Mike Emmerich

Caitlin Morrissey

So Mike, what is the DNA of Manchester to you?

Mike Emmerich

The DNA of Manchester is basically the DNA of any midwestern American city except that we happen to be on the northwest frontier of Europe. It was a Roman city and therefore you can argue there’s some Roman DNA in there, and it was a meaningful Tudor town but really not on the radar screen anywhere until stuff starts to happen in the mid-18th Century. Then, it becomes a gold rush city in all but name where hoards of people came because there was capital investing in productive things and they came for work, exactly the way it’s happened in American cities. So, I think The DNA of Manchester is in some peculiar way rather American. It’s a frontier city built by its people.

Caitlin Morrissey

And what sort of other qualities or characteristics has the city developed over this long history?

Mike Emmerich

Well, I think everything flows from that fact. It’s why I often start with that American comparison which is in many ways absurd because here we are somewhere near the middle of England. But you have to remember that this place had no parliamentary representation; its local government was rudimentary at best until it was probably heading towards its peak of population. For all those reasons, I think it developed its own kind of quite unique – everywhere is unique – but it developed its own unique and quite different set of characteristics to any of the other cities around us, certainly than any of the other established cities. I think its politics were different. It was nonconformist. It was liberal. It was very, very driven by the private sector industry for good and for ill, all of which intensify into its maturity and then affect its subsequent decline.

Greg Clark

Why was it, Mike, that Manchester was nonconformist and liberal when it was a business city in the way you’ve described? Where does that strand come from?

Mike Emmerich

I think there is clearly a sense that a lot of the people, not just workers, but influential people of the late 18th and early-to-mid 19th Century were nonconformists. They just were. Is it a historical fact? Yes. Is it a historical accident? Yes. I don’t know if there’s any particular reason for that. But there’s quite a lot I’ve read over the years that suggests that by going to the Methodist or Unitarian Chapel, or whatever it was, that formed its own alternative, distinct ecosystem to the established Church of England. Catholicism comes a little later on in the story after the legislation which allowed Catholics to practice freely again. But quite a lot of the literature is clear that it was the chapel and the need to create institutions for people who couldn’t go to university, for example, that became a central strand of the DNA. And that’s not unique to Manchester, but I think it is absolutely core to Manchester. And as Manchester grew more than other places which it did earlier, that became a central part of its makeup.

Caitlin Morrissey 

How many Manchesters are there, and is there one? And we’re talking about Greater Manchester here, of course, as well. Are there ways of understanding differences in the city, or other ways of understanding the tapestry that sort of unites and holds everything together?

Mike Emmerich 

When I think of Manchester I don’t think about the ludicrous 1974 boundaries because they don’t make any sense. It’s funny, I always remember when I was doing work on the expansion of the Metrolink system and there was one of the leaders who shall remain nameless who said to me, ‘We don’t want to be a commuter town.’ I got out the 1890-whatever-it-was tram map, and said, ‘Sorry to break it to you, but you’ve always been a town that’s part of this city ecosystem. This isn’t new. This is just recreating something that we lost when we ripped the trams up.’ So firstly, there’s no point in thinking about the warehouses and the grandeur of the high Venetian Gothic buildings of the city without thinking about the mills of Bolton, Bury, Oldham and Rochdale because they are the same place. They’re like different rooms in a house. They might have different functions but they’re all part of the same home. And, yes, that gives some very different characteristics and I’m sure we’ll come on to talk about what the impact of that is on the relative success or otherwise of those individual places, but they’re all the same place and that does give rise to different Manchesters just like you’d have a different vibe in your living room to your bedroom. It has different functions and it has different things in it. That leads to people being there for different reasons.

I think it has meant that Manchester has proved itself much more adaptable than most other industrial cities, certainly in Britain, through relative decline of the very late 19th and early 20th Century and the absolute decline of the mid-20th Century onwards. It has done so because of the functions that it happened to have. It did develop higher education. It does have better transport links. It does have the benefits of density and agglomeration and above all a massive service sector. So there have always been different Manchesters even within this same home with its different rooms.

Are there more different Manchester’s now? I don’t know. I mean we had our own Little Italy. We had our own Little Ireland. There was always concentrations of Jews up at Cheetham Hill Road to the north. Then the Windrush community comes, and then Asian communities in the mills, and then more migrant movements afterwards. I think the communities change. Their locations change a bit, though not that much, I think. The process of recycling people out of the points of arrival into the suburban areas of the city carries on. There are definitely new ones. I mean, there’s obviously the advent of the Gay Village in the 1970s I believe but certainly 1980s onwards creates another Manchester. The advent of a mass student city creates another Manchester. I think all of these are just the Mancunian variants of something that every great, liberal, open city has really.

Caitlin Morrissey 

You’ve teed up our next question quite well, which is, why do people come to Manchester? So what is the promise of Manchester, or the opportunity of Manchester to people who come to it to live here as you see it?

Mike Emmerich 

I don’t think there’s a single or easy answer to that. It’s funny, I do Speakers for Schools, the thing that Robert Peston set up and I do a talk where I say, ‘Will you please stand up if you were born here’ and about 20% of the kids in the school stand up. Then, ‘Please stand up if one of your parents wasn’t born here.’ Another 20% stand up. And, ‘Please stand up if one of your grandparents wasn’t born here’ and before you know it, you’ve got two-thirds, three-quarters of the classroom stood up. So we’re all migrants then, aren’t we? You know, my dad was a German prisoner of war.

I think in the end, the easiest way to describe it is what we now call agglomeration. It’s that once you’ve got a big city, if that city isn’t in free fall because someone’s bombed it or because it’s been swallowed up by the ocean or something, then it becomes its own centre of gravity. The different people who were standing up as I asked those questions were standing up because, like me, a parent came here because of war, like many others because their parents came to work in the mills or the factories, or because they were stationed at Ringway Airport during the war because they came to university here. I think it’s our old friend agglomeration on a long-term basis.

Caitlin Morrissey 

So we’d like to ask you, Mike, about the sort of the geography of Manchester and how different parts of its physical and natural environment have shaped the city and characterised the city over time, or have become prominent sort of influences in the evolution of its DNA.

Mike Emmerich 

There is what I now understand to be a myth which is that it’s all about the rain. There is a really good set of disputes in the literature about whether it really is the presence of water flowing freely down hills that creates the Manchester we know. I mean there’s no doubt about it. It was a fact because the original cotton mills were water-powered. But then we also happen to have coal very nearby, in fact, pretty much in the centre of Manchester there were collieries to the east of the city centre. There is a standard geographer’s analysis that says that it’s all about factors of production. Whilst it is impossible to deny that they facilitated the process of industrialisation, it would have been nothing had the early entrepreneurs not come here. Some of the earliest mill developments happened in Derbyshire but they only really came to fruition around here because there was investment available here and there were other people who were doing interesting work here. There was early modern science here and they created what other geographers would call a milieu that’s just right for that sort of knowledge and wealth creation. I think the case study of that is Arkwright who started in Derbyshire but really made his future happen in Greater Manchester. So, the weather and resource availability are fundamentally important.

The fact that Manchester is flat, relatively flat, helps. It makes building relatively easy. It helps when we come to the airport later. It’s not a bad metaphor for the city, really. You know, we’re nowhere near the sea and yet we’re dependent on cotton imports during the 19th Century, and so to avoid cotton taxes from Liverpool, the city leaders decided to build a canal 30 miles to the sea, so we overcame that. And bizarrely, for a city where it doesn’t rain a lot, it  just rains quite often, it’s actually short of surface water, so they then built pipes up to the Lake District. So, I think there’s also an argument that says that some of Manchester success is down to it innovating and building its way out of its physical problems.

I don’t know if it’s about the geography but one thing that you always have to say about Manchester is that the city we know benefits from somehow having not done what so many of the other industrial towns did which was to create these small, poly-nucleated patterns of development. There’s something about Manchester’s geography must have facilitated it, though I’ve never actually researched this. The fact is that we have the mill towns surrounding the area but at the heart of it is this Cottonopolis, probably starting in Salford if you believe the story of the Radcliffe family starting in Salford, bringing over the Flemish weavers but then hopping over the River Irwell to Manchester, and creating the centre of Manchester. This means Manchester unlike just about any other city in the UK, certainly in England outside of London, is a monocentric city in which no one genuinely argues about where the centre is. And, you know, I bore about this. But for those of us who remember the 1974 metropolitan counties – and I was discussing this last week with Michael Heseltine, actually – you have Cleveland covering what we now would call Middlesbrough. You have Tyne and Wear covering Newcastle and Sunderland. You have Merseyside covering Liverpool, Avon covering Bristol, the West Midlands covering Birmingham and Coventry, South and West Yorkshire, and Greater Manchester. The only one of the Met counties that have the name of the city is Manchester and that’s for a reason. Whether that’s do with geography or something else, I think is another question. It’s a good PhD in that, actually.

Greg Clark

Mike, I think there must be some very interesting combination of the geographical factors you’ve already mentioned, but also the sector specialisation and the agglomeration effects of those sectors, particularly what you were saying about the service sector, and, as it were, the commercialisation process as well that, if you like, so many of the things were drawn into the city the same time. But really interesting question.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Mike, you also started to talk about canals and water infrastructure. And one of our questions is also to talk about the sort of built environment, the infrastructure, the architecture of the city, and also where we see the DNA of the city through some of its built features. And to ask if there’s anything else that you wanted to say about those?

Mike Emmerich 

Well, let’s start with transport and then go on to the other aspects of the built environment. You can see both the advantages and the obvious disadvantages of such a nakedly commercial, private-led form of development. The railways affect every city like that. That’s why in London, Thameslink is such a miracle because it actually cuts through the heart of the city, getting over the fact that the private railway companies in the 19th Century stopped way short of the centre, not quite short as Old Oak Common but certainly not in the absolute centre. That’s the same for Manchester with its various railway stations and building on the sort of mishmash canal infrastructure that preceded it.

On the whole though, I think compared to other cities the legacy is a really rather good one. It’s one that, you know, we’re still using. It’s pretty good. The Metrolink system goes over 19th Century viaducts throughout most of the city where there is one. I think the commercial centre, if you look at the real estate the city is much more complicated and nuanced. Clearly, some of the very worst slums ever built in this country were built in Manchester. There’s a whole book on Angel Meadow where the Co-Op now is which makes you wince it whenever you read it. Little Ireland as it was and Little Italy and Ancoats and all the other areas where newly arriving migrants were stuffed hugger-mugger around the community facilities, most of which have now been dropped and for a very good reason. I’m not sure very often if what’s replaced it has been quite as good as it should have been either in a more statist-era, but there was certainly plenty to go at that needed to be taken down.

The thing that’s more interesting to me is the buildings that we still see in the city centre and perhaps many of those that we don’t see and here, I think we’re back to America. I started this interview by saying that I thought Manchester had a lot of the DNA of an essentially American city and an essentially American way of thinking. And I think you can see that really clearly in the way we’ve treated the city centre. As somebody who loves Georgian architecture, you know, I do sometimes walk up the one Georgian street there is in the centre of Manchester and lament what we must have lost over the years and what Liverpool and Bath and London and even Sheffield have still got which we just don’t because the Manchester approach is if it ain’t big enough, drop it. And that fight is there right up to this day in every development with a prejudice being that if it ain’t big enough, get rid of it and put something there, which means that Manchester has lost its Tudor and its Georgian centre and much of its early Victorian centre. Thank God that we realised at some point that heritage buildings were a part of what for want of a better term we still call the patrimony.

I was talking to Joe Berridge the other day and how after the bomb he planned and the city bought the idea of driving a new street so that you could virtually see the early 18th Century St Ann’s Church from the Collegiate Church that’s now the cathedral. In a way that I think that celebrates the fact that in this very modernist future facing city, there are still some really very wonderful buildings that need to be part of how we view it. Of course, at the heart of all that is the fact that the city was thrown up very, very quickly with very high property values, meaning that built into it from the start, and I’m sure has been part of the success of the place is high capital values relative to other places because we always built higher, denser than other cities. That’s something that I think is absolutely shot through how we view the city today, up to and including, you know, what Gary Neville is doing with St Michael’s and the tower blocks a bit further down Deansgate.

Greg Clark

I’m getting the sense listening to you Mike of a gold rush city, but with a desire, with a recognition that it wasn’t a precious commodity like gold that was going to run out, but there was some other sort of special capacity or power or magnetism in the city, that actually what you needed to do once you were here, as part of the rush, was to build a piece of it that could somehow generate value for the long term. Am I hearing you correctly?

Mike Emmerich 

You are with a huge ‘but’ at the end of it. So if you look at what was the Reform Club at the top of King Street. It’s now a restaurant. I say this as someone who’s a part-time resident of Venice, that building will grace the Grand Canal. It is an extraordinary piece of Venetian Gothic architecture. If you look at the art gallery and the Portico Library, they are earlier, very much influenced by Greek and Roman temples and older antiquity. I know they’ve got the town hall, the Waterhouse Town Hall, like a lot of the other town halls around the industrial cities are symbols of exactly what you described. But you can also find pictures of Mosley Street where the Portico Library is and the art gallery, full of buildings like that. I mean at one stage it was described as one of the most beautiful roads in Europe. Well, it’s bloody not one of the most beautiful roads in Europe now, it’s an absolute disaster area built with every kind of modernist awfulness you can imagine. We can’t blame the Luftwaffe because they didn’t actually take out much of it. The planners did quite a lot of it. I think one of the reasons for that, and London had its fair share of brutal post-war development too, as in all cities, and some of it courtesy of bombing but not a lot of it.

When I did my book a few years ago I read a lot around this and I proved to my own satisfaction that Manchester’s initial reformist, strong, distinctive mentality of its nonconformism, of its groundedness in the place, of the commitment to the future that you described Greg, that quickly evaporated because their children weren’t as interested as they were and too many of them made their money and left. If Manchester had created an elite who had become a multi-generational elite, the way many of the greatest cities have done, for all the ills that that would have brought with it because elites are problematic as well as advantageous, I think we would have stewarded the patrimony and indeed the economy and indeed the government and the society rather better than we did. You can see it because the Anti-Corn Law League moves to London, the Manchester Guardian moves to London. Even Richard Cobden finds himself back in the south where he came from and dying down there. And, you know, some of the industrialists built their piles in Didsbury and Chorlton but a lot of them went beyond that. This is the sort of Asa Briggs view of the decline of British entrepreneurialism was in the end people who make money ate the squirearchy who they, in some sense, replaced.

Greg Clark

I think there’s a big insight there, Mike. Thank you very much. Thank God you moved back to Manchester after your period in Whitehall.

Mike Emmerich

Well, if only I had the money to buy a big stately home. But I don’t, I never will.

Greg Clark

Very, very helpful.

Caitlin Morrissey

I think that is a huge insight into what’s perhaps been lost. And do you find it now then that Manchester’s DNA is a little hard to read when so much of that heritage has been, through its built environment, has been knocked down and replaced?

Mike Emmerich

Yes and no. I think it is hard to read. I always remember walking down Mosley Street with an academic from Rome who looked at me down his glasses and said, ‘Manchester’s not a classical city, is it?’ I said, ‘No, Luigi, it’s not.’ I remember being in a car with Howard Bernstein and Richard Leese going to Liverpool for one of our periodic meetings with the city’s leadership and arriving in the city driving around and we always had the same conversation. If we had to play with what Liverpool had to play with by way of a location and an inheritance, you’d never see us for dust. We would be absolutely world-beating. And I think therein lies confirmation of the point that you’re making, Caitlin. It’s that yes, I think we don’t have the advantage of being on an estuary, nor by the way the disadvantage. We don’t have really old money going back really deep into the 18th and 17th Century before that or even longer in the case of Liverpool as a port city, nor quite the disadvantages that they’ve got in terms of where that came from. Every city’s unique. And, you know, there’s been Medieval Manchester as a project that’s still going and tries to help you navigate what the medieval city looked like. Is it possible to construct a story and a narrative and a tour about Manchester as a really authentic old city? Yes. But it doesn’t leap out at you. You have to work hard at it. So that’s the downside.

The positive side of it, and you hear this expressed in pubs before and after football games. I say this as a Manchester United season ticket holder. Manchester the night before a Manchester United game is like the Tower of Babel with every language under the sun being spoke. Sometimes there’ll be arguments about that and whether everyone’s really a United fan. But there’s a phrase that gets used quite a lot in my experience, which is, ‘it’s not where you’re from its whether you’re up for it.’ And I do think that phrase, which I think about from time to time, does encapsulate something about the spirit of being in and of this city. It is genuinely a very welcoming open city. Every city has got and has had its problems with newly arriving migrants not being received with quite the warmth that you would ideally want. Manchester, I suspect, has had rather fewer of those problems in other cities because it’s always had to make its own weather. It’s always had to make its own future and its future, like its origins, are with newly arriving migrants. Even when we forget that, we remember it soon enough when it matters. That’s why I think what makes this, in its essence, an American city. It’s funny, I was having this conversation at the weekend, growing up in Manchester you don’t actually feel very English. You feel like you’re a Manc and the rest of them can do one.

Greg Clark

Yeah, you’re making perfect sense, Mike, and it’s actually really illuminating and I’m surprised you know having known you for about 20 years we haven’t had this conversation before but there you go, really interesting.

Mike Emmerich

We’re having it now.

Caitlin Morrissey

So Mike, what is Manchester’s role in its region and in the nation and how has that evolved?

Mike Emmerich

Well, at one point, the cotton industry was responsible for most of Britain’s export earnings. That ain’t the case anymore, that’s for sure. So that’s changed profoundly. Of course the great strength of Manchester’s entrepreneurs was that they thought that this enterprise-led model would prevail, and it didn’t. As soon as those companies faltered, and for reasons I speculated about in the book I wrote. That was a question I tried to answer, how the hell did we create this amazing thing and then just let it go to hell on a handcart? So I think the modern city uses the assets and the legacy of that to create something that’s very, very different. There is still cotton and textiles in a small way in the city region, but not much.

The way I think Manchester’s evolved, and this was conscious over the last 20-odd years because of some of the work that I helped lean into and create, is that we saw Manchester largely for good but some would argue for ill as well, as being a little bit like for the north and west of this country what London is for the south and east. It’s a beacon. It’s a place where there’s enough fuel to keep the fire burning bright, throwing out heat and light around a large area. That was my intention coming into the city and working here, and I was working with people who’d already been at that for 20 years before I arrived and I just helped them with a better language for it. But that was the plan and I think it’s working, and lest any of people listening to this think ‘Here we go, trickle-down economics’ you need to go and read what trickle-down economics means. That means the idea that you tax people less when they’re wealthy and that the wealth trickles down. I’m talking about the creation of the first really good jobs en masse that the city has created for probably two generations, and that’s what we’re doing. Those people, aren’t they not trickling out? They’re coming in. I did a lecture on this at university and we’ve stood up to my satisfaction that you can see the extra tens of thousands of journeys every day into Manchester because of the tram expansion being one of the things that’s fuelling that. So it’s not the wealth trickling out in the sense of low taxes for wealthy people. It’s people living in Bolton, Bury, Oldham and Rochdale, Ashton getting good jobs in Manchester that frankly would never have in the circumstances that we were presented with.

So that, I think, is a changing role. In that sense, the Greater Manchester model of the economy is something that is very different to the 19th Century one. Therein lies the rub because there is still a romantic view – and by the way, I share in the romance – that wouldn’t it be great if we could have jobs on our doorsteps like we used to have when we had the mills? Well, yes, it would be great. And if anybody can show me an economic lever you can pull to get them, I’m all there. But we all know in our heart of hearts that that’s not how it works, and if we want that, we’re going to have to fight like hell to carry on growing the economy where we can grow it. As you see in Brighton, in Bournemouth, in Croydon, even in the former new towns, Harlow and Basildon, you can see that the heat and the light eventually spreads out so that businesses want to locate to those areas as well. If there’s a better way doing it, I’m all ears, but I ain’t heard one yet.

Caitlin Morrissey

Thanks Mike. One of the ways that we like to think about the way that the DNA is revealed to us is to think about the things that have been invented or discovered in Manchester or by Mancunians. Are there any that instinctively come to mind as being sort of the two or three inventions that you would sort of discuss?

Mike Emmerich

There’s a list as long as your arm. John Dalton, the first table of atomic weights. In industry, you’ve got what Arkwright and the others did in spinning technology. You’ve got Rutherford doing the work that he later fulfilled at Cambridge on splitting the atom. I think you’ve got one of the early cancer researchers, was it Marie Curie? I can’t remember who it was, it was one of them, did her work here. You’ve got Alan Turing doing his work here after the war. But then there’s a gap until our two modern Nobel Prize winners pop up. As Greg knows, I made it my life’s work for about two years to make sure they damn well stayed and we got the benefits of graphene. There was a piece in The Guardian just the weekend before we’re doing this interview about how there’s a major trial at Salford using graphene in brain implants that could play a huge role in the health sector. It’s not creating many jobs yet for ordinary handed sons and daughters of toil, but there’s time.

Caitlin Morrissey 

So one final question from the list that we’ve got because I think some of the questions that Greg have cover some of the others. But what are some of the common misconceptions that you encounter when you’re talking about Manchester, either across the country or even further afield?

Mike Emmerich 

There’s one that’s very current I think among a lot of people in the north. It’s the view that Manchester’s done. You know, people look at the tower blocks, the huge skyscrapers that are going up all over the place and say Manchester is fixed. Well, it’s not fixed. Manchester still has a poverty rate higher than just about anywhere else in Greater Manchester. Because it’s the biggest of the 10 boroughs, that statistically means it’s got more poor people than anywhere else in Greater Manchester. It is still, depending on how you count it, the fifth or sixth most deprived city in the country. A lot of the mill towns around have got some of the real issues of deindustrialisation along with the way migrant communities are clustered alongside more traditional communities and there’s a whole lot of difficult stuff arises from that.

I think there is a view that Manchester has terribly heavy rain. It doesn’t, as I said earlier, it doesn’t rain that heavily. It just rains quite often. My wife is from Essex, describes it as wet air, still soaks you.

I actually think it’s a good question that. I think people actually now understand that this, what this city is. I think Manchester has done a bloody good job of getting its message out there that it’s not a wannabe London, it’s Manchester.

Greg Clark

Well, let me pick up exactly with that, Mike, and just say, you know, one of the claims that Manchester’s made is this idea of being an Original Modern city, or the Original Modern city. What does that phrase mean to you?

Mike Emmerich 

So let’s take that in two parts. In some senses, Manchester is the Original Modern city. It just is one of the very first cities that embraced industrialisation in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and embraced it more radically and more fully than anywhere else, which means that it’s just a fact of history. But the term was coined by Peter Saville who having been the Creative Director for Factory Records, which was the Manchester label that lay behind Joy Division and a bunch of those other very early Manchester bands from the 1970s, was later engaged by the City as its Creative Director. You know, he was already by then the grandfather of British pop art, living quite happily in London. But he came back to do this work and he came up with that brand. It’s quite a curious tale, really, because I remember going to a workshop and I thought, I’m going to hate this. Organised by this bloody pop artist. It’s not my sort of thing. And actually, I was rapt by what he said and he took his audience by surprise because this was a bunch of the Manchester glitterati, and everyone thought it was a celebration of ‘Manchester is the Original Modern city.’ And Peter said, ‘No, it’s a challenge. Your challenge is to live up to being the Original Modern city and Manchester is just not there.’ That was in 2007 or something. So I think it is both a statistical fact about the past and a challenge for us for the future.

Greg Clark

Great answer. Thank you. Mike, for at least 20 years, you’ve been a really key figure in Manchester’s leadership. In some senses, you’ve been the chief strategist. In other ways, you’ve been the chief economist for the city. You worked with Sir Howard Bernstein, Sir Richard Leese and many others, and one of the strategies that you adopted was to invite expert opinion, either from around the country or from around the world, to come and give an independent perspective on Manchester. You organised the Manchester Independent Economic Review. You had numerous OECD missions visiting Manchester. What was the purpose of that from your point of view, and what does it tell our listeners about Manchester that you’re willing to behave in that way?

Mike Emmerich 

Personally, it goes back to being a kid who couldn’t get a book out of Chorlton Library where I lived  and being sent on a bus by my mum to get the book out of Central Library which I hadn’t never seen before. I walked in there and thought, what the hell is this? And I then walked around Albert Square. It was a metaphor for what I was basically saying when I came back to the city, which is, just look around you, this city is still shrunken from the incredible ambitions of the people who built it. And at the time I came back, the city was patting itself on the back, and rightly, because it was during the Commonwealth Games when I did the deal to come back in 2002. Yet I’d seen Howard and Richard do a presentation to the Number 10 Policy Unit when I was working there in which they talked about all of this. I was beaming with pride as a Mancunian, you know, being among all the Prime Minister’s principal advisors and they all said, ‘So what? They would say that, wouldn’t they.’

When I came back and decided to take the job that I took, I made my price that we had to do this review because I thought the city needed to hear some really hard home truths. Although the journey that they’ve travelled in that 20-year period was extraordinary, I mean, completely extraordinary: bidding for the Olympics was the most ballsy thing possible. Creating the first tram system, brilliant. Hulme, an astonishing piece of urban regeneration – its architect said to me just last week, ‘It’s Jane Jacobs in M16.’ Despite all of that, our numbers were lousy. This was a poor city that was still statistically not far off bumping along the bottom and it’s clear we had to do some stuff. We had to do some stuff differently and that was stuff that was going to require some serious rewiring the way it thought and took decisions and to make investment decisions that will be very, very difficult for a conurbation with 10 political leaders, 10 boroughs. I thought the only way we can do that is with an independent reviww because I’d seen it done at Treasury through the sorts of reviews that I’d been involved with there. I’d watched the Miners Review, the Higgs Review, the Barker Review was happening about that same time. I’d seen how you can use an independent review to speak truth unto power. It was a gamble because it might have failed, but I thought it was a gamble worth taking because the city needed to make the next big leaps forward and that’s what we did.

Greg Clark

And very successful it was, too, and it also, I think, undid that perception that you’ve just described, that this was just Manchester talking about Manchester because that’s what Manchester does. You actually got the rest of the world to talk about Manchester.

Mike Emmerich 

I mean, Manchester loves nothing more than to talk about itself. It’s very self-referential and reverential. That’s one of the things that Graham Stringer deserves credit for. I mean, Richard latterly, because he was a leader. But, you know, the foundational stuff was Graham with Howard and a bunch of other people, but they led it. They had taken some really big decisions, but they played them out. You also have to remember, Manchester starts in some senses, not with a bomb, not even possibly with the Olympic bids, but with the 1984 City Centre Local Plan, a document which is available in Central Library. As I said in the lecture I did at the University of Manchester in November, the 1984 City Centre Local Plan said, ‘We’re going to bring back the trams, we’re going to rebuild the commercial office stock of the centre, and we’re going to build housing at the Centre for the first time.’ They’d done that for 30 years before I arrived and they needed to work out what the next iteration of that will be. That needed the sort of outside inspiration that we got from Diane Coyle and Jim O’Neill and the others.

Greg Clark

Thank you, Mike. And you know, we could talk about that for hours, but I think we’ve got the germ of it there. Can you look forward, Mike and just talk about Manchester in the future for a bit, and maybe give yourself, you know a 30 to 50-year horizon. Where do you think this place is headed, both in terms of the city it’s becoming already, but how that will change its role in the United Kingdom, in Europe, in the world? What do you think the, you know, the possible pathway is?

Mike Emmerich 

There are lots of possible pathways. So let me assume, number one, that we don’t find ourselves in a world war, that Trump doesn’t prevail, that Putin doesn’t prevail, that the all-band tendency we see across Central and Eastern Europe defeated just about in France and Germany, there in Italy. Let’s assume that we don’t find something in that scenario because if that scenario happens, all bets are off. Ditto, if global warming turns out to be as bad as it could and if migration isn’t then the driving factor of geopolitics on our planet. If there’s something like normality, so if we find ourselves in a world that feels something like the one we’ve been in the last 70, 80 years since the war, then I think the future of this city is bright. It’s bright in several senses. One, I just think that the era we’ve lived in, in which the South East has carried the country, is not going to continue. London is going to continue to be a world city and a place I love very much indeed and admire, but it cannot absorb the next round of growth that our economy needs. Manchester is very well-placed for that. It’s happening right now. You can see it in the numbers, and we’ve made this city investment ready, and the investments coming, and there’ll be more of it.

I think it’s highly likely even in a positive scenario that London is going to have more problems with water in terms of water levels. The Thames is a real issue for large parts of London, water scarcity is going to be an issue. I think resilience will demand that our country, for that and other reasons, actually starts to find its own multipolarity and Manchester will be and already is a big, a big beneficiary of that.

I’d like to think, and here I’m becoming more optimistic, the investment in science and innovation and technology, of being in a place that’s relatively close to where we’re going to have all our wind power come from, all of those things will help this become a centre of the technologies that are vital for the future. At the heart of it is still this big city with its very, very different migrant populations, incredibly strong institutions and investment track records, which will make it continue to be a recipient for investment.

So I think my central case is that it is a really good one for the city. I think the challenge we’ve got to achieve, and this applies to everywhere not just Manchester, is to answer the question that lies behind the emergence of the cancer of Brexit, of populism, which is how we work out what parts of our existing model of running an economy in this country is baby, and which part of its bath water. Get rid of the bath water and keep the baby. I think a lot of the convulsions we’ve had with Corbyn, with Boris Johnson and all the rest of it. We’re really trying to ask that question and I think we’ve got to get to the bottom of it and make sure that the model really delivers better. Because, you know, it’s still the case, as in London, as in a lot of cities in liberal democracy, you just walk very short distances from the areas of where you think you’re in a city that’s really very desirable, you walk a short distance and you’re in pretty abject poverty. And we’ve got to answer that question, or else that’s going to bite us all in the backside and create the scenario I started this bit of the conversation by describing which is an authoritarian, populist, terrible future.

Greg Clark

Well said, Mike, and thank you for making that so clear. My last question is, what is the music of Manchester to you, and why is Manchester so associated with numerous musical traditions?

Mike Emmerich 

Apparently, one shouldn’t talk about the four blokes with guitars, four white blokes, now middle-aged but playing music. Apparently it’s not the thing anymore. But it was a big thing in this city and it still is. The modern city was defined by what happened here in the 1980s, the Manchester phenomenon with the Haçienda, Factory Records and everything that flowed from it. I still think that that’s huge. But just as we don’t all listen to the BBC anymore and we all have our very varied ways of accessing culture, what we’re accessing is equally variegated and Manchester has clearly listened to all kinds of music of every different genre.

If I could put in a plea for one thing, it’s this. I think very traditional culture, classical music, has always been a big part of the city and is fundamental. I do worry that we obsess too much in this city, this very modern city, about the most modern forms of culture, the most avant-garde, and at some point, that becomes a case of fur coat and no knickers. I’m all in favour of having not a fur coat but a good, thick, big coat. But I’m quite keen that we all have some underwear as well because these are compliments, not substitutes. Everyone who thinks about Manchester and musical culture thinks about The Hallé, quite right too. Charles Hallé came over here, a migrant 19th Century story, the first fully professional orchestra, blah, blah, blah. But my passion is for an earlier music and it’s been a wonderful journey that we’ve been on through the ensemble we started to discover that Manchester was performing Handel and Vivaldi and Corelli at the same time as London and Bath and very, very few other places in England were. Manchester has always had a cultural melting pot. We know the first subscription concert took place in 1744 and what’s more, if you really want to push me, we also know that the largest part of one of the most important collections of music of the 18th Century: the former collection of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, a would-be Pope never was Venetian Cardinal who set up shopping in Rome to perform music to try and advance his papal ambitions, but died in poverty. The largest single part of that collection is in Manchester Central Library with a unique score of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and a whole bunch of other stuff and we’re performing it. Isn’t that a great thing about cities? They find themselves with all sorts of assets that are, in some ways, completely unrelated. And if the people there are smart enough, you use those assets to tell, to retell, to recreate the story and Manchester’s story is bizarrely for a city that in, I don’t know, when were the Four Seasons written? 1720/21 or something. For a city that at that point was really not very much at all, they’re now part of our original story and that’s what makes cities so great, isn’t it?

Greg Clark

Mike, we recently lost one of the great leaders of modern Manchester and somebody with whom you enjoyed a very long and a very trusting relationship, and in many ways, you were one of his key colleagues and key confidants. What are your reflections of Sir Howard Bernstein and his contribution to the Manchester that we’ve been talking about?

Mike Emmerich 

Well, Howard was just an absolute original. He was the glue that held a lot of this city together for a very long time. So profoundly important is his contribution that it’s not just to the city, it’s to the country. Because the devolution model that we’re seeing rolled out around the country was something that he, a group of us but led by him, absolutely led, which is why I agreed with him not long before he died that I’d write his biography. Something that I’m carrying forward, sadly, as a project without his involvement because he’s beyond interview. So my memory is of an incredibly powerful figure but there’s already stuff coming out for the book, not for now, that people wouldn’t quite believe about him.

Let me tell you the most important of them for this podcast. It’s that people think of Howard as the person who was responsible for all the big stuff that happened, all the big ideas. He wasn’t. He absolutely wasn’t. The thing that was remarkable about Howard was that he spotted a good idea and could sift out the crap. He could spot who was spinning him a line and who really had something important to say. The people who had something important to say were on his team in no time, and it’s that group of people and his absolute relentless dedication to delivery, is actually the story of Howard Bernstein’s Manchester. And funnily enough, it is a very, very Mancunian story. It takes us right back to the cotton industry, which is of just relentlessly investing and innovating to create more and better product. In the end, I think that’s Howard’s legacy and it’s one that people like me who live in this city, and now, I know Caitlin, will we all benefit from.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Thank you so much.