Manchester's city centre population is expected to hit 100,000 by 2025.

When you consider that only a few thousand were living there around 20 years ago - and just 500 in 1990 - it is an astonishing transformation.

And, according to the 'State of the City' report of 2018, that growth looks set to accelerate even further.

In the four years since 2015, the city centre has added around 35,000 people, with the current total sitting at around 60,000.

Officials expect similar to happen again.

City-centre living is no longer monopolised by students and young professionals, with increasing numbers of 35-49-year-olds choosing to live in the apartment market.

Just this week, the council said there is 'intense competition' for city centre accommodation and said it will look at ways to prevent the authority losing out on income.

The broadening of the population living in Manchester will inevitably lead to more demand on services such as schools, medical practices and policing.

How will we cope?

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(Image: Mark Waugh Manchester Press Photography Ltd)

Pat Karney, the council's city centre spokesperson, admitted to the M.E.N it will be a 'big challenge.'

"I am amazed at the phenomenal growth over the last three decades," he said.

"When I moved in thirty years ago there were about five hundred residents mainly publicans and weirdos like me who love city centres.

"Nobody wanted to live there. The vision was always of a European city with mixed populations and community facilities.

"In this country we have only been at city growth for thirty years.

"For the next thirty years a whole new agenda opens up. We need to ensure Mancunians can live in their city centre and we need schools,doctors and nurseries.

"It will be a big challenge but Manchester can do it."

While council leaders plough ahead with expansion plans undeterred, others have more concerns.

A number of the most influential minds from Manchester's business community spoke to our sister site BusinessLive , at a recent round table discussion, about the challenge.

Bar and restaurant guru Thom Hetherington, Holden Media chief executive, said: “I think we can start fantastic businesses, all the employment opportunities are there, the cultural offering is there, but we really have to look at the social environment we’re creating.

"You look at issues with the street environment, with cleanliness, with anti-social behaviour, the horrific problem we have at the moment with homelessness and Spice, and for me it feels like that is the biggest issue and one of the hardest to sort."

Manchester’s growth isn’t without conflict, said Tim Heatley, whose firm Capital & Centric is behind a number of progressive developments including jenga-style Leonardo hotel planned for Piccadilly and the Phoenix development at Crusader Mill.

He says: “Inevitably there’s going to be growing pains.

"You have conflict as a result of that rapid pace of growth and things get lost between the two, they get missed along the way."

(Image: Joel Goodman)

Restaurant consultant Lucy Noone, founder of Comms By Pear, asked: "Should you care more about the people that are coming than the people that are here?

"I can’t help but sit and watch all the money that’s being spent on flights to Brussels and how many times they could pay for mental health services.

"There’s a massive deficit of what people really need in order for cities to thrive.

"You don’t just need the well-travelled elite to arrive in the cities to make cities work, you also need everybody else to work right from the lower paid role to the top."

Rebecca Eatwell, managing director of Font Communications, added that creating a hospitable city is 'more than just buildings', adding: “We can’t expect to create a community just by throwing up loads of tower blocks”

(Image: Manchester Evening News)

Mr Hetherington said there needs to be more done to ensure foreign - or non-Manchester-based developers - are giving something back to the community.

He said: “We’re lucky in the property industry there is a real horde of Mancunian-based businesses who are shaping this city and most of them are taking that responsibility on and saying ‘I’m doing well off this city and I’m going to give something back’.

“But, I think most people would agree the council could do more to make sure that all developers contribute to the city and that’s the missing link.”

Speaking on the disparity between the richest and poorest in the city region, Ms Noone said developers 'have a responsibility that everybody who can see that tower should be able to get into that tower'.

“If it’s a job, if it’s about potentially living there one day, that tower is on their skyline not the other way around and they should be able to have access to it.”

She also called for greater transparency about contributions made by developers.

“If you don’t want to put a load of social housing into your development then give them X amount of money and they’re supposed to build it somewhere else.

“It would be nice if they said this is the pot, this is for one project and you can see where it goes and perhaps there’s even a link between it, so you know there’s an ongoing project with an ongoing social link between the two.”

The balancing act of Manchester becoming an attractive place to live and work for those who otherwise might have settled for London or the South East, while at the same time ensuring its accessibility and openness, is a key question for its future.

Getting the basic foundations first of all is essential, said Mr Lord, who recalled a listening exercise with employees working in the night-time economy.

“There was a woman who worked in a city centre nightclub and she finished at four in the morning and she was on minimum wage," he said.

“It wasn’t viable for her to get a taxi, she lived in Cheetham Hill, so at four in the morning, she would walk from the city centre to Cheetham Hill and that’s not right at all.”

Mr Lord said a recent consultation on the night-time economy has been one of the biggest responses Transport for Greater Manchester has ever had.

“Some 440,000 people work in the night-time economy across Greater Manchester so, for a normal nine-to-five job, transport is amazing if you’ve got options to get home, so why can’t that happen for 440,000 people?

“Automatically people think you’re talking about leisure but a nurse finishes work at four in the morning. How does that nurse get home?”

Tim Heatley agreed that a lack of late night transport options was 'holding the city back'.

(Image: Mark Waugh Manchester Press Photography Ltd)

“Many a night out has been cut short because the last train home is really early,” he said.

With the city centre booming and becoming increasingly residential, the potential conflict between the wants and desires of residents in town, and operators in the night-time economy, like bars and venues, is brought to the fore.

An ‘Agent of Change’ principle seeks to protect the city’s thriving nightlife by placing the onus on residential developers to deal with noise issues when they build near music venues, as a means for residents and operators to peacefully coexist and avoid the damage to the night-time economy seen in east London.

Mr Lord said: “I have a big fear when it comes to places that are restricting licensing and restricting the hours because actually a responsible operator should be able to work with the residents.

“I think restricting licences which are restricting hours can set precedents and it can almost handcuff the night-time economy.”

Rochelle Silverstein, head of commercial at Kampus, which is building 500 apartments with commercial space on the ground floor, said the scheme is 'getting into conversations early with operators close to developments'.

“We’re taking that holistic approach,” she said

“So making sure operators open at a sensible time and you’ve got people sat in and it’s well managed and having a drink until half 12 and it’s not going to cause an issue. There’s a balance there”

Also, with the struggles of retail well documented and heavily reported, Rebecca Eatwell asked, at the Business Live event, how Manchester’s high streets should evolve to weather the storm.

(Image: Transport for Greater Manchester)

The change led by Nick Johnson in Altrincham was heralded as a prime example of how the private and public sector can work together to revive a town through its retail offering.

Mr Hetherington said: “The Trafford Centre has sucked out all the business from Altrincham, it literally closed Altrincham town overnight, it was one of the most boarded up towns in the whole of the UK.

“Then Johnson came along, the visionary, only a few years ago and reopened Altrincham Market and there’s a nucleus now with really good restaurants and bars and there’s a really good, safe, thriving night time economy.”

However, he asked whether it could work in places like Moston or Beswick.

“What we don’t want to see is operators and developers and city councils thinking this is a cookie-cutter approach and every town and every area should have an Altrincham market because although the underlying principles can be replicated, you cannot think it will work everywhere.”

(Image: Mark Waugh)

With the city centre growing, is Manchester at risk of losing its identity? Rebecca Eatwell asked.

But Thom Hetherington said he 'refuses to believe that the creativity within Manchester is going to get snuffed out just because we build some tall buildings'.

He said: “Manchester’s creativity and Manchester’s independence, its innovation, it’s more resilient and I don’t think the development in the city is going to cut that off .”

However, it’s the responsibility of developers to allow creativity to continue to grow, Rochelle Silverstein said.

“It’s our job to provide a platform for creativity to fill those voids and make sure it’s sustainable, affordable, and doable for the best talent and the best creatives to come in and not stifle the creativity by having that financial driven only approach", she added.

“At the end of the day that’s going to make it an attractive place for people to live.”

Meanwhile, Lucy Noone said the aim should be for 'reasonable profit rather than maximum profit' so 'there is wiggle room for creativity'.

Pablo Flack, who co-founded Bistrotheque in Bethnal Green in 2004 before setting his sights on Manchester, said: “What you don’t want is that everything becomes so developed and so defined that there’s no cracks left in the city because creativity needs the cracks.

“There’s no cracks left in London and it’s become a really boring city, so that’s a real challenge.”

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