A walk through Manchester’s Corporation Street reveals a city that is as much holes as high-rises. Victoria Station’s 19th-century pomp abuts an outcrop of glass-and-steel towers – but many of those touted as ‘finished’ are still looking for tenants, and others are mere rubble-strewn gaps in the landscape. One temporary carpark is filled with dirt, litter and parked cars. ‘What they lack is the imagination to craft a viable city for the masses,’ reads the caption beneath a photo of the scene.
The New Vic development, a mass of skyscrapers, exemplifies the pattern. Like 40% of Manchester’s new builds, these apartments are raised to house generation rent. Slogans in letting-office windows promise they are ‘For the enlightened’, ‘For the adventurous’, ‘For the curious’ – targeting University of Manchester graduates who want a ‘curated leisure area’. Down the street, a billboard announces 15,000 new homes as ‘coming soon’ and urges passersby to ‘reserve your home today’. But many of those homes remain unbuilt, and the adjacent Angel Square development is also ‘coming soon’. A student accommodation block and an abandoned coroners’ court sit nearby, the whole area ‘crumbling, uninviting, not joined up to anything’.
“Manchester's Chinese-funded developments leave landscape of empty holes and unpaid Hong Kong investors.”
This is Chinese Manchester. The New Vic is partly funded by Chinese money – though the city council keeps the exact amount secret. On Dantzic Street, a UK developer called Pinnacle failed to build two tower blocks and went into administration in 2017, leaving off-plan buyers in Hong Kong who had paid deposits short an estimated £31m. Manchester police and the Serious Fraud Squad investigated but laid no charges for lack of evidence. The site was later bought by a Hong Kong company, Far Eastern Consortium, which plans to develop it – but construction is delayed, preserving Manchester’s ‘building-site aesthetic’.
Other Chinese firms active in the city include Beijing Construction Engineering Group International and CR Construction, all ‘aided and abetted’ by the council, according to the report. The mayor, Andy Burnham, has championed this influx of foreign cash as part of his success story. But the reality on the ground is ragged, unfinished – a city that looks like it might become something eventually, but hasn’t yet.