Clinging on in east Manchester

By Alec Herron 

Pebbledashed council maisonettes with their first-storey walkways and cement so thick it feels like it will never set, lined by cracked frosted glass leading to a vented bin shaft. A novel invention, before recycling was a twinkle in the council’s eye: you take your bin bag to the steel swing shutter, open it, put your rubbish in and enjoy the satisfying sound of it landing ten feet below, followed by a horrific waft of everyone on the row’s mulched rot. I have an unreliable memory of my cousin once climbing down it when we were kids. 

My gran’s house was here on the Grey Mare Lane estate in Beswick, east Manchester. From the first floor street I once watched as gas rigs were dismantled and spiralling concrete walkways emerged from the ground, feeding the third tier of what would eventually become Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium. Inside, Sundays were filled with rice pudding, sucking bone marrow and hours sat around the table hearing stories of tragedy and petty gossip told with the same veracity. Stories I’d love to hear again. From the windows, the only red lights on the city’s skyline were the CIS and Piccadilly towers.

It will all be coming down soon. The four walls and surrounding estate in which so much of my childhood memory lives will be replaced. Almost everything built before the Commonwealth Games in 2002 is set to be demolished within the next few years. Only a handful of residents remain in this block, with a few more in the identical one opposite. Streets that once guided us to now long-gone market stalls of felt-lined colouring boards and penny sweets sit empty. Most people have left knowing their homes are coming down, on a promise they will be able to return. The remaining residents huddle in pockets of 1970s terraces, awaiting their marching orders. 

When there’s no match at the Etihad, the locals return to its nearest pub, Mary D’s Beamish Bar. The paint on the walls screams the names, songs and mantras of CITY! – interrupted only to hint at the pub’s Irish roots with that most Irish of symbols, a road sign. At the bar are Colin and Steven, two brothers in their sixties who have lived on the estate all their lives. Colin is one of numerous residents whose home is coming down as part of a regeneration plan. Colin shows me his options on Manchester Move, the platform for applying for social housing tenancies. None are in Beswick. He volunteers most evenings as a coach at a community boxing club; for that to work, he needs to be local.

Their friends and family have already moved out of the area. Pointing out the window, they take me through which rows of housing are staying and which are going. They say the community has gone to pot; that since the stadium arrived, the neighbourhood hasn’t been a concern for those in charge of the city.

Steven has taken direct action against football fans urinating on his property. A quick squirt of a hose pipe out a window and a feigned apology usually clears them off. But it doesn’t solve the complaints he has with reduced parking spaces for residents. I’m reminded of when my gran, who never drove in her life, planned to buy a clapped-out old banger to squat in front of her house and stop football fans parking there on a matchday. 

As I step outside Mary D’s, two teenage lads speed past pulling wheelies on a motorbike. They reach the far end of the road past the next block of maisonettes to be demolished, then turn around and do the same back. I walk towards Tesco, once the Victoria Inn where my mum and dad went on dates in the 1970s. The two lads follow me en route, then turn around in the store car park to speak with a group in a pulled-over car. After a few seconds and a hand in the window, they’re off again. You can’t help but be impressed with the agility and balance, the wheelies lasting the length of the estate, the sound of the engine echoing off every surrounding semi-derelict building like a chorus of angry sirens. It’s a shame no one’s here to see them. 

The group in the car pull away as I arrive. Each one has an inflated balloon pursed between their lips, including the driver. 

I meet Michelle, emerging from a patchwork row of abandonment. Some houses still lived in, some boarded up. She tells me her father has been taken into hospital that morning and that his flat, which is due for demolition, is full of damp.

‘Sportcity’ was the name of the 1990s plan to regenerate this part of East Manchester, at a time when 78% of its residents were claiming at least one form of welfare benefit. The plan was to build and populate the largest concentration of sporting venues in Europe. The success of that ambition is undeniable: the area is now home to 80 acres of world-class football facilities, the ‘medal factory’ velodrome and BMX centre, National Squash Centre, Rugby League’s HQ and now the largest indoor arena in the UK, Co-op Live. 

The regeneration of Grey Mare Lane estate was initiated after a 2017 public consultation concluded the estate was being “left behind”. Late last year, a £70 million masterplan for the area was withdrawn, two years after being first presented to residents. The Manchester Evening News reported that the housing association One Manchester, who own and manage the majority of the social housing stock on the estate, had been deemed ‘not up to the task’, and the larger housing association Great Places was brought in.

Two weeks ago a new masterplan was released. 124 social rented homes are to be demolished, and at least 550 new homes built — more than double the number of the previous masterplan. Meetings are held bi-monthly with a steering group of local stakeholders including the council, housing associations, the local MP, councillors and residents. It looks like a lot of thought has gone into the future of the estate, and one day it will be a tidy place to live for people from a mixture of social backgrounds.

So why do the long-term residents of Grey Mare Lane estate that I speak to still feel they’re not being given fair treatment? Various attendees of the latest stakeholder meeting tell me that the council chair of the group voiced their frustration at representatives of One Manchester for not having formalised a mechanism for displaced residents to return to the area, despite this promise being communicated in several forms since 2019. They ordered a legally binding document to this effect be produced ahead of the next meeting in July.

Jonathan and Gillian are friends and next-door neighbours, who along with Danny from two doors down, have become prominent voices at these meetings. They show me documentation from 2021 assuring them they will be moved into new homes on the site ‘within an early phase of the development’. The same letter from One Manchester also states clearly that tenants will be offered a ‘flat with the same number of bedrooms that you currently have’. 

They were led to believe that when housing is built on one of the estate’s various empty plots, they will be moved across before the demolition of their home begins. That promise has now been withdrawn, and they’ll need to find somewhere else through Manchester Move by the end of the year. 2027 has been given as the earliest possible point they could move back to Grey Mare Lane. 

In 2013 the ‘bedroom tax’ was introduced by the government, reducing housing benefit for those in ‘underoccupied’ homes — in other words, people who are deemed to have more bedrooms in their social housing than they need. Jonathan has most recently been told that as he and his partner rent a two-bedroom council maisonette his home is underoccupied, and they will have to move into a one-bedroom property, outside of the area. His partner suffered a stroke three weeks ago; he blames it on the stress. Both he and Gillian insist they won’t be moved from the estate, even if the bulldozers arrive with them still indoors.

I walk past the home of my gran’s good friend, Nelly. I chuckle, recalling the time an earthquake had Nelly falling out of bed to which she wrote to the council to complain. What a shame it is to see her home abandoned. It must be due for demolition, I think. Then I see a figure through the window. The house isn’t abandoned, but merely in a shocking state of disrepair.

In the adjacent street, I speak with Sarah. She has been attending meetings on the future of the estate for 15 years. Her home isn’t threatened with demolition, but she wishes it was. She and fellow owner-occupiers were promised (and signed documents to permit) the retrofitting of their homes, including cladding and roof upgrades in line with the council-rented properties. While work on council properties has long been completed, homes bought under the right-to-buy scheme like hers remain untouched. It leaves a visual signifier of who owns and who rents — a security worry for some, who believe it exposes those who could be perceived to have more money.

The lack of adequate information, the backtracking, the uncertainty about what the future looks like, when it will arrive and how they will fit into it, and the overflowing sentiment that their quality of life is not being considered, has had an effect on the residents of Grey Mare Lane estate. Two years ago, the Liberal Democrats returned a councillor in the ward covering Beswick, their first since 1996. Various residents, all lifelong Labour supporters, and a trade union steward, tell me they threw their support behind Lib Dem Alan Good after he came knocking on residents’ doors, listening to their issues and taking them to the council — something they say the Labour councillors weren’t doing. One year later, the ward returned its second Lib Dem, Chris Northwood.

Why is any of this necessary? Why does a neighbourhood that was built to rehome Manchester’s inner-city working class, back when their streets were deemed to be slums, now need to be demolished? Like any journalist worth their salt, I went to the finest source of information possible. I asked my mum.

“For a lot of us moving from Ancoats, the idea of an indoor toilet, of running warm water, was luxury.”

My mum moved into the maisonette with her younger brother and widowed mother when the Newcombe Close block opened in 1970. She never believed the houses were going to be around for a long time — that the council were just doing the best they could with the limited funds they had. By the mid-1990s the estate’s honeymoon period was well and truly over. Decline had crept in through the back door, plugged in its stereo and turned the volume up for all the neighbours to hear. For my family, things were about to get worse.

Speaking with two men posing as potential new tenants interested in the area, a neighbour let slip that the woman next door lived alone. They had the confirmation they needed. Opening the front door on a chain, the men headbutted my gran through the gap. They headbutted her again and again, forcing her down the corridor. While the beatings continued they dragged her around the house, forcing her to hand them every penny of the pension she had collected that morning and walked home with, likely being followed. Before leaving they tied her to a bed and gagged her to ensure their clean escape. There was barely an inch of her body left unbruised.

Doctors would later conclude that the brutal violence visited upon my gran that day was the prime cause of her early onset dementia, which would lead to a rapid decline in her health and, within a handful of years, her death.

Whenever I travelled up from Wythenshawe to visit my gran, the Grey Mare Lane estate felt like it had an edge. Walking certain streets seemed to carry more weight than back home. People’s faces seemed a bit tougher. Wythenshawe wasn’t without its social issues, but my street had a field to play football on and we were allowed out unsupervised. In Beswick, we were kept under the watchful eyes of aunties, uncles and gran. Being back for this story has chipped away at my negative memories. 

“Your gran is the only reason I’m still here,” says Maz, who has run the shop in the ground floor unit below my gran’s maisonette for 36 years. “I was robbed twice in quick succession when I opened this shop. I was ready to give it all up. Your gran told me: Don’t let the bastards win.” During their troubled times on the estate, Maz and my gran looked out for each other. It now breaks his heart to see the estate half empty. He doesn’t know when he needs to shut up shop.

Maybe neighbourhoods just change. Maybe, sometimes, the only option is to rip them down and start again. Maybe the Grey Mare Lane estate, as we know it, has reached its expiry date and better things are on the horizon. 

I’ve since moved back to East Manchester. My wife and I bought a home in a gated private development across the Alan Turing Way from the estate, a new neighbourhood borne from the Sportcity vision. My mum was surprised I settled here. Our neighbours are now middle-class families, young professionals, and flatshares that have parties on their balconies. 

The slum housing that my family moved from was in Ancoats, at the northern end of Every Street — now a green space favoured for drinking and drug use. My gran was a care worker in the local area who refused to budge as the families around her were relocated to the edges of the city, including Hattersley, Oldham and Wythenshawe. 

With so many questions left unanswered over several years, to many of the people who call the Grey Mare Lane estate home, it feels as though history is repeating itself. A masterplan for a neighbourhood and a masterplan for the residents that live there are two very different things.