Jessica Bowles

Caitlin Morrissey 

Jessica, what is The DNA of Manchester to you?

Jessica Bowles

The DNA of Manchester feels like it is absolutely a combination of that history and geography of the place and the things that have happened in the last couple of hundred years. Particularly its industrial rise, fall and then growth again. Manchester has a really clear geography. You will have heard that from other people. It's a monocentric city region with about three million people across the city region but one very clear centre. I think that's been fundamental to Manchester's renaissance in particular over this last 20 or 30 years. I think it's also had a history not just of a cotton city, which is well understood and well known and the heart of the Industrial Revolution, but before that as a mercantile city, as a city of traders not just manufacturers. That gave the city a quite distinct quality I think which has been part of its renaissance. I've talked quite a bit now about renaissance but I do think that journey of Manchester as it's grown and become a global megacity, it's decline through the second half of the 20th Century, and then it's rebirth and regrowth are all part of the same story.

Caitlin Morrissey 

And this sort of leads us into asking, how many Manchesters are there? Is there one? Are there many? That doesn't have to just be interpreted in relation to those boroughs.

Jessica Bowles

Manchester is a really diverse city and it's full of people who've made it their home. So, on one level it is a single place that's got a clear sense of itself as a big city as part of the north of England, as a city with an international outlook. But it is also a city of many different communities. There is thought to be something like 150 to 200 languages spoken in Manchester, so that gives you a sense of its diversity of culture and its communities.

I do also think it's got a real sense of itself. People from all walks of life and all parts of the world come here and have made it home and do get adopted by the city. I came here to work 15 years ago and I don't feel like an outsider to Manchester because I embraced Manchester, Manchester embraced me. I think that's a quite common experience for this city which has always been a place that people have come to. It was through the Industrial Revolution, people were coming to this city to make it home and to be able to live, to be able to build their lives and so, it's very essence as a growing city has been about coming to it and arriving here.

Caitlin Morrissey 

And when you describe that essence, or that feeling of being part of the city, what sort of makes Manchester, Manchester from that point of view? Is there a way to sort of boil it down from your perspective?

Jessica Bowles

It sounds very trite to say but it is a really warm and friendly city. It's somewhere where people acknowledge each other on the street, where people do talk to each other, where there is a willingness to engage on a personal and human level, and I think that's very much part of the city. But it's also a city that's got a bit of an edge. So, we are a radical city that's not just accepted its fate but has used whatever it has at its disposal to try and do better. Through the ‘80s and ‘90s, music was being generated here, creative music that travelled the world. It's got extraordinary football clubs. Of course all of those things are true, but those things can also be traced back in its roots; that political radicalism with the development of the Suffragette Movement and the first cooperatives. New ways of working and being workers was at the heart of that essence of the city, I think. So, it's a place that just doesn't accept its fate.

Caitlin Morrissey 

That's a really great way of putting it. Just while we're still sort of talking about the history of the city, can we also talk a little bit about how the geography of the city has shaped it, and perhaps the location and the part of England that it's in geographically has shaped the city that it has become, even through some of what you mentioned, with the mercantile tradition and then the industrial tradition, and then ever since. Are there any sort of threads you see there in terms of the geography and the place and the environment and the DNA of the city?

Jessica Bowles

The geography is interesting. It has a very clear centre to it with towns around the edge which kind of played to this sense of being a trading location with things that were coming in from the outside of it to be traded there. What's interesting is that it could become the centre of the cotton industry and yet it's not on the sea. It doesn't have a seaport but it connected itself to the sea because we're actually not very far from the sea. So it was able to overcome some of its geographical disadvantages. I think that connectedness between the other northern cities – the fact it's not very far from Liverpool, it's relatively close to Leeds – gives this sort of locational advantage of being in the centre of big and growing populations.

The other thing that I heard was that its climate was very helpful for the cotton industry because it is notoriously wet and damp. I often feel like there's a sort of particular Manchester air, which is sort of Manchester wet air, and it was very good for the cotton fibres and making them easier to spin and work with. So apparently this was a particular geographical advantage during its cotton trade. Although I must say that today, as I look out of the window, it is a beautiful sunny day here in Manchester and so I wouldn’t want people around the world, your listeners, to think that it is always wet here. That would be a terrible stereotype.

Caitlin Morrissey 

We won't be involved in perpetuating that myth on a day like today. And then I guess building on from that, you mentioned this sort of connectivity between Manchester and Liverpool, the port city, and over overcoming some of its barriers to be connected to other places, and to be part of this growing northern region in the UK and in England. And that sort of brings us on to some of the questions that we have about the physical and infrastructural features of the city, and the role that those have played in the city that it has become. How is the DNA is expressed through some of these?

Jessica Bowles

The city that we've got today has actually really pretty good infrastructure to help people move around the city region and it worked very hard to get that. The canals existed as part of the Industrial Revolution and the railways did. But the city took really conscious decisions about creating a metro tram system through the ‘80s and ‘90s to create connectivity into the centre of the city and this central point that is Manchester, within Greater Manchester. That was pretty far-sighted, you know, cities were struggling to think about these connections and to look beyond the car at that point. Manchester recognised the need to be able to move this very large population around the whole city region to truly be able to access what was only ever going to happen in the very centre of the conurbation because of the high-quality jobs we were looking to bring back into the city. So, it has got a very good tram network. Clearly, that could be expanded further and there are plans to do that, but it does work and it does provide a constancy and a certainty about the fact that that infrastructure is going to continue to exist. So, if you make your life in a part of the city and it requires you to be able to move around the city, you know that you're going to be able to do that. That's been a very important part of Manchester's journey over the last 20 years. I used to work in the Department for Transport before I came to Manchester and it was notable how much more advanced Manchester was in its thinking about how it used transport to drive economic growth and to connect the city region together.

I think the other thing that Manchester has, which we kind of take for granted, is an absolutely amazing airport. An international airport that's arguably as connected as any of the London and the south-east airports and possibly more in some circumstances. It's really the airport for the north. And that is sat in local authority ownership as a kind of asset to the city region. Throughout times when airports were being privatised there were all sorts of different ownership models and Manchester held its airport and used that actually very successfully to create dividends for the local authorities. It also enabled the local authorities and the leadership of the city region to think about how it wanted to use its airport to drive growth and to grow the economy that we've got here. I think that's been a very important and possibly underexplored story.

Ben Houchen, the Mayor of the north-east, brought back Tees Valley airport possibly acing Manchester a long time down the line. But, you know, that sort of value of the infrastructure of places is a critical part of Manchester’s story. I don't know the detail of all the stories, but if you go back through time, you know, the Manchester Corporation had an awful lot of infrastructure that it used to drive and to shape the initial growth of Manchester through the 19th Century. It had hydraulic power stations that were raising the theatre curtain at the Palace Theatre, and it had pieces of civic infrastructure that helped to create a civilised city.

Greg Clark 

One of the things that seems to distinguish Manchester from the cohort of British cities that it does seem to have retained this power for asset accumulation and for venturing with public assets. And you've mentioned Manchester Airport Group, you've mentioned the Manchester Corporation. We could also speak to the joint ventures with the Abu Dhabi Investment Fund. We could think about the way that Manchester has remained a very strong owner of cultural facilities within the city. There's something about Manchester that seems to have been bypassed by the British local government reforms of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, that basically took these kinds of powers and assets largely away from cities. Any reason why Manchester would have been particularly, as it were, immune to that particularly British disease, or did it just fight back more strongly than the other cities?

Jessica Bowles

It's an absolutely fascinating question, isn't it? I'm not sure I know the answer to this but my hunch is that you had some really strong leaders who at a point where, for instance, the metropolitan counties were being disbanded in the early ‘80s said, ‘Well, let's keep collaborating. Let's keep our joint capability to do things together and act together and let's just see.’ That sort of relatively gentle approach to, ‘Well, let's keep working together. Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water. Let's not do exactly what government is telling us to do’ was hugely important in creating foundations that could continue to be built on. And I'm thinking about as the counties were abolished, and the ten districts were created without any formalised infrastructure, governance infrastructure between them, they maintained the AGMA (Association of Greater Manchester Authorities) which could act together and could provide that view across an economic geography. Greater Manchester was clearly a single economic geography. Even at that point, people could see it. So I think that was partly to do with the leadership. I guess, actually, very largely to do with the individuals that you have there and probably that they could point to things that had been done in the past that weren't damaging but were at least beneficial.

They also pretty early on in that ‘80s and ‘90s period, were starting to do some quite unusual things. So Manchester bid for the Olympics twice and at the point where it did that I don't think anyone could have imagined the Olympics coming to desolate, dark, de-industrialised Manchester. It was sort of a very bold and eye-catching thing to do and something that got the response that ‘You must be mad!’ However, the partners coming together to work on that gave a potential for ‘We can, we have got our we can work together. We can do bold, ambitious things.’ And of course, Manchester hosted the Commonwealth Games in 2002 off the back of those. The failure of the Olympic bid created the infrastructure in East Manchester around what's now the Manchester City football stadium which has led to the partnership with Abu Dhabi. So, there's a sort of thread all the way through of ambition, not being constrained by what you're told you can do or what you deserve, and just having a go. And I think that has characterised Manchester’s success over this period.

You talked a little bit about some of those local government services, I suppose, which were lost in many places. And it's notable, when I think about the first Devolution Agreement that I worked on, that one of the key things in there that we sort of wrote into the Devolution Agreement was that we wanted to take that control of the buses, and we have a franchise routine for the bus services in Greater Manchester. Bus services have kind of been lost from almost every local authority, and we have now done that, that’s now back under local control and will have a transformational impact on the public transport network that we've got here. But at the time, government was totally against this. I've worked in a department that had the answer was no if you wanted to talk about new models for bus services, but Manchester wasn't constrained by that. You know, let's have a go and say that’s what we want.

Greg Clark 

What I really like about what you're saying, Jessica, is that it sounds like there's a wonderful sort of combustible combination here between sort of municipal mercantilism and non-conformism. And it’s a rather powerful keg, isn't it, when it works together.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Well, it's really fascinating. When you're talking about the geography of the city region and the infrastructure and this notion of connecting the city region. I think I've also heard you before describe it as a knitting together, and I think probably what's important for the listeners is this idea that Manchester is a city region of ten quite individual centres. Would you be able to talk a little bit about the role of some of the metropolitan infrastructure – and now the buses coming back under public control – in stitching together this monocentric city region of ten different places? What is the role of the infrastructure in shaping Greater Manchester’s geography?

Jessica Bowles

When I first came to Manchester, it had just undertaken the Manchester Independent Economic Review which was the ten districts of Greater Manchester agreed that they should look from the outside at Greater Manchester and what was going well, what was not going well, how they could build their economic future and create more success that would benefit the whole city region. That was a really important bit of work for the city region because it allowed the leaders and the chief executives of those ten districts to come together for the greater good of the whole place, recognising that they weren't going to get equal shares of everything. That each place of the ten was going to be saying that they all had their own part to play, and that they could come together and recognise that the city centre of Manchester was a really important driver of the economy. That was quite a hard thing to swallow if you're in Wigan or Oldham or Salford or Stockport. But actually, creating a narrative and an evidence base which showed you that you needed to be able to invest in the centre and also connect the outlying boroughs more closely to that centre was important.

Now, further iterations of that needs to happen and you can argue about whether that's worked as well as it could have done. But actually, that fundamental coming together around an evidence base and your ability to see the future through the lens of the ten, rather than each individual district, was really important. And part of why that was successful – and I saw it firsthand when I came to Manchester – was that the leaders and the chief executives of the ten places were meeting every single week, sometimes more than once a week, for very long periods of time. And it wasn't an add-on to their day job, acting collaboratively. It was their day job. And chief executives spending a day a week on working together across Greater Manchester was quite an extraordinary thing. I don't think you would find that anywhere else. It wasn't optional and I think that that way of working and that way of doing business was really what allowed Manchester to move ahead.

Caitlin Morrissey

I think it's a really important point to make, to give that sort of context to this culture of collaboration between the ten boroughs as a collective rather than ten individual parts, especially because I think people are very familiar with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, and may not realise that there's this deep history of collaborating that is fundamental to the way that Greater Manchester works and operates. So thank you for sort of bringing that into the conversation.

Greg Clark 

It sounds to me like one of the things that's very clear in Manchester, in the sense, is that Manchester has a birthright to be a big city. And a lot of the local government reforms, and in particular, the abolition of the metropolitan counties was about trying to make Manchester a small city. And actually, there was a desire to revolt against this and that collaborative working that you described. Jessica, it seems to me that you're almost saying that this is a group of people in pursuit of their birthright, trying to garner it for the future, knowing that eventually the times would change and there would be an opportunity to reconstitute ‘The Big Manchester’ rather than being forced always to work with ‘The Small Manchester’.

Jessica Bowles

This goes back a bit to the history of geography. So the borough of Manchester, as deindustrialisation happened, emptied. Literally emptied. So East Manchester had lost a huge proportion of its population. Tens of thousands of people left. Almost nobody in East Manchester went to university, at a point where people were actually going to university from sort of a range of backgrounds. And so, it was physically a big city that was empty. And so, I think that's possibly right if you were here on the ground, you could hear it and you could feel it. I think it's something like 300 jobs a day were being lost from manufacturing for a period year upon year in the middle of that, in the ‘60s and ‘70s. That sense of emptying and depletion would have been felt very keenly if you were here. And so, I think this sense of being able to put back and to recreate was going to be there. Because the city didn't shrink, it just had fewer people in it and less going on and less money and less opportunities. So I think there’s something in that, Greg.

Greg Clark 

I think we must ask about the relationships with three other cities that all begin with L. So what is the dynamic between Manchester and Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds, Manchester and London?

Jessica Bowles

Well, I think this is very interesting because Manchester, very early in its renaissance and rebuilding, started looking internationally again. It wasn't trying to be better than the Leeds or Liverpool, or Birmingham, say, it just looked beyond that. In the Town Hall, in the Great Hall, if you look up at the ceiling, the ceiling is made up of the Coats of Arms of the cities and towns that Manchester traded with at its heyday. The world was its playground, the connections it had were truly global. And I think that Manchester did a really smart thing by saying, ‘Let's look at the best of the world. How do cities grow, rebuild, reinvent themselves?’ And it didn't try to have a zero-sum game with its neighbouring cities or even within the UK, but it looked beyond that to what was happening in New York, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Berlin. What else could it see and learn and feel?

One of the most important moves, I think, was that it saw the need to repopulate the city centre and to repopulate the city. I talked a bit about East Manchester emptying out in that sort of period of post-industrial decline, but actually the city centre was empty too. In the early ‘90s, it had 400 people living in the city centre, most of whom were caretakers or looking after buildings that were there. And today, I don't know, it's 60-70,000 people and growing and that repopulation of the heart of city just was such an important move. That was partly driven by what we were seeing in other cities, what was happening in New York, of reusing warehouse holdings, of creating culturally rich parts to the city.

So I think the answer is quite tricky because it does have a relationship and Manchester has a better relationship now, I think, with its neighbouring cities than it probably ever has done. There's obviously rivalries over football, mainly football. But I think that there's a respect between those cities and there's a learning that's happening between the leaders of those cities now that I don't think we would have seen 20 years ago and probably not 30 or 40. And I think that's been actually helpful for all of the cities, recognising that if you can connect them more closely you've got a stronger and richer economy for people to come and live and work in this part of the world.

I think that the other part of your question is its relationship to London. I’ve never heard an argument made in this city that London shouldn't be the very best it can be, and that having a global city like Manchester on your doorstep, which in effect it is, is only beneficial to it and that that is a really important part of Manchester's opportunity. That's not that we have the back offices and London does the high-end work. That's not kind of how we see it working. But actually, having the opportunity of a global city so close is really valuable.

I do think that Manchester is of a scale though that you can create devolved structures, you can get your arms around what needs to be done, you can collaborate partnerships in a way that is just much harder in London. I don't think I ever felt such a networked experience when I was living and working in London as I have in Manchester. So I think there was something quite special about this area, and particularly when we start looking as well at very difficult cities that are neighbouring us.

Caitlin Morrissey 

You’ve mentioned that Manchester is a renaissance city. What is it that enabled the city to make a comeback? It doesn't just play with the hand it's been dealt. It moves, it looks forward, it's bold, it's ambitious. It does things that the rest of the country is seemingly finds more difficult to do. What is it about this city that is able to produce a renaissance like it has, given where it was?

Jessica Bowles

I think it recognised that things had got so bad, it needed to look really hard at what it actually still had, to look at its opportunities, the universities that it had, the businesses that were here, the civic leadership and kind of figure out, what do we build this new economy on? What is it that we can do? Are we going to be just a financial and professional services city – and we had started building those sectors through the ‘80s and ‘90s – or is there more? What can we do if we unlock the brilliance of our universities and really draw them into the city, rather than seeing them as very special things that sat sort of perched on the surface of the city, but really drawing it into the thinking? That shift and that ability to start using the science innovation, the history of industrialising, of using the innovation that came out of the universities in your businesses and industry, as it had done from the birth of the universities, was really brought back to the fore. And I think that none of this happened quickly, but that was a really important element of it. As was this sense of, well, you've got to have spaces that people want to live in if you want to expect people to both come back and also stay and make their lives there and contribute to the future of the city. So creating that environment that had houses, that had what people wanted to live in, that had a connectedness, that a kind of modern transport system, that had a sense of being a modern city. That was really important.

Then I think the other really important thing that Manchester did was recognise the value of culture. And you can have jobs and houses. You can create those. But actually, if you don't have an interesting city to live in, people will go somewhere else. They'll go somewhere that is interesting. So, one of the very first bits of development in this new city was the creation of the Bridgewater Hall. I mean, a world-class concert hall in the centre of Manchester which is home to The Hallé and brings brilliant music talent to the city. But actually, that's quite a bold thing to say. This is so important to us at the same time as creating a conference centre and a place where people would be in the city. So I think that's pretty bold to say these things are important to us, and they should be important to you, and then sort of no shame in inviting people into Manchester, ‘Come here and have your conferences, come here and see the best music, come here and experience what it's like the university here. Come and live here.’ And if I look back at that now, I think it's quite amazing. You’re not saying 'We were a bit dirty and failed,' but actually to say that this is somewhere that you should come and not feel ashamed about that sort of past.

Greg Clark

I think that you’ve identified the culture and an attractive quality of life and an opportunity to have a cultural life in a big city where there's a diversity of choices. That, in a sense, part of Manchester's offer is that rich texture of life's opportunities. That's one thing. The second thing is this kind of reaching back to a very long history of success. You know, Manchester, yes it's a turnaround city, but it's a turnaround city based on several hundred years of being a really important city. So there's a kind of a depth of psychological confidence, by the sound of it, that has been a reservoir of resource for the whole process.

And then the other thing is that Manchester has used the opportunity of both European integration and of globalisation to kind of develop a pitch for itself as an international city with an international perspective. And of course, the culture, the music and the sport really underpinned that because they were part of the Manchester brand that was already global and international, and therefore created, as it were, a vehicle through which Manchester's aspirations around investment, business, talent, knowledge, technology, innovation, it had a kind of platform to work with. So it seems to me that's part of what you're saying, Jessica.

Caitlin Morrissey

So I suppose just building on from there then. And just stick to focusing a little bit on that point about culture, I think we've spoken about sport in the city and what the large teams mean for Manchester.

Jessica Bowles

I mean, they are riven through the city. I confess, I was really astonished when I came to Manchester and every meeting started with a conversation about football. I was literally gobsmacked. And that's not that I hadn't worked with people who were interested in football. On one level, you could see it as creating different tribes but it was almost a cohering thing that this is what is important to the city. I think it's an extraordinary thing and I've come to appreciate it on a personal level more than I expected to. And I've seen how deep it goes and how threaded through communities it is. And it is, of course, the thing that if you go around the world and you say you come from Manchester, it's one of the things that people know about Manchester is its extraordinary football teams. Whether you share the language or not, it’s a way of locating this city.

Caitlin Morrissey 

So true. I live near the Man City stadium, and anytime there's a game on, it's like the soundtrack of the day is whatever the Man City chants are. I know the game's on without even knowing it's on, if you know what I mean. I think a final question to end on, I suppose one is, since you've been in Manchester, having come from Harlow and working in London, what are some of the common misconceptions that you encounter about Manchester? Obviously, one of the biggest myths, it's slightly true as well, is about the city's rain. But what's some of the common misconceptions that you encounter in your work or your kind of spheres?

Jessica Bowles

I think there's still a sense of snobbishness that Manchester is a bit dirty, dark, culturally lacking, grimy and that you couldn't have a career here. There's still a sort of bit of a sense of that amongst people of my age and I'm not a recent graduate. I think there's a changing sense amongst younger people and later generations who see these cities as brilliant places to live because that's what they've experienced. We have very high graduate retention now in Manchester. I think it's over 50% of graduates staying in the city doing really good jobs and being able to build a career here. So, I think there's still a lot of stereotypes about the north in general, about its lack of outlook and its sort of sense of backwardness, which I don't think is reflected in the place that we have.

Caitlin Morrissey 

And then I suppose the final question is, in this conversation, is there anything else that you would have wanted to say that you haven't had a chance to already? Perhaps, if we'd have asked a different question about The DNA of Manchester?

Jessica Bowles

There's two things I would say. One is about the pieces of infrastructure in the city. The Town Hall, Manchester Town Hall, is a very important part of that in my mind because it's such a symbol of Manchester's part in the world. And I've talked about the ceiling in the Great Hall and there was a competition run to design it and it was designed by Alfred Woodhouse, so a very famous architect. But I found this little quote which was from the Manchester Corporation who declared that when they were starting the competition for the Town Hall that they wanted a building that was ‘Equal, if not superior, to any similar building in the country at any cost which may be reasonably afforded’. So they set their level of ambition, ‘Let's not do something totally ridiculous, but let's be ambitious about it.’ I think it's very interesting and it's a very innovative building as well in the way that it was designed and the way it was intended to be used. So I think that was another part of the architecture.

I think the thing we haven't talked about is the way that it in the very early stages of regeneration of the city it learned how to do regeneration and arguably taught a lot of cities in the UK what regeneration could look like and how to do it. So it was at a point where, again, it took a very bold move in working a staunchly Labour city, with a Conservative government, with Michael Heseltine, Lord Heseltine, to begin that regeneration of Hulme through the City Challenge process. And it’s used that and it's refined that thinking and it was very important part of that collaboration, partnership between leaders and businesses in the city to really figure out what regeneration meant for a city like this.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Yeah, I guess that’s the challenge when there's no precedent to follow. It's a really great point to end on. And just to say thank you so much for joining us again. Our first double contributor to The DNA Cities podcast! That's been such a terrific and wide-ranging conversation, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.

Jessica Bowles

Thank you for having me.