The strange death of Levenshulme Market

By Mollie Simpson

In August 2019, the copywriter and editor Suzy Prince opened Bopcap Books, a bookshop in a small unit in Levenshulme Antiques Village. If you could go back to 2012, when Suzy was a stallholder at Levenshulme Market, and relay that information to her, she would’ve thought you were mad.

Back then, Suzy was raising two young kids. She admits that she only started the market stall to get out of the house and meet people. She paid £37 per week for her spot as a trader, and easily turned a profit selling gift cards and books. She didn’t have grand ambitions to run her own business, but as time went on, her success with customers suggested that she might be underestimating herself. 

One day, a customer mentioned there was a vacant unit in Levenshulme Antiques Village. It was advertised as a short-term lease, meaning she would only need to give a month’s notice if things didn’t work out or she wanted to leave. Business rates and bills were included in the rent, and it was right in the heart of Levenshulme. The opportunity felt too good to pass up. By October 2023, Suzy’s bookshop was doing so well, she expanded it into an even bigger unit in the Antiques Village. 

To this day, Suzy credits her success to her early days as a trader at Levenshulme Market. “It was absolutely invaluable,” she enthuses. “It provided me with really good additional income on the days I was doing the market and it gave me the time to build up my own business, without taking the risk of getting a shop unit and starting from scratch.” 

For ten years, every Saturday and once monthly on a Friday night from March to December, Levenshulme Market ran on a council-owned car park near Levenshulme train station. It was known for street food, art, cocktails, craft beer and gifts, but the first thing people in Levenshulme tell you when you ask about it is the community feel. When it received the Great British Market Award in 2020, the judge remarked that it had “changed the dynamics of an area, and its environment, by creating a vibrant community hub… It represents a real team effort.”

That team effort was central to how the market was run. It was volunteer-led, and operated as a Community Interest Company, or CIC. It reinvested all of its profits back into Levenshulme, including £1,000 towards the Friends of Levenshulme mural on the train station, and £2,000 towards litter clear-ups, even establishing a recycling compound in the area. Many businesses say the decision to open a market stall at Levenshulme Market was the best they ever made: it cost very little, and the weekly schedule meant they had time to test out products, develop a customer base and build contacts — without the risk and hassle of starting from scratch on their own premises.

Levenshulme Market had become a local success story, cementing a narrative of a neighbourhood on the rise. So it was a shock when, on 7 June last year, its directors posted an update on their blog: “We take a break after 10 years.” The market was going to cease trading for the rest of 2023, they wrote. The blog described a “painful planning permission process” where Manchester City Council had asked for additional fees from the market — fees that “would end us financially”. 

“We have weathered many storms over the years and if you can just allow us to take shelter for a while we’ll do our very best to come back stronger than ever when we pop the gazebos back up in 2024,” they wrote. But they pointedly noted they had had “no support from the council and councillors”. In response, Levenshulme’s local councillors wrote in a joint statement on Twitter that they were “genuinely surprised”. “We're all committed to supporting Levenshulme Market and working with the council for a positive outcome,” they wrote.

It’s now the middle of summer 2024, and there are no signs of Levenshulme Market reopening anytime soon. Amanda Finch, one of the market’s directors, says that her neighbours often ask her when it’s coming back, and local Facebook groups have lamented the loss of the market to the community. “It is appalling to read that both the council and our Labour councillors have been so unhelpful,” wrote independent local council candidate Jeremy Hoad, in a popular comment in the local Facebook group Levy Massive. 

For the last two years, the council has widely taken the blame for imposing fees on a struggling independent market that did so much good for the community. But the frustration is being felt equally on their side. To their minds, they’ve given the market the best offer possible. We’ve spoken to both sides, and it seems no-one wants the market to be shut. So why is it?

The blunder

In 2011, Levenshulme suffered an indignity: it was described as a failing high street. According to a council review, Levenshulme had the highest rates of vacant shops anywhere in the city. This was a government priority at the time, and the council secured funding to establish a market in Levenshulme, in the hope of regenerating the high street. But in 2013, after two years of unsuccessfully running the market on its own, they handed operational control over to a CIC, run by a group of local residents.

This was a turnaround moment, and from then onwards the market grew and grew. “I’m really proud of what we achieved,” says Helen Power, one of the market’s original founders. “Obviously, cause and effect is very hard to determine in these things, but lots of new high street businesses opened in the time we were operating, and we were able to fund local small traders and high street regeneration projects with the profits we made.”

The love for Levy Market wasn’t universal. Some started to resent the fact that it took up space in one of the only free car parks in the area every weekend. In 2021, 300 people signed a petition against the market’s application to the council to trade on Sundays as well as Fridays and Saturdays, forcing a backtrack. That same year, someone hacked the market’s Facebook page and removed the admin privileges of the directors.

Others complained that the market didn’t accurately reflect the demographic of Levenshulme, attracting mostly white middle-class shoppers with deep pockets. “It is a valid criticism of the market, we’re not denying that,” says Paul Bower, one of the directors of Levenshulme Market. “But also, I still think the market is more diverse than a lot of our detractors would say… The makeup of the traders and the types of food that the market had was incredibly diverse and representative of a wide range of ethnicities and cultures.”

The administration of running the weekly market was also becoming increasingly stressful. Being volunteer-run, all of the directors had full-time jobs. The market had operated on a temporary trading licence, which a spokesperson for Manchester City Council describes as an informal arrangement. This essentially allowed the market to use the car park without having to pay any rent. Paul explains that the directors had to go through the process of applying for site licence renewal every year, “which involved signing contracts, solicitor fees”. “It was taking up so much of our time,” he says. “We thought something on a four-year licence would give us a bit more time to plan. Little did we know what was about to happen.”

And so, in the summer of 2021, Levenshulme Market applied for a four-year licensing agreement.

This was a fatal misstep. The directors had inadvertently stumbled over a tripwire, triggering the full force of Section 123 of the 1972 Local Government Act. 

Easy as 123

Section 123 won’t be known to all but the most hardcore of local government enthusiasts. But it stipulates the following:

The idea behind it is that councils shouldn’t be able to recklessly flog off assets for less than what they’re worth.

Before the decision to apply for the longer lease, the market could get away with claiming a “short tenancy”, in the words of the Act. Even though they’d been there for 10 years, from a legal point of view that had been 10 short, one-year contracts. That meant they didn’t need to pay what the use of the land was worth, and could essentially use it for free, aside from paying a market rights’ licence fee, permits and fees for waste disposal. But once the lumbering but irrepressible machine of local government law began to grind, there was no going back.

As an opening gambit, the council asked the market to pay commercial rent for use of the site, at £250 per day the market was held. A spokesperson told us that the market value of the land “was robustly assessed to ensure best value for the Council — and by extension Council Taxpayers.”

For the market, the timing was awful. It was struggling after the pandemic, with traders noticing it was much quieter. Adding an extra £250 overhead every day would push the market into the red — so the directors pushed back.

There was another route. A council is allowed to dispose of its own land for less than “Best Consideration” if it believes that the purpose of that disposal will likely contribute to the economic, social and environmental well-being of the area (and that the disposal does not undervalue the site by more than £2 million).

Accordingly, Manchester City Council made their final offer: a profit-share model, where Levenshulme Market would give the council 20% of its annual profits. This, the council told us, “would decrease the risk to the market operators as they wouldn't be beholden to a commercial rate if they either can't operate (e.g. the example they give about not being [operational] in inclement weather or if [a] generator fail[s]), or if they don't turn any profit.”

Levenshulme Market refused this as well, arguing that the profit-share model would eat into their financial reserves and put them at significant risk. And so began a bureaucratic saga that lasted two years. Meetings were held with council officers, the deputy leader of the council and the local MP, Afzal Khan. The market tried to present its case, but the council’s response was unequivocal. This was the offer; take it or leave it. 

Which brings us to the current impasse. The market continues to insist that with the council taking a chunk of their profits, it isn’t worth continuing. Given the many benefits the market brought to the area — supporting businesses, reviving the high street, cleaning up litter — they don’t feel they should have to give a cut away. Meanwhile, the council has dug in, saying it can’t offer anything better. “The council is well aware of how challenging it is to run a commercial market and profit, having had to make the difficult decision to close a number of markets in recent years,” a spokesperson told us. “However, a council can't subsidise a private business. The profit-sharing model was offered as a way of supporting the market to continue to trade — and that opportunity has not been offered to any other market anywhere in the city.”

Everybody loses

Two of Levenshulme Market’s directors, Amanda Finch and Paul Bower, are at Station Hop, a craft beer bar and shop on Levenshulme High Street. Amid this summer’s torrential rain, they both admit to feeling somewhat relieved the market hasn’t been running this summer. “Normally, we would have been so stressed, because the market is so much quieter when the weather is absolutely horrendous,” Paul says. “Although traders don’t blame you, you bear the stress and the weight that they’ve not had a good market.”

I ask what would happen if Levenshulme Market did accept the council’s proposed profit-share model. “We would be building up minimal reserves. We would be building up minimal pots to reinvest in the community, we would have had barely anything to reinvest in our infrastructure,” Amanda says, raking her fingers through her hair.

Was there ever a scenario where they considered accepting the council’s offer? “We could have potentially managed to see how it went for a year, two years,” Amanda says. “But then what would be the purpose, if we're literally just keeping our heads above water?”

The result, it seems, is everybody loses. Market stalls have been replaced by cars. A popular community event has disappeared. The council is being berated for killing the market. And for the next would-be small business, the opportunity to try out their products locally has been lost.

Could the market come back? At the moment, no-one thinks so. It is cruelly ironic that by trying to secure their long-term future, Levenshulme Market is now being asked to accept a decision that would put its long-term future in doubt. But the council is also in a bind — legally required to get “best value” for taxpayers out of a car park. 

And so, it’s another instance of the UK’s chronic tendency to mitigate (and litigate) against local communities coming together. See also: how hard it is for pubs and cafes to get pavement licences (a common practice on the continent) or how easy it is for a slightly noisy event to be shut down on the basis of a couple of complaints.

The council says it still wants a market offer in Levenshulme, and soon it will open a tender process to gather formal expressions of interest. This will be the same commercial rate offered to Levenshulme Market last year. It’s uncertain whether the CIC who have up to now run the market will apply, but having turned the offer down before, it seems unlikely.

“We are trying to engage with the council and having a real hard time, and that can only last for so long, especially when you’re run by volunteers,” Paul says. “Ultimately, we’ve all got lives to live, and you have to at one point ask: why are we doing this, where is this heading?”