‘Massively moving’: Sir Mark Elder waves goodbye to Manchester

Dear Millers — welcome to this week’s briefing, which leads on a very emotional finale at the Bridgewater Hall for Sir Mark Elder, the longtime music director at the Hallé. We also have news on what’s happening to the iconic Hotspur Press building and a lovely Home of the Week in Bolton.

With a month until the General Election, it’s been a busy day of political news. First Nigel Farage announced that he is going to contest a seat at the election and has taken over the leadership of his Reform party, potentially a significant blow to the Conservatives. Then a big election projection published by Sky News showed that Labour could be on course for a massive landslide victory — we’re talking the most seats won by any party since 1924.

YouGov’s MRP poll thinks that based on public sentiment at this point, Labour would win 422 seats, the Tories would get 140 and the Lib Dems would end up with 48. The poll says every seat in Greater Manchester would go red except for Hazel Grove and Cheadle in Stockport, which would go to the Lib Dems. For detailed local analysis of the elections, check out our members-only report from last week.

🗞️ Our weekend read about Sir Harry Evans has been a hit. His wife — the superstar editor Tina Brown — called the piece “wonderful”, the former FT assistant editor Brian Groom called it “lovely” and longtime Mill member David Winkley said in the comments: “Dear me, another brilliant and moving article.”

🏘️ Last week we published pieces about Manchester’s housing crisis — and how it really exists in the suburbs. “The worst of the housing crisis isn’t lit up in apartment windows and visible from the Peak District,” writes James Gilmour. “It is happening elsewhere, and has very different causes, wrapped up in the ongoing yet under-discussed transformation of Manchester’s economy.”

💰 To read all of our sparkling members-only stories and support our mission to provide high-quality, independent and often delightful journalism in Greater Manchester, please join as a member now if you haven’t done so yet. We now have 3,228 paying members, who chat in the comments under our stories, come to our events and feel part of this wonderful collective endeavour. It only costs £8.90 per month to join, or just £1.70 a week if you join for a year upfront. That means you can feel better informed and more connected to the place you live for less than the price of a Bee Network bus — what a steal!

🌦️This week’s weather

Local weatherman Martin Miles says the first week of June is going to be unseasonably cold. ​​”I wish I could give better news about the weather, but as we know so well, the great British Summer is rarely just sunshine and butterflies.” Let us down gently, Martin.

Tuesday🌦️ Bright spells early on before showery rain moves in from the north west by lunchtime. Turning windy and feeling cool. Max 15°c.

Wednesday🌦️ Windy with a mixture of sunny spells and blustery showers. Max 14°c.

Thursday🌦️ Breezy with bright spells and occasional short-lived showers. Max 14°c.

Friday🌦️ Showery during the morning then turning drier with intermittent sunshine during the afternoon. Milder, but still breezy. Max 16°c.

Weekend🌦️ Remaining changeable with further sunny spells and showers, although temperatures will be milder and closer to the seasonal average. Warmer next week.

The big story: Sir Mark Elder bows out 

Top line: Manchester waved goodbye to one of its most significant cultural figures this weekend as Sir Mark Elder gave his final Manchester concerts as the Hallé’s music director. Elder has held the role for almost a quarter of a century and The Mill was present at his emotional finale on Saturday. This was the moment Elder came out to take the crowd’s applause at the Bridgewater Hall for the final time. 

The backstory: Elder took over the Hallé in 2000 and is widely credited with making it one of the most respected orchestras in the country. He is considered to be Britain’s second best-known conductor after Sir Simon Rattle and he was knighted in 2008. It was announced last year that this would be his final year at the helm. This weekend was his farewell to Manchester, but he will be leading the orchestra a few more times around the UK this summer, including at the Proms. 

Reaction: “For many of us, the Hallé Orchestra and Sir Mark Elder are one and the same – is anyone else experiencing separation anxiety?” asked the music writer Andrew Meller, who writes that before Elder took over, the Hallé “was mediocre, miserable, poorly managed and flirting with bankruptcy.” Writing for Classial Music, He calls Elder’s tenure “one of the most remarkable transformations in British orchestral history.” 

The reviews: The Times gave Elder’s final concert a five-star review, with critic Rebecca Franks writing: 

In the room: We attended the Saturday concert, which had been added because the Friday night finale was sold out. It featured not just the orchestra but a massive choir too, made up of the Hallé Choir, Hallé Youth Choir and Hallé Children’s Choir. It was the European premiere of James MacMillan’s Timotheus, Bacchus and Cecilia, a work specially commissioned for this occasion.

• One Miller who was in the hall called it a “very emotional experience” and tweeted: “The James MacMillan piece with the kids' choir was so massively moving.” 

• Another reader tweeted us: “When it ended, my friend turned to me and just said, 'Wow!'. So glad to have been there.” 

A bonus piece: After the orchestra played Mahler’s Fifth Symphony in the second half, Elder received a massive ovation from the crowd. In a speech, he told concertgoers that they should “shout from the rooftops” about the quality of the Hallé and said: "I can never forget what we have shared together". Elder then led one final piece, Elgar’s Chanson de Nuit. 

As good as any team: The Telegraph’s five-star write-up of Friday’s concert noted Elder’s remark from the podium that “any sort of marriage is tricky” — perhaps a reference to strained relations between the exacting Elder and some of the orchestra’s musicians. Elder followed it up by saying: “But we’ve always worked to achieve the absolute best we could do.” The newspaper’s critic Ivan Howett wrote in his piece: “Anyone who’s followed the orchestra over that time, as I have, knows that ‘the best’ this team has achieved has been as good as any team anywhere.” 

What’s next? The baton now passes from the 77-year-old Elder to the 37-year-old Singaporean Kahchun Wong, who takes over as principal conductor and artistic advisor (Elder will come back to conduct occasional concerts in future as conductor emeritus). When we watched Wong’s first performance with the orchestra as a guest conductor last year, he got an extremely warm reception from the crowd. Perhaps everyone in the room could sense that he has very big shoes to fill. 

Your Mill briefing

🌹 Sir Keir Starmer was at the Fusilier Museum in Bury today to defend Labour’s defence policies, reiterate the party’s commitment to the UK’s nuclear deterrent and tell reporters that recent private school closures have “nothing to do” with a planned Labour policy to charge VAT on their fees. Last week, we covered the local reaction to the Starmer-aligned candidates parachuted into safe Labour seats in Greater Manchester. 

🏡 The MEN takes a look at Manchester City Council’s plans to build 10,000 affordable homes by 2032. The council are doing this via their own development company, This City, and Manchester Life, the management company regenerating Ancoats. It would mean more affordable homes in and on the outskirts of the city centre, which might feel like a novelty given the lack of affordable housing included in most new developments. Salboy, currently working on what will be the city’s tallest tower, are also planning a 23-storey tower of affordable housing just by Beetham Tower.

🌇 Hotspur Press, the 1801 Cotton Mill on the bank of the River Medlock, will be redeveloped into student accommodation, with 595 bedrooms across 37 storeys. The original building’s facade and signage will be preserved. More of this purpose built student accommodation is cropping up around the south of the city centre towards the universities, likely to the joy of some in places like Fallowfield and Hulme, where tensions have been rising between longer-term residents and students living in houses carved up into HMOs. We wrote about that last year: Where is Manchester supposed to put its students?

🥐 Trove, the popular bakery in Ancoats, has closed after losing its lease. It’s been on Murray Street since 2018, with other sites on Marble Street, in Levenshulme and in Wilmslow. It recently announced the closure of its Stockport site.

💍 The first wedding held at Afflecks was over the weekend. Sean Berry, who has been selling posters at Afflecks since the ‘80s, met his wife Millie back in the ‘90s. They had put the wedding off until now, Berry said, because of "some very boring reasons like inheritance and tax".

Home of the week

This beautiful Grade-II listed cottage in Lostock, Bolton used to be servants’ quarters for the nearby Lostock Hall Gatehouse. It was restored by National Heritage and is now on the market for £600,000, with three bedrooms, wraparound gardens and charming period features.

Our favourite reads

Jeanette Winterson on Manchester, ‘the unquenchable city’ — The Financial Times

“There are all kinds of explanations for the Manchester magic,” writes the novelist Jeanette Winterson for the FT. “Coal, canals, cheap accommodation (then, not now); even the weather. None goes deep enough. Go deeper. It’s under your feet – in the layers of soil and time. If this sounds fanciful, visit Jodrell Bank, 20 miles south of the city. One of its telescopes is near the site of a Bronze Age barrow. What can’t be hidden by the impressive distractions of the visitor experience is the energy itself. Powerful, eerie and strange.”

A moment that changed me: I survived a terror attack – and found healing through a choir — The Guardian

Cath Hill, a survivor of the Arena Bomb, writes about the anxiety that followed the attack, and how subsequent attacks around the world compounded that anxiety. It was only after visiting the doctors that she was registered as a survivor of the attack, which meant she could be put in touch with others. Eventually, she joined the Manchester Survivors Choir, which helped with some of the guilt she experienced. “Connecting with other survivors led me to realise that I could be proactive months afterwards, and offer support and help in a way that I didn’t on the night.”

Sheffield was in decline. In Bill Stephenson’s photos, the city still glows — The Tribune in Sheffield

We loved this piece from our sister paper, The Tribune, about the working-class photographer Bill Stephenson who covered the city’s football hooligans, music scene and declining steel industry. His most famous work was in Hyde Park flats, called Streets in the Sky. “Stephenson had expected to find residents who felt dwarfed by the concrete jungle and desperate to leave,” writes Victoria Munro. “Before long, he’d realised that what was actually in front of him was ‘a very cohesive community’ of people who thoroughly enjoyed the estate.”

Our to do list

Tuesday

📚 Booker Prize-winner Marlon James will be in conversation at Deansgate Waterstones, marking the 10-year-anniversary release of his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, a fictionalisation of the real-life attempted murder of Bob Marley. Tickets here.

🎨 There’s a life drawing class at Studio Bee in the Northern Quarter, above the Peer Hat, featuring beer, wine and tapas. Let that affect your art as it may. Tickets here.

Wednesday

😁 Title Fight, at GRUB, is a comedy night that pits two acts against one another. The catch is that opponents get to choose the title of the other performer’s act. Book here.

🗣️ The Bolton History Society is hosting a talk on how the American Civil War affected the Lancashire Cotton Famine, promising insights into the cotton trade and what the people of Lancashire thought about transatlantic slavery. Book here.

Thursday 

🖼️ Award-winning Journalist Gary Younge will be in conversation with Sook-Kyung Lee, the new director of the Whitworth as part of the Universally Manchester Festival. Tickets are free. 

📖 Helen McCarthy, the first English-speaking author to write about anime, is giving a talk about the art history of Studio Ghibli at Friends’ Meeting House on Mount Street. Get tickets.