Heading north through the inner-city neighbourhood of Ancoats, an informal collection of urbanism doctorates, architects and curious residents begin the third Manchester Urbanists “exploration walk”. Three cobbled streets in, they observe red-brick industrial housing as it is being torn down in Cotton Street.

Photographs taken, the group continues through a neighbourhood that boomed and bellowed in the new world of industry at the end of the 17th century, was almost totally abandoned by the 1980s, but is now growing in popularity again among young renters.

“I was looking to buy a property here in the mid-90s; you could get a factory for £30,000 in those days,” recalls Joan Haggas, who opened Manchester’s first backpackers hostel in 1994. “But the temporary relocation of businesses following the [1996 IRA] bomb stopped that.”



During the walk Haggas stops in Cutting Room Square, of which the city’s tourist board states: “Nowhere in Manchester will give you a stronger sense of the city’s industrial past.” The square is soon to sit in the shade of an eight-storey car park: “I wanted somewhere with character,” Haggas says. “They’ve ripped most of those down now.”

The group arrives at the Smith’s Arms, the oldest building in Ancoats, whose origin stretches back to somewhere between 1775 and 1794. The planning application detailing its demolition and the construction of 199 apartments, plus commercial units, is read aloud.

Last year, Greater Manchester’s economy outgrew that of inner-city London. Further devolution of powers from Whitehall are about to be realised, and the campaign for the title of first elected mayor of Greater Manchester has picked up pace with Andy Burnham throwing his name into the hat.

Cutting Room Square in Ancoats is to be redeveloped into new apartments. Photograph: lowefoto/Alamy Stock Photo

However, Manchester is also about to contend with the capital in other ways. A major housing crisis lurks, and a growing deficit of office space needs to be dealt with. To make amends, Manchester’s skyline is heading for dramatic change.

The Smith’s Arms joins a growing list of historic industrial architecture that is making way for Manchester’s second coming. The Elizabeth Gaskell Campus in Rusholme, built in 1912 and part of Victoria Park Conservation Area, was flattened for a private hospital. The Victorian Society was unable to save the Grade-A listed Black Horse Hotel, built in 1876 on Salford’s historic Chapel Street, from the behest of local bookmaker-turned-billionaire property developer, Fred Done. Despite a last-ditch legal injunction, the demolition of a Castlefield viaduct that heralded the age of rail travel in 1830 is set to make way for the construction of Network Rail’s 1km Ordsall Chord line. The home of the second incarnation of music venue Twisted Wheel, the heart of Northern Soul, has been trampled over by a budget hotel bearing a blue plaque. The list goes on.

“For me, the question is why does Manchester City Council underestimate how important heritage is to people?” asks Adam Prince, one of the most vocal critics of the changing face of Greater Manchester, and a leading voice in the Friends of London Road Fire Station campaign, which sought to highlight the 27-year denigration of one of industrial Manchester’s proudest constructions.

London Road Fire Station was bought late last year by the developers Allied London, whose CEO Michael Ingall (having consulted widely with the community) recently revealed plans to convert the ornate Fire Station next to Piccadilly for a multitude of purposes, including an outdoor cinema and luxury hotel.

“In other cities in the world, they wouldn’t be demolishing such historic buildings,” says Prince, who recently founded Manchester Shield, which he describes as “a user -inspired civic movement that seeks to empower citizens in Manchester.”

Metres away from London Road Fire Station, the chalkboard above the downstairs bar at the Star and Garter reads: “Network Rail: Charognarde en costards bas de gamme (carrion in low-end suits).”

To its diehard regulars, the Star and Garter is “the last ever truly indie venue you will know”. In stoic brace against the decline of its surroundings, the tall, red-brick public house and rock saloon is the final portal of civilisation before entering the rail arches and back alleys of the city’s red-light district.

Manchester’s booming economy is changing the cityscape. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

“This part of the city is like the corner of the room you put the TV in front of, because the cat pissed there,” jokes Andy Martin, landlord of the Star. He has persevered with the maintenance of the venue famed for its monthly Smiths/Morrissey disco, at great personal cost, for more than 20 years. “It’s like they’re shaking my hand and saying, ‘Thanks for looking after it – now fuck off.’”

The Star and Garter holds the misfortune of sitting between two of the largest development projects coming to Manchester. The artisan fire exit will soon overlook the £550m Mayfield development. The front door faces the expansion site of Piccadilly, part of Network Rail’s Northern Hub project, including the proposed HS2 high-speed line, the construction of which will force the Star to close its doors for three years.

These may not be the grandest buildings, but they are the cultural narrative of this city Yigal Landey

In late 2015, the Star and Garter, with two centuries of heritage, Grade II listing and 200-capacity venue space, turned down an offer from Network Rail equivalent to a two-bedroom apartment in the city centre. Martin had previously rejected an offer from London and Continental Railways, owners of the Mayfield depot site, of £100,000 – just £20,000 more than what the ravaged and abandoned public house was bought for in the late 80s.

“They’ll get this place through a compulsory purchase offer, or whatever,” Martin says. “They’ll get it on the cheap, skirt round the listed building shite, say it’s unsafe and knock it down. If it stays afloat, they sell it on to a coffee chain. Either way, they’re quids in.”

Across the city, the smaller Oxford Road Station is also set to grow as part of the Northern Hub plans. The path down from its wooden-roofed platform leads to 70 Oxford Street, known until May last year as the Cornerhouse, Manchester’s most iconic mixed-use arts venue.

Along with the Grand Central rock pub, popular among the city’s alternative crowd, and The Salisbury Inn, a Dickensian pub extending into pushed-together Georgian housing, the collection is known as Little Ireland after its migrant population.

Tensions over the future of the site post-Cornerhouse were heightened in 2012 when a feasibility study by Fletcher Priest Architects showed Little Ireland replaced by modern towers. Plans are still to be revealed by the sole bidding developer, Bruntwood.

“Because Manchester is doing better than anybody expected, land is at a premium,” explains Yigal Landey, a land manager and attendee of a Save Oxford Road Corner meeting at Kro Bar, opposite Manchester University. “These buildings were the bread and butter of Manchester. They’re not the grandest, but they’re the cultural narrative of the city.”

The Cornerhouse cinema in Manchester relocated with the Library Theatre Company to a new £25m arts complex. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Across the table, professional urbanist Victoria Payne brings the conversation back to what lies ahead: “In my experience as a planner, if you have a project that is going to be unpopular, you keep it quiet.”

The Cornerhouse closed it doors forever on 4 April 2015. Its essence moved a few hundred yards down Whitworth Street West and was reborn in the £25m Home arts complex built with its back to the city, facing the once-creative hub of Hulme and the coming four Owen Street skyscrapers.

Sat on the privately owned terrace in bright orange Aperol sunglasses, Jonathan Schofield, Manchester International Festival tour guide and Mancunian historian sips a pint of ale and contemplates whether a state of hysteria is arising over the changing face of the city.

“We’re in danger of becoming a York or Chester, which is the last thing I want. Many of the old Victorian buildings they try to preserve ... it would’ve been surprising to the original architects they’re still standing,” says Schofield, who in his book Lost and Imagined Manchester lamented the short sightedness of the 1960s rip it up and start again attitude to iconic buildings. “But what we don’t want to get rid of is the good stuff.”

One example of the good stuff Schofield highlights is the Ralph Abercromby pub. Early plans drawn out by a property consortium including Manchester United legend Gary Neville suggest the historic pub is to make way for a pocket garden beside a luxury hotel, apartment and office new build.

“I took a closed-down pub in the middle of the recession. I’ve turned it around and been teaching people about the history,” explains Old Trafford-born landlord of the Ralph Abercromby, Mike Christodoulou, sitting below one of several frames he has mounted on the walls explaining its history.

While the Peterloo Massacre was taking place in 1819 yards away through Albert Hall and across Peter’s Street, the wounded were brought to the Ralph Abercromby for medical treatment. It remains one of the few sites still standing from that turning point in British history which ultimately led to the birth of trade unionism and, indeed, the Guardian newspaper.

Oxford Road station is set to be expanded as part of the Northern Hub plans, putting the future of the Salisbury pub at risk. Photograph: Loop Images Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

Though the rallying of hands to online petitions such as that to ‘save the Ralph Abercromby’ adds to the sentimental stock of buildings under threat. The outcomes of what happens to heritage buildings are in the hands of private owners – unless dealt a compulsory purchase order.

In Manchester, notification of proposed demolitions and construction plans go to consultation months before decisions are officially signed off by the town hall planning executive.

“If there’s a planning application, the planners have to go to consultation. This includes thousands of letters sent to local residents, notification signs and notices in local media,” city centre councillor Joan Davies explains. “But often consultations have no response.”

One issue facing Mancunians who do decide to react to planning proposals is the uninviting planning portal on which Manchester City Council hosts proposals and collects comments and objections. The site resembles an outdated library search page instead of a public forum through which the citizens of the UK’s second city decides its future.

“Every time I see an older building being taken away, it’s a little bit of the soul [of the city] being eaten away,” says Davies’ fellow Labour councillor, Beth Knowles. Since moving to her Ancoats apartment four years ago, she has seen the landscape beneath her crumble and laments the lack of opportunities available to halt planning decisions. “Scrutiny committees are the only real public forum and you’re scrutinising things that have already been decided.”

Indeed, recent history shows that even when a large section of the public is engaged and rallies to oppose an unpopular plan, it can have little or no effect on the outcome.

The picturesque right of way between Manchester’s Central Library and Town Hall was legally closed in March 2015, months after one of the city’s most loathed pieces of architecture had already been completed. A glass oval with warped aluminium dripping from its ceiling was the eventual result of a four-year battle between council and campaigners, during which council leader Sir Richard Leese described the path on Twitter as “just the space left between two buildings”.

“The Save Library Walk campaign really opened my eyes to [the question of] who’s heritage are we trying to retain here?” says Salford-born Steve Millington, senior lecturer in Human Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University. “We were academics, activists, professionals who knew how to organise a campaign, knew how to access knowledge in a very expert way and we lost. It seems anything goes at the moment.”

Perhaps the solution to concerns such as those of Millington and his fellow campaigners lies in building greater awareness of what the city has to offer. Stretching ownership of the city’s historic assets across the sprawling Greater Manchester conurbation of 2.7 million residents could highlight just what the city faces losing, if it continues to rip it up and start again.

“I took a group of nearly 50 on a free coach tour from Harpurhey, north Manchester,” says Jonathan Schofield, who would like the city council to arrange tours of the city for school children. “Not one had been to Salford Quays, the university area, Manchester Art Gallery, Chinatown ... It was the most depressing thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

But with the greatest growth the city has seen since the industrial revolution lying ahead, the prospect of Manchester taking an irreversible step too far in the destruction of its heritage is only a few wrecking-ball swings away.

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