The Manchester Briefing from The Mill

Manchester Pride, a large-scale music event with huge headliners and a packed schedule filled with music, dance and drag performances, returned last weekend. The city was filled with colour and thousands of people turned up to celebrate in Gay Village. But this year, Manchester Pride also faced fresh criticism over its relationship with Booking.com, a key sponsor of the festival who have faced cri...

The White Hotel, a world-famous nightclub in Salford that has hosted some of biggest DJs in the world and has been described as a "nurturing influence" on new artists, is every Mancunian's favourite nightclub. But the iconic venue could be facing some complications due to a dispute involving planning permissions, as well as the development of its once-derelict but evolving neighbourhood. What does...

It’s mid-August, and the students who buy so many of the tickets for local club nights are away. They aren’t coming back any time soon, and when they do, they’re less likely than their forbears to even go to clubs in the first place (and drinks aren’t cheap anymore). So how do we keep the city partying hard, and what’s it like to be a DJ right now? Mollie sits down with Finn McCorry, NTS resident,...

Last weekend saw the continuation of violent far-right riots that have erupted across the country in the wake of a devastating attack in Southport that left three children dead and eight injured. A man was pictured raising a Nazi salute in Piccadilly Gardens, where a black man was chased and attacked by a gang of white men and women, protesters in Bolton set off missiles and threw bricks at police...

Last week, a video emerged of a Greater Manchester Police officer forcefully kicking a prostate man in the head and kneeing him in the stomach at Manchester Airport. The story dominated national news coverage and triggered an investigation by the Independent Office of Police Conduct. But a lengthier video, released over the weekend, has fuelled further debate. It shows the run up to the confrontat...

Levenshulme Market was a local success story, cementing a narrative of a neighbourhood on the rise. For ten years, it ran weekly markets on a council-owned car park near the train station serving everything from craft beer to books, cocktails and gifts, and the market became celebrated for its role as an incubator for small businesses that managed to make the jump from a market stall to a spot on...

In this week's episode, Mollie and Joshi discuss the curious case of a semi-detached house in Harpurhey that was bought for £575,000 and sold for £1.8 million on the very same day. Manchester City Council cited the sale as an example of market manipulation, but the property company involved happens to be a major council partner. Mollie and Joshi talk about how the story showed up on our radar, and...

Do Manchester's theatres have a class problem? Robert Pegg, a playwright and police station representative, seems to think so. In a remarkable long read for The Mill , he argues that working-class creatives have been confined to the fringe scene, with commissioning editors mainly looking towards their own narrow class to fill vacancies. So how do we address these imbalances, and how do we ensure w...

Has the question of whether Manchester or Birmingham is Britain's second city distracted us from another possibility: That Britain doesn't have a second city at all? David Rudlin, director of urban design at BDP, thinks so. A little-known law states that neither Birmingham nor Manchester are big enough to claim the title of Britain's second city, which brings us onto an interesting question: How h...

Writer Alec Herron's gran’s house was on the Grey Mare Lane estate in Beswick, east Manchester. He can still remember Sunday afternoons "filled with rice pudding, sucking bone marrow and hours sat around the table hearing stories of tragedy and petty gossip told with the same veracity". It will all be coming down soon. The regeneration of Grey Mare Lane estate was initiated after a 2017 public con...

It’s been a frantic few days of political shenanigans as Sir Keir Starmer’s ruthless operation in London moves to impose its favoured people on the safe seats that are up for grabs in Greater Manchester, the Lib Dems attempt to remove any Tory blue from the Greater Manchester map and the Tories fight to hold on in Bolton. So who are the people vying to be the next MPs of Greater Manchester, and wh...

Last Thursday, The Mill  revealed that Primary Security, a company  controlled by Sacha Lord, had obtained more than £400,000 of public money from an Arts Council scheme that was supposed to support culturally significant organisations during the pandemic. Our story presented evidence that the application was deeply misleading and that Sacha Lord’s company Primary Security had recently c...

Co-op Live is finally live! Bury rock band Elbow performed at Manchester's new £365 million arena to a crowd of thousands on Tuesday night, after a series of disastrous mishaps where gigs were postponed or cancelled and an air conditioning vent fell from the ceiling. What was behind the delays in the first place, and what does Co-op Live have to do to win back the public's trust? With thanks to Ma...

On Friday 22nd March, tents started gathering under the porticoes outside Manchester Town Hall in St Peter’s Square. An activist named Emma was protesting the government not halting arms sales to Israel, and seeing the sleeping bags under the porticoes gave her an idea. Within a few days, dozens of tents were outside the town hall and there was a waiting list of rough sleepers hoping to join the c...

In late 2021, a noise complaint filed to Manchester City Council about the iconic Northern Quarter venue Night & Day Cafe caused a city-wide row that lasted more than two years. In today's episode, Jack and Joshi discuss Jack's recent piece, that took a deeper look at what, until now, had been quite a simple story. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When a video emerged of a Greater Manchester Police constable kicking and stamping on a homeless refugee, there was a huge public outcry. Andy Burnham demanded an internal investigation and homelessness charities called it "appalling, unacceptable and degrading". What does this incident tell us about the police's attitudes to the homeless community in Manchester, and what will it take for the auth...

In 2016, Caroline Dyer and Colette Burroughs-Rose shared frustrations with how the world was becoming more divided. They believed the political developments of the time — the election of Donald Trump and Brexit — had caused more friction in the world and there was a need for more nuanced conversations to help us reconnect. In the aftermath of this division, Heard Storytelling was born. It began wi...

Earlier this week, our editor Joshi Herrmann sat down with US Senator Bernie Sanders to discuss the colossal decline of local news in the UK, how that impacts communities and how he imagines the crisis in local news might be resolved. "It is a disaster for democracy," Bernie Sanders told us, a powerful statement about something we all care about. In today's episode, Mollie and Joshi examine that i...

When Sir Tony Lloyd died last month, his seat in Rochdale looked like a relatively easy hold for Labour. Now, with the party’s candidate disowned for spreading a conspiracy theory about Israel and George Galloway picking up support over the war in Gaza, the by-election has entered uncharted territory. Under the glare of the national media, three former Labour members are on the ballot, but La...

"How did Manchester became the poster-child of neoliberal urbanisation, and what can the people that live there do about it?" That's the subject of tenant organiser and author Isaac Rose's debut book, The Rentier City: Manchester   and the Making of the Neoliberal Metropolis . In this week's episode, Joshi Herrmann hears from Isaac Rose about whether the "Manchester model" of property-fuelled...

Last month, before  Mr Bates vs The Post Office  created a massive public outcry and elevated Fujitsu to nationwide notoriety as the company that allowed its software bugs to destroy the lives and reputations of hundreds of innocent subpostmasters, Andy Burnham and Manchester City Council leader Bev Craig were on a bullet train from Kyoto to Tokyo, on their way to pay Fujitsu a visit.&nb...

For the past year, we've been aware of a bizarre new trend where TikTok creators share videos of women wandering the streets on a night out in Manchester. The video creators claim to be documenting modern life in Manchester, but watch enough of these videos and you’ll start to see an extremely skewed version of the city, where beautiful, drunk women are on every street and there’s a nightclub on e...

It's nearly the end of 2023! What a year it's been. In our final episode of the year, Joshi, Mollie and Jack round up their favourite stories and take you behind-the-scenes of reporting some of our big investigations and feelgood features. Many thanks to the Hallé for sponsoring this week's episode. Manchester is globally renowned for its bands and its football teams, but we also have — in th...

In this week's episode, Mollie and Jack talk about gatecrashing Chanel's exclusive afterparty at Victoria Baths, the importance of the French luxury fashion house coming to the city and the collective hysteria that settled over Manchester as celebrities flocked to the best hotels and restaurants. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Some say the 'Manchester model' is a cautionary tale about what happens when a city hands over its keys to property investors. Others say it's an example of how the great cities of the UK should regenerate and rebuild their prosperity. Economist Mike Emmerich is closer to the second view and has been a key voice in the city for decades. He used to be an advisor in the Treasury and Downing Street b...