napoleonic Wars to try to protect farmers by banning imports of corn until the price reached a certain level. But they were making the cost of living extremely expensive and the Anti-Corn Law League was a hugely successful campaign. They were abolished in 1846 and free trade became Britain's kind of default stance for decades after that.

But the city became much less influential nationally after that point. I think mainly because the cotton, the cottonocracy as they called it, the merchants and manufacturers, once they'd achieve free trade, they got what they wanted and they just wanted to get on making money after that point. They weren't so interested in national political issues. They were happy to leave the governing to the kind of imperial elite in London.

But coming to the modern day, you've got Andy Burnham, probably the best known of the English Metro Mayors that have been introduced in the last few years. During the pandemic, he became popularly hailed as King of the North by many people on social media for insisting that the lockdown rules should be adapted to suit local circumstances. And the authorities within Greater Manchester, despite all those sensitivities about identity, have been pretty good at working together particularly on joint things like promoting the city and economic development. But I think, I mean, Burnham, obviously with cabinet experience, a high profile, has been quite influential in helping to pull together with some of the other Metro Mayors, particularly Steve Rotherham in Merseyside and some of the others and trying to get the north to speak with one voice. That involves overcoming a certain suspicion of Manchester among other northern cities. It's often resented. If anyone suggests that Manchester is in some way the capital of the north, you get an earful from people in Liverpool and Newcastle and Leeds. But I think they have got better at working together. But question marks remain about how much influence any of the regional mayors has on national policy. England still remains a pretty centralised country when it comes to policy, so I think there's a long way to go on that.

Greg Clark

What you've said is really super clear. One example we might just talk about for a minute or two is Manchester Airport, where I think what you've got if I'm correct, and you will know much better than I, you've got an airport that's increasingly emerged from being an airport that served the Greater Manchester region to being the primary sort of international hub of north of England, if I've understood that correctly. Is that sort of resented? Does that create more suspicion, or do people elsewhere in the north like the fact that they don't have to go to Heathrow to get an international flight these days? How is that viewed? Do you have a sense of that?

Brian Groom

I don't have a single sense of that. I mean, I'm sure that people in other places in Liverpool and Newcastle particularly would like to see as many flights as possible going from their own airports to wherever they want to go. On the other hand, there's a limit to how many international airports the North of England can support. I think there's probably an acceptance that Manchester's reasonably well located for quite a wide swathe of people living in the north. And sometimes it's easier for people to get there than it is to go down to London and get to Heathrow. But it's owned by the ten Greater Manchester authorities as well. So it's been, it's one of the best examples of how the authorities have pulled together to work together. And I've not talked to too many politicians in other places about what they think about Manchester Airport but I think my guess would be that people would rather have an international airport in the north than not have one.

Caitlin Morrissey

I just wanted to pick up and follow up with something that you were talking about in terms of the ebbing and flowing of Manchester's role nationally and to ask you how the mindset of Manchester has changed when you think about this being a city that others sort of emulated themselves on, and you hear about places, Barcelona being called the Manchester of the Mediterranean or Philadelphia being the Manchester of the USA, and then almost in the 1980s this being a place that other cities certainly didn't want to become and to see the sort of devastation of deindustrialisation unfolding in the city. And in your reading of the long history of the city and your building of the people's history, how can we understand the mindset shifting and evolving through this incredible rise and incredible fall?

Brian Groom

Well, guess if you think of it like a person that, you know, perhaps gets a great job or sets up a fantastic business and is hailed all over the place, but maybe has an illness or some personal problem and hits harder times. But then finds a way to overcome that and regain some confidence. So self-confidence is very kind of tied up with that economic role and the economic prowess. It's fairly-- one exciting thing about writing its history is that it has a real story arc to it. You go from tiny place in the Romans to tiny place in the Middle Ages through to the shock city of the 1840s, the prime global city of the Industrial Revolution through that period of decline and then through a period of recovery. So just from the point of view of telling a story, it's really interesting. And people's self-confidence and how they think of themselves and the city they lived in is very much bound up with that.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you very much. I'm going to move on to the questions now, where we're talking about inventions and leaders and myths. It's a slightly different way of understanding the DNA of the city. But I'll begin with the question about inventions or discoveries that have come from Manchester. This can be really from any sort of sphere, wherever your instincts take you, I suppose.

Brian Groom

Yeah, I mean, there are so many, but I've picked out three possible ones to talk about. First one is John Dalton, who is a weaver's son from Cumberland, rather gruff and unpolished man in the early 19th Century. A Quaker who led a frugal bachelor life in Manchester. But he was also one of Britain's greatest scientists, best known for formulating a new atomic theory to explain chemical reactions on which much of modern chemistry and physics are based. So we owe him a huge debt. He also researched colour blindness, from which he suffered, and he was a noted meteorologist.

Second one I picked out was the New Zealand physicist, Ernest Rutherford, who achieved the first ever artificially induced nuclear reaction while he was Chair of Physics at the University of Manchester from 1907 to 1919. He fired particles from a radioactive source that disintegrated the nuclei of nitrogen atoms and that released subatomic particles that he afterwards named protons. Now, some people describe that as splitting the atom, though there's some debate about whether that applies to that or to some later experiments. But Manchester at that time became a world centre for nuclear physics.

And then a really fun one was after the Second World War, a team of researchers at Manchester University produced a computer called the Small Scale Experimental Machine nicknamed ‘Baby’ in 1948. It was anything like small, it was a huge set of metal boxes. But it was the first time a program had been stored in a computer's memory rather than on paper or by another mechanism. And that heralded the arrival of modern computing and, famously, Alan Turing worked on the second version of it. So those are just three of the many incredible inventions that have come from the city.

Caitlin Morrissey

And we want to ask you about Manchester's most influential leaders. But I'd like to also extend this question to ask you if there are any quiet leaders or leaders who don't get the recognition that you'd like to flag as well as being influential in shaping the city?

Brian Groom

Well, at the local government level, I've mentioned Andy Burnham, originally from Merseyside, former Labour cabinet minister. The City of Manchester was led for a long time by Sir Richard Leese and now by Bev Craig, also a Labour politician born and raised near Belfast, the city council's first female and first gay leader. And then in Salford you have a directly elected city mayor, Labour's Paul Dennett, a left-wing gay man from a working-class background in Warrington. I mean, it's a Labour-dominated city now, but as I mentioned, it has had a couple of significant periods of Conservative dominance in its past, notably in the late 19th Century and between the two World Wars in the 20th Century when the Conservatives won most of the parliamentary seats and dominated the city council. You tend not hear about it so much, but it's a much more mixed political background than is sometimes portrayed.

At national level now, you've got four MPs from Greater Manchester in the cabinet. Angela Rayner the Deputy Prime Minister is MP for Ashton-Under-Lyne. Jonathan Reynolds the Business and Trade Secretary is MP for Stalybridge and Hyde. Lisa Nandy the Culture Secretary is MP for Wigan. And Lucy Powell, Leader of the Commons, is the MP for Manchester Central.

And yeah, you mentioned the ones who are maybe underappreciated. Hard to say. Graham Stringer, I would say, the council Leader in the 1980s took it from the point where it was regarded as a loony left council among the group that got labelled by the newspapers then. It was a left-wing council. But after Labour lost the 1987 election, I think Stringer and his colleagues realised that to rebuild the city, they were going to need the private sector's support and support also from a Conservative government. And from that way, what people sometimes call the Manchester Model was built, which is working closely on projects with the private sector and with national ministers, where they'll agree to do so as well. A very non-partisan way of trying to grow employment and construction in the city. Now, as I said, it's not uncontroversial that method of doing things, it's still heavily debated, but I think Stringer's role is probably a little bit underappreciated in how that all came about.

Caitlin Morrissey

So moving on now to the question of myths, the myths of Manchester and the stories that are told about the city and the messages that they encapsulate. And a further question because I know that you've looked at the long history of Manchester. But were there myths about the city and its past that are no longer told, or has the character of those stories changed at all?

Brian Groom

I mentioned the phrase, ‘this is Manchester, we do things differently here’. It was misattributed, but there is a certain thing that it gets repeated all the time with a certain pride to it. So there is sense of we are Manchester, we are a bit special, we're a bit different from everyone else.

Perhaps I could pick out, in terms of what the kind of things that unite people, pick out L.S. Lowry from the early 20th Century, born in Old Trafford. He created the abiding visual impression of England's industrial north. He said, ‘my ambition was to put the industrial scene on the map because nobody had seriously done it’. And he was right, nobody had at that time. Not everybody loves Lowry, but he certainly is identified as creating an abiding image of north of England.

Probably in recent decades, the biggest uniting factor is probably the music scene, along with sport possibly. And music from the ‘60s, the beat era with the Hollies and Freddie and the Dreamers and Herman's Hermits, through the punk and post-punk years, Joy Division, New Order, The Smiths, or in soul, Simply Red. Then the club and dance scene of the 1980s and Manchester and the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays and the Inspiral Carpets. And then in the 1990s, you've got the Brit pop with Oasis and then, more recently, bands such as Elbow. It's not so much a myth, but you're talking songs and stories that pull together people in Manchester and its impression of itself. They probably lie in that music more than anything else, I think.

Greg Clark

We should just ask Brian if there's anything you want to say about stories that are told about Manchester that are not true or appear to you to be misconceptions? For example, most people have told us that actually it doesn't rain that much in Manchester, just to give you an example. But are there other things that you think are commonly held views about Manchester that are, in fact, not true or unhelpful in certain ways?

Brian Groom

I tried to think of one. I've not really thought of very many. I mean, you mentioned the rain thing. Yeah, that is true, I think. I did at one point research the average rainfall of cities across the UK. Manchester came up with kind of almost the-- in terms of cities in England, it's quite high rainfall. I think only Sheffield has higher rainfall, but it's way less rainy than Cardiff and Glasgow, that west coast effect. There it can be 50% or something more rainy, more rainfall than Manchester. So that's a little bit of a myth. To be honest, I'm struggling for other myths that I've come across.

Caitlin Morrissey

And so that sort of lends itself to thinking that this is a fairly well-understood city then, and perhaps that's partly to do with the music and the football and the exporting of these sorts of things from the city?

Brian Groom

I think so, yes. It's mostly famed for sport, music and popular culture, and has been for quite a long time. And I think that's pretty accurate, you know, really. I think those are—I think they do give it an image to other people, that a lot of cities around the world lack. So I think they've been hugely important in how it's seen elsewhere.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you very much, Brian. We’d also like to ask you about the shocks and traumas that Manchester has faced over its long history and what we can learn about the way that the city has responded to these events.

Brian Groom

Well, a couple things you could pick out, notably the Christmas Blitz of 1940 on the 22nd and 23rd of December. A ferocious two-night blitz during the Second World War when thousands of incendiary bombs and hundreds of high-explosive devices were unleashed on the city. About a thousand people were killed. My mother and her family only survived because they hid under a kitchen table. Lots of people have similar stories. I mean, as far as the city pooled together to an extent in the way cities tend to do in such difficult circumstances, there were lots of contemporary accounts about a spirited response by citizens, though, perhaps, they add an eye to the propaganda value as well.

The biggest long-term trauma was obviously the steep post-war economic decline, particularly in the ‘70s and the ‘80s. And it's rather difficult to experiment with modernist architecture, such as the notorious crescents at Hulme, which were described by Architects’ Journal as Europe's worst housing estate and the building of the Arndale Shopping Centre in the centre of Manchester, Europe's biggest indoor shopping centre built without any external window displays and these horrendous yellow tiles on the outside. Mancunians who do have a turn of humour, quickly derided it as Europe's biggest toilet block. But the efforts to turn itself around began in the 1980s with things like the two Olympic bids, leading to winning the Commonwealth Games in 2002.

And in 1996, there was the massive trauma of the IRA bombing, the biggest bomb detonated in Britain since the Second World War. Thankfully, four coded warnings allowed the police to seal off the city centre. And miraculously, nobody died, but 220 people were injured and there was extensive damage to the city's retail and commercial core. Fortunately, a scheme to rebuild the city centre proved successful, mainly linking St Anne's Square and the Cathedral through new pedestrian spaces.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thank you very much, Brian. Now we're coming to our penultimate question, which is what does the future hold for Manchester as you see it, and how will the DNA that we've been talking about today shape that future?

Brian Groom

Well, as I mentioned, I think the key question now is whether Manchester can keep its economic growth going and can it use its new prosperity to tackle its huge social problems, both within Manchester itself where huge parts of the north and east of the city remain poor, and whether it can spread it to, I mean, the effect has been spreading across some of the surrounding boroughs, notably Trafford and Salford, but it's been slower to reach other boroughs such as Oldham, Tameside and Rochdale. So a key question now is does a city region like Manchester, does it have the tools to tackle its own stark inequalities or does that require action at national level? And if it can achieve that, then it will make a global name for itself again. I think it's far from easy and success is certainly not assured in that, but if it sticks to those traditional qualities that I mentioned of openness to new ideas and new cultural influences, I think it will stand a chance, certainly stand its best chance of doing that.

Greg Clark

Brian, if I may, I've got a couple of follow-ups, and they're all be quite short ones, but in your mind and given the book that you've written and the review that you've done, how important was it to merge the universities to create, as it were, one super university that could host Nobel Prize winners and others? Some people have suggested that's very significant to us, other people have not mentioned it. Do you have a view?

Brian Groom

Well, the universities as a whole of which there are four in Greater Manchester have been hugely important to the city's development, both on the technical side through what became UMIST and as you say merged with the University of Manchester in 2002, creating a very substantial university and through Manchester Metropolitan University and the universities of Salford and Bolton. And you talk about myths about Manchester, people often say it has more students than any city in Europe. I've never found a survey or a stat to back that up, but it must be among the most student-heavy cities and regions in Europe. And I think particularly with the modern revival, I think that's been really important because you've had a lot of students who have stayed on to do more, to do research and to start work. And it's helped build the kind of professional and scientific based industries on which the modern economy is now built. So I think the universities have been an absolutely vital part of that.

One fun thing I found out in researching the book was when the Victoria University of Manchester was trying to get acknowledged as a university in the late 19th Century, there was one kind of lofty national journal said, you know, the people educated at Manchester will certainly be stupid or something like that.

Greg Clark

Brian, I've got one other question, if I may, which is just to ask you a little bit about perceptions from Manchester towards London and Birmingham and vice versa, whether you've encountered particular views. I mean, one of the points rather obviously is that Birmingham is numerically, I think, the second city in England, but Manchester has certainly seems to have stolen the prowess of being, you know, the city that is most talked about, if I may put it that way. Perceptions from Manchester towards London and Birmingham and vice versa, any reflections?

Brian Groom

Yeah, I mean, the kind of second city label is a slightly meaningless label anyway. It has no practical effects. Yeah, after you ask the question second what? Second most populous, second most prosperous, second whatever. And again, the definition problem is really difficult. If you just go on city council boundaries, then the borough of Manchester is an unusually small city authority to be at the core of a big city, and Birmingham is a massive one that dominates its surrounding region. But if you look at the size of their conurbations, they're roughly the same size at about 2.8 million. And you're right, I mean, Birmingham in particular has always kind of liked to describe itself as the second city. Manchester, in my experience, doesn't think about Birmingham very much or talk about it very much. But when I looked at that, the only kind of poll I could find about national attitudes to it was from the BBC from the early 2000s, two-thirds of people regarded Manchester as the second city. And it certainly had the momentum in the last 10 or 20 years. And these things do ebb and flow. I mean, I described how Manchester kind of was very much a political influence in the early 19th Century, but late in the mid-19th Century, that switched to Birmingham under Neville Chamberlain. And these things have come and gone over time. They're fairly similarly sized cities that have been very important at different points in the nation's history.

In relation to London, one notable thing in my lifetime is that Manchester and London have come to seem much closer together. I mean, they used to seem very different when Manchester was a textile manufacturing centre, in a sense, in a way more distinctive because of that. And London seemed a lot further away. You didn't go to it very often. There weren’t the frequent-- trains were not as frequent as they are now. But in some ways, and it's true of the whole of the north to some extent, the better transport has made Manchester feel a bit less distant from London. And as people often say, in the way the kind of service economy and the ideas economy has grown, they're more similar economies than they were 100 years ago. So there's quite a lot in common between Manchester and London now, I think.

Greg Clark

Brian, I think it's been hugely stimulating and fascinating for us, and you've been very generous with your time and with your good humour. So thank you so much.