Walk through Manchester’s Corporation Street and you’ll see the 19th-century pomp of Victoria Station abutting an outcrop of high rises — many finished, all glass and steel, but others mere holes in the ground, a rough temporary carpark filled with rubble and dirt. The ‘New Vic’ development, another mass of skyscrapers, looks finished outside but is still looking for tenants. Like 40% of Manchester new builds, these apartments are raised for generation rent. Slogans in letting-office windows urge graduates to ‘reserve your home today’ even as 15,000 new homes announced as ‘coming soon’ are not yet built. This is Manchester. But it is also Chinese Manchester.
The New Vic is partly funded by Chinese money, though the local council keeps the exact amount secret. Elsewhere, on Dantzic Street, Pinnacle, a UK developer, went into administration in 2017 after failing to build tower blocks, leaving off-plan buyers in Hong Kong short some £31 million. Manchester police and the Serious Fraud Squad investigated irregularities but no charges were laid for lack of evidence. A Hong Kong company, Far Eastern Consortium, then bought the site and plans to develop it, but construction is delayed, and Manchester’s building-site aesthetic endures.
“Chinese money fuels Manchester's development as Burnham's 'Manchesterism' praised, but unfinished towers and secrecy raise questions.”
This landscape is the physical manifestation of what some call ‘Manchesterism’ — the philosophy of Andy Burnham, the metro mayor. Speaking to Channel 4 News, Rose Marley, chief executive of Co-operatives UK and a former adviser to Burnham, said the mayor ‘has done what he said he was going to do in Manchester’. Richard Leese, former Manchester city council leader, also endorsed the approach. But the reliance on opaque Chinese investment — from Far Eastern Consortium, Beijing Construction Engineering Group International, CR Construction and others, aided and abetted by the council — raises questions about who is really shaping the city. The UnHerd journalist noted that the whole area looks ‘crumbling, uninviting, not joined up to anything’, despite the foreign cash. Flush from his victory, Burnham’s Manchesterism may be a success story, but it is one built on unfinished towers and invisible debt.