The BBC’s northern home is to double in size within ten years after local council gives go-ahead

MediaCityUK, the BBC’s home in the north of England, is to double in size geographically over 10 years as television production companies are increasingly priced out of London and the south-east.

MediaCity leads to Salford becoming the UK's property hotspot Read more

Plans for a £1bn expansion of Salford Quays were approved by the local council on Thursday. The new development will include more TV studio and production space as well as shops, offices, a 330-bed hotel and over 1,400 new homes.

Manchester city council is also expected to give the green light to a huge expansion of another TV studio lot in the east of the city in a few weeks’ time.

It marks a rapid change in attitude towards the north of England as a media hotspot, just five years after more than 1,000 BBC staff were relocated with varying degrees of enthusiasm from London. Some stars famously refused to make the move, with Jeremy Clarkson making it clear he would not countenance the idea of relocating Top Gear to Salford.

“It is nowhere near any court that matters and nowhere near a single politician,” Clarkson wrote at the time. “Furthermore, if we ran the show from Salford, we’d be employing people from Salford. People who were born there and thought ‘Yes, I like this. I see no reason to go anywhere else’.”

Hot on the heels of the MediaCityUK growth, the Space Project in Gorton, a working-class area of east Manchester where the Channel 4 show Shameless was set, has submitted plans for a 90,000 sq ft expansion. If approved by Manchester city council within the next month, the production hub — home to Dragons Den and the forthcoming series of ITV comedy drama Cold Feet — will also double in size by 2017.

Compared with London, studio costs in Greater Manchester are more than 50% lower, average full-time staff costs are 40% lower and lifestyle costs including transport are between 40% and 60% lower, according to an independent report from Amion Consulting Limited last year.

The report claims one in four dramas shot outside London are now filmed in Manchester, which is home to over 600 film and TV companies and major independent production companies, such as Red (Happy Valley, Cucumber), Baby Cow (Alan Partridge, The Trip) and award-winning documentary maker Nine Lives Media.

Over 60,000 people now work in the creative and digital industries in Greater Manchester, according to Amion, which forecasts that number will grow 27% by 2034.



“Manchester has become the go-to production destination in the UK due to investment in facilities, the deep-rooted talent pool and it is now the biggest tech and creative centre outside the capital. On all counts it is a more cost-effective choice,” said Sue Woodward, founder of The Space Project and a former managing director of ITV Granada.

The expansion projects hark back to Greater Manchester’s television production glory days, when Granada Television produced some of the nation’s favourite shows from its Quay Street studios, including Coronation Street, the Krypton Factor, University Challenge and The Royle Family.

Sidney Bernstein, the media baron who formed Granada Television after buying the franchise to broadcast commercial TV in the north-west, was determined to develop a strong northern brand of TV to surpass that produced in the capital. “I think that what Manchester sees today, London will see eventually,” he once said.

MediaCityUK was built on derelict docklands in Salford Quays by Peel Holdings, a vastly wealthy property development company which also owns Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport, the Trafford Centre shopping complex, the Manchester ship canal, Glasgow harbour and the Mersey docks. Peel is in the process of building what it calls the Ocean Gateway, the renaissance of a strategic corridor encompassing the city regions of Liverpool and Manchester and adjacent areas within Cheshire and Warrington.

Phase 2 of MediaCityUK was granted by Salford council’s planning committee on Thursday. The 10-year build will create hundreds of new jobs for the area, which is already home to the BBC, ITV, The Lowry, dock10 studios, apartments and hotels, restaurants, cafés and bars, the University of Salford and Salford city college.

Salford’s mayor, Paul Dennett, said: “There are around 250 businesses in MediaCityUK employing approximately 7,000 people and another 1,000 businesses in the wider Salford Quays area employing a further 27,500 people. That’s up from 24,000 in 2008.”

Though Salford Quays can still appear rather bleak on a grey day, it feels almost continental on warm summer evenings, with open water swimmers splashing about in the filtered waters of the dock and workers in deckchairs watching sport on a big screen outside the BBC complex.

TV favourites made in Greater Manchester

Cold Feet

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cast of Cold Feet. Photograph: Jonathan Ford/ITV

The hotly anticipated new series of Cold Feet was filmed on location in and around Manchester earlier this year. James Nesbitt, Fay Ripley and chums returned to the city 13 years after the previous series of the comedy drama, with Ripley telling the Guardian she couldn’t believe how the city had changed. “Piccadilly station is like Harvey Nick’s now. It’s unbelievable. When I was here there was some old bloke selling one second-hand crisp packet,” she said.



No Offence

Paul Abbott’s Shameless introduced TV audiences to the estates of east Manchester in Gorton. His well-received police comedy, No Offence, is filmed in an old youth club nearby. Joanna Scanlon, the foul-mouthed detective in charge of a raggle-taggle group of rule-breaking cops, will return for a second series in the new year.



Blue Peter

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lindsey Russell shortly after presenting Steven Spielberg with a gold Blue Peter badge. Photograph: BBC

The BBC’s children’s division relocated to MediaCityUK in 2011, with the Blue Peter garden moving from White City in east London to the often windswept Salford quayside.

Jeremy Kyle

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Jeremy Kyle Show. Photograph: ITV/REX

Britain’s premiere mid-morning shout fest is filmed at MediaCityUK, with tickets snapped up months in advance.

Fresh Meat

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The cast of Fresh Meat. Photograph: Mark Johnson/Channel 4

The university comedy starring Jack Whitehall and Zawe Ashton was filmed at the Sharp Project in east Manchester, the sister studios to the bigger Space Project. The show was created by Peep Show’s Sam Bains and Jesse Armstrong, who drew on their time sharing a grotty house when they were students at Manchester University.