When Mancunian architect Ian Simpson was starting out in the early 90s, there were just a few hundred people living in Manchester city centre.
“It was a place people came to and left,” said Simpson of a post-industrial “wasteland” of car parks, factories and a few scattered pubs. “It had no heart in the city centre whatsoever.”
There are now more than 100,000 people living in the same area, many of them in skyscrapers designed by Simpson.
That skyline is seen as the most potent symbol of an economic turnaround that has taken Manchester from post-industrial doldrums to a place consistently growing faster than London.
The city’s growth is also the platform from which Andy Burnham, Greater Manchester’s metro mayor since 2017, has sought to catapult himself back into Westminster in recent days.
Manchester’s economy has outpaced the rest of the UK for most of the past decade, supported by a growing professional services sector, a rise in the number of graduates staying on in the city and a booming residential market.
Official data shows that gross value added per capita, an indicator of living standards, for the local authority of Manchester — which covers the city centre — was 73 per cent above the UK average in 2023, up from 40 per cent in 2015. London’s gross value added per capita in 2023 was 81 per cent above the UK average.
Greater Manchester, composed of 10 metropolitan districts including the city itself, has also seen its GVA per capita rise from 16 per cent below the UK average in 2014 to a 5 per cent gap in 2023.
Attempts to turn around the city and its neighbouring boroughs started from a low base.
By the early 1990s, Manchester had fallen from its status as a powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution to a city in sharp economic decline, one that had lost its manufacturing base and was suffering from low investor confidence.
In the years that followed, and with the 1996 IRA bomb attack on the city acting as a catalyst, local civic leaders took a long-term approach to turning that story around, said the Greater Manchester-born former Goldman Sachs banker Lord Jim O’Neill.
O’Neill, who later served as Treasury minister under Conservative chancellor George Osborne, added that “for much of this millennium to date”, political leaders, universities and key business people in the city “all sang from the same ambitious hymn sheet”.
Since becoming Greater Manchester’s first directly elected mayor, Burnham has given the city region’s growth story further national prominence.
Burnham is a potential challenger to the leader of the Labour Party, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, though his attempt to stand as a parliamentary candidate was blocked last weekend. His pitch to Labour colleagues has rested on the city’s growth, which he has recently branded “Manchesterism”.
In a speech to the Institute for Fiscal Studies earlier this month, he promised that the next steps would be to “reindustrialise the birthplace of the industrial revolution” by focusing on five growth locations across the conurbation, as a report said Greater Manchester has become the fastest-growing economy in the UK.
It is the latest iteration of a process begun decades ago, which focused its attention initially on the city centre.
One plank of the strategy was to repopulate and densify the centre, attracting young graduates to a forest of new skyscrapers.
In 1991, Manchester’s core, while known the world over for its music scene and nightclubs such as the Haçienda, had just 771 residents, according to that year’s census.
City leaders focused on incentivising property development, including through taxpayer loans and a relaxed approach to planning.
Simpson pointed to the “rustbelt” of car parks around a relatively small city centre that have in the past decade been turned into high-density housing.
That regeneration is now visible in Manchester’s property prices and those of some neighbouring Greater Manchester boroughs.
The cost of a house in next-door Salford has nearly doubled over the past decade to £226,000, making it the fastest-growing local authority in Great Britain over the past decade, according to FT analysis of Land Registry data.
The population increase took place in tandem with a growth in white-collar jobs.
Sir Richard Leese led the city council between 1996 and 2021 and oversaw the city’s strategy with late chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein, widely regarded as the key driving force behind Manchester’s modern turnaround.
Leese said the change in Manchester’s economic fortune resulted from a strategy in the 2000s to focus on sectors such as computing and life sciences rather than those it had lost, such as heavy manufacturing.
“It was recognising in an objective way what it was we were really good at,” he said, adding that there had been a strategic focus on transport keeping graduates in the city after they had finished their studies.
Manchester’s growth has not been without its critics. As its housing market has heated up, the city has at times topped the country’s chart for homelessness rates, on occasion recording higher levels than London boroughs.
The city also has the second-highest proportion of deprived neighbourhoods nationally in the latest Index of Multiple Deprivation, published in October.
Paul Swinney, chief economist at The Data City, has also raised questions over the reliability of the fast increase in productivity for Greater Manchester since 2019, arguing that some of the official numbers on output growth looked “implausible”.
Meanwhile, political attention has turned to the need for growth to benefit the outlying boroughs, particularly former mill towns still struggling from post-industrial malaise.
Official data shows that gross median weekly pay and gross disposable income per capita in many parts of the wider city are still lower than the national average, including Bolton and Oldham.
The figures mean that the wider conurbation did not make it in the top 11 performing cities for growth in real disposable income per person between 2013 and 2023 in the analysis by the Centre for Cities.
The city region’s growth to date is nevertheless now attracting attention among policymakers in London, keen to see its trends repeated.
Andy Westwood, professor of public policy at the University of Manchester, said the drivers of its growth should be learned from and “replicated elsewhere”.
“But this is growth from a low base,” he added. “So this growth needs to be sustained and improved for some time yet to meet the gap with London.”