Manchester, England (CNN) — Britain badly needs its mojo back. Its economy is struggling, public services are strained and improvements in living standards have slowed to a crawl in recent decades. Political instability is the new normal, and the national mood is bleak.
Could a healthy dose of hope from Andy Burnham be the antidote?
The former mayor of Greater Manchester, in the northwest of England, Burnham will become the United Kingdom’s seventh prime minister in a decade on Monday after replacing Keir Starmer as leader of the ruling Labour Party.
He has promised the country “a new era of possibility.”
While his predecessor lacked charisma, Burnham is a natural communicator with an easy-going vibe and a gift for galvanizing people. He is likeable and funny — in a “dad jokes” kind of way — and his smart-casual fashion choices make him relatable.
He is also an experienced politician, having been a member of parliament and a cabinet minister for many years before trading London for Manchester in 2017. Now, he wants to bring “Manchesterism” — his brand of business-friendly, locally empowered social democracy — to the British capital and the rest of the UK.
“I am going to give Britain the circuit breaker it needs,” he said in a speech last month, as he launched his third bid in the past 16 years for leadership of the Labour Party.
As mayor of Greater Manchester for nine years, Burnham oversaw a city region whose economy has grown at roughly twice the rate of the country as a whole.
The city is “unrecognizable” from the one that Lucy Ellison, a 33-year-old café manager, grew up in. She moved back two years ago after working in hospitality in the United States and Amsterdam for 12 years.
“It feels like a different city,” she told CNN, mentioning the “quirky wine shops and independent bakeries we never used to have.”
‘Love Notes to Manchester’
Wine bars, specialty coffee shops and upmarket cafés now proliferate in a city with a distinctly optimistic and ambitious energy. Last month, Condé Nast Traveller named Manchester the UK’s “brightest foodie destination.”
A bustling hospitality scene is part of the reason why Hip Pop, a local soda and kombucha brand, has thrived. Co-founder Emma Thackray started the company in her kitchen in 2019, selling at markets in the north of England.
The brand is now stocked by most major UK supermarkets and sold in several other European countries. Thackray wants to “build a global brand, from the heart of Manchester,” she told CNN, as she enthused about the many positive changes in the city where she was a university student more than two decades ago.
On a street downtown called Deansgate, local artist Helen Davies, 32, sits in a shop front working on a collection of paintings dubbed “Love Notes to Manchester,” an ode to a place she “continues to fall for,” according to a writeup in the window.
Nearby, brightly painted steps lead to Deansgate Mews, where an eclectic mix of eateries can be found. A youthful clientele enjoys lunch in the sunshine or types away busily on laptops, part of a growing cohort of young workers who have moved to the city in recent years, many from London.
Manchester is more affordable than London and still offers high-quality restaurants, a vibrant night-life and top-notch arts and culture.
About a 10-minute walk from Deansgate Mews, Aviva Studios — an enormous cultural venue that opened in 2023 — is currently hosting a major new exhibition by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Aviva is the UK’s largest investment in a cultural project since London’s Tate Modern, an art gallery that opened at the turn of the century.
Fraser Millward is familiar with both venues, having left a 20-year career in London’s theater and live events industry in 2021 to join the organization that runs Aviva, Factory International, as a technician.
“Manchester is something else,” he told CNN. “It’s got an energy about it that’s unlike anything else in the UK. It’s got a really exciting buzz.”
A dramatic turnaround
Manchester wasn’t always this way. A once mighty metropolis at the heart of Britain’s industrial revolution in the 19th century, the city was in “almost terminal decline” by the 1980s, said Richard Leese, who led Manchester City Council from 1996 until 2021.
Its decades-long transformation was driven by a long-term strategic plan that involved partnerships between business and government to drive investment in infrastructure, skills and education, Leese told CNN. A major reconstruction of the city center was undertaken after a bomb set off by the Irish Republican Army in 1996 damaged many buildings.
Unlike the country as a whole, Manchester has also had stable leadership, with Labour enjoying an overwhelming majority in local government for much of that period, allowing it to consistently drive change.
“One of the things that Manchester has really proven in cultural policy and other areas is that longer-term thinking is essential,” said John McGrath, the chief executive of Factory International.
Now, Manchester attracts more overseas investment than any British city outside London and is ranked among Europe’s top 15 cities for investment, according to EY and Invest Manchester, a regional agency.
It has made the most of its industrial heritage, repurposing old warehouses and factories into modern apartment blocks and co-work spaces. Factory International also pays tribute to the city’s cultural history, taking its name from Factory Records. The seminal former record label, based in Manchester, launched the likes of band Joy Division and ran the famous Haçienda nightclub, on the site of which stand apartments today.
A positive future
While the origins of Manchester’s renaissance pre-date Burnham by about 30 years, he is widely credited with dramatically improving the city’s previously patchy public transport services, a legacy epitomized by the network of yellow “Bee” buses. He has also not interfered with a winning formula and has played a part in boosting investment.
Not all parts of Greater Manchester have shared in the city’s success, however. The region continues to have high “relatively levels of deprivation compared to the national average,” according to a local government report.
And while Manchester’s story shows that change is possible, it also demonstrates that change takes time to deliver. Burnham may have only three years before the next general election, which must be held by mid-August 2029, raising doubts about whether he will have long enough to tackle the country’s myriad economic problems — not least a ballooning welfare bill and growing youth unemployment.
His ability to implement policies aimed at boosting economic growth — such as reindustrialization, building more social housing and taking greater public control of utilities — will also be severely constrained by weak government finances.
Burnham, for his part, has seen firsthand how change is wrought, giving him a steely reserve to fight for it. His decision to take control of Manchester’s bus network, for example, faced significant resistance from private bus companies and took several years to accomplish.
Manchester, meanwhile, faced enormous challenges in its comeback, from high levels of poverty and unemployment to poor education and crumbling infrastructure. Those fortunes slowly shifted through the consistent efforts of “several thousand people,” according to Leese.
He highlights another crucial element in the city’s success: the fact that it has “regained its self-confidence.”
“Cities that believe they can do things, do do things,” he added. Leese said the current government under Starmer and finance minister Rachel Reeves were elected “with the promise of a bright new future,” but then “spent six months telling everybody how bad everything was.”
Economists have likewise said the government did not capitalize on the wave of optimism felt after the 2024 election, a missed opportunity which weakened business confidence and impacted investment.
Still, while Burnham’s outlook is far more hopeful, “details are scarce,” said Paul Dales, chief UK economist at Capital Economics. “We are not encouraged by Burnham’s economic plan,” he wrote in a note this week, citing Burnham’s “narrow” diagnosis of the UK’s economic challenges.
“He thinks the problem is that local governments don’t have enough power and the overall government does not have enough control,” Dales said. “But these are only small contributing factors to the big issues of low investment and low savings resulting in low productivity growth, and the size and quality of the labour force not growing fast enough.”
Leese, on the other hand, argues that Burnham’s upbeat approach will pay dividends. “His agenda will be about messages of hope and a positive future, which is not just hot air, it’s an essential element of giving people some confidence that we do have a better future,” he said.
A weary Britain is counting on it.
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