Things don’t feel great in town, do they? You’ve probably felt it. Like some northern Neo, things feel off, things beyond your control. The city looks different each time you stop to look: a new high-rise on the skyline, a new regeneration pop-up, a new rough sleeper on a doorstep.
The Manchester of the Haçienda days is long gone. Gentrification is pushing Mancunians out of their own communities in favour of shit flats for shit rates. When you look at the numbers, Manchester is less affordable than the capital – a mini London with North-West wages.
These are just some of the depressing truths covered in Isaac Rose’s new book, The Rentier City: Manchester and the Making of the Neoliberal Metropolis, a sobering look at the North’s poster child and its increasingly poor conditions. From Engels’ trips through the squalor of Little Ireland to the ahistorical mystique of Tony Wilson, Rose wipes away the muck of the Manchester brand and asks: who is this city actually for?
We caught up with Isaac to chat about the book and get some theoretical basis behind our anti-Manchester mantra…
Isaac Rose is a tenant organiser and writer living in Manchester. He works for the Greater Manchester Tenants Union, and his writing has appeared in Tribune, Novara Media, The New Internationalist, and elsewhere.
For people who’re interested in the book – but without giving too much away – what’s it about?
Isaac: It’s about how the changes in Manchester, particularly over the last 10 years, are a great example of a certain form of neoliberal urbanism. Obviously, we see it in other cities around Britain; this isn’t unique to Manchester. But in Manchester you see a very clear example of the model. And it’s not just me, there’s a lot of critique elsewhere.
The uneven economic development of Greater Manchester and the North-West more generally are all part of the same model – where you pile all investment into a small place and then hope that it’ll trickle out in a positive way. That’s the critique that colleagues of mine have articulated in a more academic way: what happens when all investment gets sucked into the centre and then extracted out by institutional investors? I’m not making an original argument or anything, but I wanted to put it into a book that people can read. I’m not an academic myself, but I’ve worked with them and I actually think this stuff is pretty locked away from the general public. This is a story that needs to be told.
It’s also about pushing back some of the Manchester bullshit, from the Haçienda to the towers – the story that we all know is bullshit. It was important to create something that was critical. One book in my mind was the City of Revolution, but that’s a collection of academic essays from 20 years ago.
As I wrote, I thought: how do you tell this story? You can’t really understand the property boom without understanding the political struggles in the 80s. And we can’t really understand what those meant unless you understand what deindustrialization did to the city and the region. And you can’t really understand that unless you really understand the long history of capitalism in the North-West, where industrial capitalism was born. There’s the belief that Manchester was the paradigmatic industrial city – the first industrial one in the world. Now, if my argument holds, today Manchester is paradigmatic rentier capitalism.
You mentioned Manchester bullshit. Care to expand?
My friend is a DJ in Manchester and says the Haçienda was good in 1988 – and then it stopped being good. It had an amazing summer and then it got tired. It’s been commercialised and some people have made a lot of money out of the myth, and in doing that, it’s become dehistoricized. Black music in Manchester has been written out of the Haçienda story, for example. Where did all this dance music come from? Why were people listening to Black American dance music? Well, because it had been listened to in Manchester for 30 years by that point, and there’d been networks of black clubs in Moss Side.
“The Manchester culture of the 80s could never happen here today”
In the more triumphalist, Tony-Wilson-is-king narrative, that stuff’s completely lost. It’s not true – it didn’t just come out of nowhere. The social democratic state meant that working class kids could have the time to learn instruments and go to art school or whatever. The cheap housing in Manchester – like Hulme – meant you could basically live there for free. It was a really modern thing that was happening, and it has nothing to do with Manchester today. The people who led the boosterism and the urban investment strategy co-opted the “history” for their own agenda, but really it was their political enemies who were closer to the spirit of the really good stuff happening in the city – the democratic, modernist, multicultural, working class culture which we don’t see today.
Our cultural history has been told really badly. As a city, and as a region, we should critique the narratives in our history. Why is it that there’s one story about culture in Manchester? Dave Haslam’s book from 1999 is a lot more attentive to these broader histories of black culture and modernism. But in lots of stuff that’s written now, like the big Tony Wilson biography that came out, the whole narrative is just lost. There’s a chapter where I talk about how everyone thinks Tony Wilson is really important, but actually the important guy is Bob Scott: the guy who led the city’s three Olympic bids. That’s a bit cheap, and we shouldn’t really think about things in terms of individuals, but Tony Wilson is a distraction to what actually happened.
Could you explain how Manchester has cycled between boom and bust in the last few hundred years?
There’s two meta narratives around how capitalism has changed in the last 300 years. One is about the shift from productive industrial capital in factories to speculative and rentier types of capital accumulation through real estate. Manchester was the industrial city where commodities came together and then made stuff. Then it collapsed. Global capital left the city for years. It later reintegrated itself within the economy, but in a very different way to before.
The other is the rentier narrative. In the 19th century, the environment was built primarily by speculative investment. You had speculative landlords throwing up working class and bourgeois housing; the slums and the suburbs were both products of speculative urban development. My argument is that the local state, through building places like Wythenshawe and clearing the slums, abolished, to some extent, the role of the rentier. But decades later, the Thatcher government undid that work. Getting rid of council housing. Introducing the right to buy. Getting rid of rent controls. The 1988 Housing Act. All this stuff was a way of bringing the rentiers back into our cities. Now we all live in a world run by landlords. And today the rentiers are more powerful within the economy than before.
How many years can you say Manchester was improving for working class people?
They started to build council housing and get rid of the worst of slums in the very late 19th century and that continued up until the 70s, although the war interrupted it. It’s worth thinking about the contradictory elements of that project; not everyone wanted the slums cleared. There were racialized injustices where communities got cleared, whether that was Jewish communities in the interwar years or black communities in the 60s and 70s. It’s difficult to think about because there was a genuine attempt to build housing for working people, but they were also smashing up communities, forcing people out. That memory of slum clearance is still present, and many people, or their parents, experienced the trauma. The difference today is that slum clearances are more about clearing space for capital to create flats for rich people rather than council housing for working people.
There’s an idea in our culture that a place can only be deprived or gentrified – a cheap shithole or an expensive trendsetter. What do you think?
Tom Slater, who is an amazing scholar of gentrification, has a really good book called Shaking Up the City which summarises a lot of his work in very punchy chapters and covers the false choice between these two outcomes. The media plays an important role building a consensus around gentrification, they just don’t really adopt a critical lens at all. The false choice is: either you have some decrepit, decaying council estate or you knock it down and build something better and new. But those new things are always invariably a market-led solution. Tom and I would say the political consensus behind these projects is built by that false binary.
“The irony is Manchester sold itself on the culture and then destroyed the conditions that created that culture.”
Often in order to build these projects they have to displace and deceive a load of people; they have to trick them into thinking they’re getting something out of it. The types of developments that are created don’t allow for that community to replicate themselves within a new environment. The whole thing is oriented to a new demographic, which is higher-earning and higher-paying. They move in. The neighbourhood changes. It’s not to say that a nice coffee shop is inherently bad – those places are fine – but what does that do to the surrounding neighbourhoods? How does that change rent prices? Once you bring in new rental apartments, corporate landlords push the rent up by huge amounts. In Manchester we’ve seen rents go up a lot over the last five years. That jump is driven partly by all these new flats in the city centre. Renters are paying more, so other private landlords raise their rent and push up the general rent in the city.
Anyone can look around to see and see it happening. I wanted to put the intuitive power of these arguments in this book. They’re often locked away in academic circles, which is partly due to the media creating the consensus around neoliberal urbanism.
So why is gentrification not good? Well, it’s because it accelerates particular dynamics that have loads of negative social effects. There’s displacement, yes. Social Cleansing. Breakup of communities. But beyond this, it’s even bad for the new folk who move in. People are paying a lot of money on rent. Even if you’re a young professional living in Ancoats living the Manchester dream, you’re probably still paying 40% to 50% of your income on rent. And that’s not good. We need investment, but what we often see in Manchester is investment in order to extract income from an area. There’s so much wealth generated in Manchester by working people that is just sucked out through rents. Obviously, there are deep structural problems in the British economy, but the fragility and the flaws of this model are all concentrated in Manchester.
How much of this was intentional?
The Manchester leadership have played a blinder. They’ve been extremely good at what they’ve tried to do; they’ve done it better than anywhere else. Things changed in the late 80s when cities were asked to compete against each other for grant funding. Thatcher removed the idea of the central state giving out money to local governments to do things and maintain services. What resulted was competition between cities, and Manchester assembled grant coalitions of a mix of public and private players. They were able to put in these bids to fund things like Metrolink, the Commonwealth Games, the Bridgewater Hall. The Manchester identity and culture comes in because it helps sell the story – you know, the bee – there’s a strong brand for the city. And that brand has been very cleverly used by business figures within the local state to get this grant money to do a certain type of development. And they just kept doing it and doing and doing it. That’s one of the things that we can think about: in the late 80s, when they were defeated, perhaps there was no other choice at that point, but what about in 2024? I remember someone telling me that Howard Bernstein said Manchester hadn’t yet reached lift off. It hadn’t reached the critical mass of investment in the city centre. Maybe we’re reaching that point now, I don’t know. If that’s what you want to do for a city, then they’ve done it very well. You can’t knock them for that. But it’s whether that was – and still is – the right thing to do.
Do Manchester’s ridiculous rent prices spill out and affect Greater Manchester?
The thing is with property professionals, real estate agents, is that it’s their job to figure out how much you can charge for rent. Real estate agents in Manchester professionalised a lot in the last five to ten years, which is partly why the rents have gone up – because they’re much more attuned to market rent and they can spot when it’s too low. They obviously don’t call them rent gaps, but it’s the same thing. The other thing about rent gaps is that it’s not just payment of rent, but also the surplus taken off when you actually sell a plot of land. Someone was saying to me that the smart thing to do now in Manchester if you can’t buy a house is to buy one in Wigan because there’s good train links and Wigan will pop up in ten years.
In East London, when they built the overground, it caused a boom of speculation on land prices. Anywhere on a train line close to Manchester, you’ll see the same – it ripples out. That’s because land and rents and housing are controlled by market logics. But it’s the political system that allows it to happen. The commercialisation of the private rented sector since Thatcher has been the worst thing for all this, because the value of all property has increased. A landlord can buy a house, borrow a load of money or remortgage an existing property, and price out anyone who actually wants to buy and live in it. That has a really inflationary effect on all housing and all property. The problem is, if they want to sort things out then house prices will collapse. They don’t want that to happen because probably the only thing that would cause a revolution in Britain is house prices falling by 90%.
“Anyone who lives under the shadows of Manchester’s towers knows exactly what’s going on, and we should listen to those people.”
A lot of this is difficult to prove empirically because the data is very hard to get ahold of. You have to get a theoretical understanding and then you observe it in the real world. We should all be wary of people who say that the answer is to liberalise planning. Manchester is a great example of where planning has been super liberal, supply has been allowed to increase massively, and particular forms of development have been encouraged – and it’s not led to a reduction in house prices. But the developers will always say it’s because we’re not doing it enough.
There’s a change that anyone can intuitively spot looking at a city like Manchester. Working class people in Manchester know all this because they see it and they experience it. They know the rents are going up. They know that all this development is not good for them and their communities. It’s basically a form of class war because the developers want to get rid of them. Anyone who lives under the shadows of Manchester’s towers knows exactly what’s going on, and we should listen to those people. They know better than anyone. This isn’t just a random theory that’s been plucked out of nowhere, it’s rooted in people’s day-to-day realities. Of course, if you’re benefiting from all this, then you’ll try and make it seem like it’s all to do with something completely different. You’ll engage in what Tom Slater calls agnotology: the production of ignorance.
Doesn’t the displacement of people affect the local culture?
There’s a quote in the book about gentrified thinking from Sarah Schulman. She calls it inherently stupid. She was talking about New York, and how AIDS and gentrification were a sort of twin attack on a popular, modern, cosmopolitan culture – in Manchester, and any city where gentrification takes root, we can hear echoes of that. It kills diversity. It kills – I would say – a sort of modernity that is rooted in people. If people can’t afford to live there, it becomes much more monocultural and much more bourgeois in terms of the types of culture that are happening. It also moves everything towards consumption; Manchester City Centre is just about spending money, there’s nowhere to go do cheap, interesting things. There is pressure on space and the economic model means that space for things that make culture good is squeezed out of cities. All the things that make cities great are smoothed over and replaced by a rentier culture. So big investors will build a CULTUREPLEX where you get Mexican or Indian street food, and you can get a really expensive pint – maybe there’s some DJ playing on a shit sound system. There’s loads of these things in Manchester, and they’re all rubbish. But they’re making loads of money because that model of creating a playground – whether that’s a nice flat to live in, or a marina or a kombucha brewery – gets rich people in.
It’s really deadening to culture. The Manchester culture of the 80s could never happen here today. Although there are pockets of that spirit, they’re besieged, under attack, and their future is not secure. We haven’t really talked about The Factory or Aviva studios – or Granada studios, as my friend says we should still keep calling it – and the way that cultural institutions have been used as an anchor for the real estate boom around them. The irony is Manchester sold itself on the culture and then destroyed the conditions that created that culture.
So… how do we fix things?
There has to be a complete political shift away from the extractivist model towards something else. Elements of that would require actual council housing being built, rent controls being brought in, land and planning becoming more democratic. We need to restore the local government’s public spirit for planning, which is something that’s been gradually chipped away by the Tories – even Labour’s plan is to liberalise planning. There’s been a long push against the planning system that was created after the war, and I don’t really see who would deliver it today. That’s where the book ends. Yeah, we need to do all these things, but there’s no real force in the country – social or political – that could deliver this right now. But we should keep thinking about it, and keep trying to make it happen.
answers
Isaac Rose
questions
George Francis Lee
The Rentier City is available through Repeater Books