A city worth investing in

We'd just finished our interview, said our goodbyes, and I'd started turning off the cameras and the lights. Then, there was a knock on the studio door.

Jonathan Bayfield was back, slightly apologetically.

"I forgot to mention something," he said. "Have you turned everything off, or could we film a little more?"

I had, but we could.

Jonathan was in the studio because I was looking to learn more about why Aviva has invested hundreds of millions of pounds into Manchester.

I'd just finished writing about our investments in London, in office buildings in the City specifically, and I wanted to get an idea of how we invest in other places around the UK too.

I wanted that bigger picture, and I'd heard that Manchester was the city to talk about – and I'd heard that Jonathan was the man to talk about it with.

What's the story?

Jonathan Bayfield leads on real estate research at Aviva Investors, which means he thinks a lot about cities. How they work, what makes them tick, and what makes a city a good place to invest. 

There are three things we look for, Jonathan told me. Talent, clusters, and scale.

Talent is just what it sounds like. The city should have talented people – educated and skilled. 

Clusters means groups of those talented people working in specific industries. People moving between companies, knowledge spreading, innovations happening faster.

Scale is, again, just what it sounds like. Bigger cities often provide more opportunity for investment. Having a bigger pool of potential employees is massively beneficial to companies, helping them to grow. In a bigger city, there are more people to visit the city centre, to spend money in cafes and restaurants, in shops and entertainment, improving the economy of the city – which in turn attracts more people, more businesses, creating clusters of talent... and so the cycle continues. 

This is all broad stuff though – what is it about Manchester specifically that makes it a great place to invest?

To answer that, Jonathan started off by telling me about the industrial revolution. 

Spinning a yarn

Manchester was central to the industrial revolution, he said.  

There was wool grown locally and there were big rivers that could power mills and transport goods, so Manchester became a centre for wool production. Then cotton became the big thing and Manchester switched – creating goods from cotton grown elsewhere. By the end of the industrial revolution, a third of all cotton production was happening in Manchester. 

That’s not a third of the UK’s cotton production, but a third of all cotton production worldwide. 

Time moved on, and then a familiar story. Manufacturing moved to where labour was cheaper. Tens of thousands left the city.

Which raised the question: What does Manchester need to succeed in a changed world and get ready for whatever the future brings? 

Sir Richard Lees and Sir Howard Bernstein were two local policy makers, and their answer was to stop relying on what was grown elsewhere and instead grow something else locally again.

“To create jobs and to create wealth, and create better standards of living in Manchester, they believed the answer was to bring in more knowledge-intensive industries. To have people coming together to work in industries like finance, media, technology and professional services.” 

To make that a reality, they wanted to grow talent, Jonathan explained. They aimed to power up the universities, to bring people to the city as students, then convince the graduates to stay.

Which, for the most part, is what happened. 

“Manchester's got about 120,000 students living within the city, spread across four different universities. Every year, between 25,000 and 30,000 of their graduates stay in Manchester. That's really important for bringing through the new skills into companies to help them grow and develop. 

“We believe that, for knowledge-intensive industries, people are the most important thing. 

"So, many years ago, Manchester was successful due to its access to wool, and energy in the form of mill river power," Jonathan said. "But today the really important thing about Manchester, is its people."

That's the talent, right there. Plus, when it comes to scale, nearly 3 million people live in Greater Manchester. Within an hour's drive from the city centre, you can reach 7 million people. 

“In Manchester, we've also got really big clusters of excellence in professional services - specifically accounting and law. It's also got clusters in technology. About 35% of jobs within Greater Manchester are in the knowledge-intensive sector. 

“For us, this is a really key indicator for the strength of an economy - for somewhere that we think is going to grow, and continue to grow in the future, and drive demand for office space and residential space.” 

So what exactly are the spaces we’ve helped build? To learn about those, I needed to talk to Julian Cobourne.

What we've helped build

Julian leads Aviva's regional investment management team, which means he's responsible for managing the actual buildings with actual tenants that we’ve invested in outside of London.

The biggest example of where we’ve invested in Manchester is at St John's, Julian tells me.  

Since 2017, alongside our partners, we've developed around 500,000 square feet of new office space there.

Manchester Goods Yard alone is 335,000 square feet. Booking.com's UK headquarters takes up five floors. Cloud Imperium Games is there too.  The ground floor has two restaurants - Fenix and Caravan - and a pub. 

The Globe building is 80,000 square feet, and it’s now WPP's Manchester headquarters, Julian tells me. “They've brought together a number of WPP Group companies, like MediaCom and Code Computer Love, that used to be scattered across the city into one building.”

Then there's the Old Granada Studios itself.  

The former Granada TV site on Quay Street had been empty since 2013 – before then, programmes like Coronation Street and University Challenge had been filmed there, Countdown and The Chase too, but then ITV Studios and ITV Granada moved to Salford Quays. Now the building has been repurposed, Julian tells me, listing off all the new tenants. 

There’s a 120-bedroom Mollies Hotel with a three-storey Soho House members' club on top - one of the first Soho Houses in the UK outside of London. Plus, there are new TV studios, a new office building, and a container village for – naturally – startup workspace. 

Personally, I’m glad that TV will still get made there. It feels right, to carry that history on. But there’s also a huge variety in the spaces that we’re invested in.

Why the variety? 

"The purpose of St John's is to create an ecosystem," Julian explained. There are smaller spaces for companies just starting out, medium spaces for those getting bigger, all the way up to headquarters for the biggest of them.

"That ecosystem allows us to work with tenants and move them up into bigger and bigger spaces as their businesses grow and develop." 

The idea is that these companies can grow without leaving, so, again, Manchester keeps the talent they’ve grown.

Julian was great at describing the place, and seeing pictures and mock-ups was handy to understand what was being built, but I needed to see it for myself. It’s hard to write about it otherwise. 

That’s what I told my boss, anyway.

Seeing it for myself

So off I went, on a sunny day in late summer, weighed down – as always – with bags full of camera equipment.

With me were a couple of colleagues who’d come along to help with some filming and to get content for a couple of other projects we're working on.  

There was one point when I realised that I was the only one of four people there (me, two colleagues, and someone we were interviewing) who hadn't gone to university in Manchester. That’s the 'tens of thousands of graduates' stat in action there.

After we’d explored a little, filmed some b-roll, we set up in Aviva Studios to talk to Pat Bartoli. 

Pat is Director of City Centre Growth and Infrastructure at Manchester City Council. She is someone clearly passionate about her job and about Manchester.

We met in what I assume would usually be a bar on event days. No drinks for us though, even though I'd set myself up behind the bar. It was just the best place to put the camera - my light stands leaning over a bunch of stacked glasses and tripod wedged behind the sink.  

Behind Pat was a window with a view out over St John's and, in the middle distance, a railway bridge carrying commuters and tourists, locals and visitors, to and from Manchester. That view is the main reason we were in that space – being able to look over St Johns from above.

"St John's is a very ambitious regeneration project.” Pat told me. She gestured at the window behind her, at the buildings outside and the people moving between them.   

“This neighbourhood is rooted in enterprise, culture, and living, and it's creating thousands of jobs in Manchester."

Aviva’s investment has transformed the site into what Pat described as “a dynamic hub for digital media and creative industries.” She described how St Johns started by supporting small and medium tech and creative companies, then gradually attracted the bigger names. 

"Having big global brands is also very important to us, because that's a major attractor for people - particularly young people - who want to come and work in those industries," Pat explained.

Like Julian had told me, St John's has workspaces and restaurants and bars, a cinema, hotels, and homes. Different uses all packed together, active at different times of day – and Pat explained that St Johns is not meant to be a place that empties out after 5pm like most business areas. 

Then there's Aviva Studios itself, where we were sitting. 

“It's a major asset to the city. It's a world class arts venue, and an almost unique flexibility of space means it can host a range of different activities and events all at the same time.” 

I can speak to the flexibility of the space, filming from behind the bar as I was.

Jokes aside, Aviva Studios is an amazing space – “a world class venue”, like Pat says. Aviva is the principal partner, and it’s the permanent home of Factory International.  

Just to speak to the scale of it - Julian had told me it’s one of the biggest arts projects in the UK since the Tate Modern. 

Then there’s Factory Academy that offers free courses in the creative industries to help people develop skills they may need to succeed. 

“Aviva's investment reflects confidence in Manchester's long-term economic growth, its skilled workforce, and its strategic importance.” Pat said.

“But the partnership isn't just financial. It's about placemaking, sustainability, and inclusive growth.” 

Bringing it home

Walking back to Manchester Piccadilly station afterwards, leaving my colleagues behind, I was weighed down again with that camera gear. But the light was hitting the buildings just right and the Opera House was glowing gold in the afternoon sun, so I stopped for a minute to dig the camera out again. I’m not sure I took anything worthwhile, but that’s not the city’s fault. It was really putting on a show for me. 

Jonathan had explained Manchester to me in broad strokes. The talent that’s there, the clusters, and the scale that comes with millions of people and universities creating tens of thousands of graduates every year.

Julian had told me about what we've helped build there. Half a million square feet of office space, yes, but also an ecosystem where people and businesses can grow – helping the city to grow, too. 

Then Pat had walked me through what that's meant for Manchester. The jobs created, economic growth above the national average and a cultural venue in an area generating over a billion pounds of value. The training programmes giving people access to careers they might not have otherwise had. The regeneration of an area that was lying vacant.

But aside from all that, being there, in the sunshine, Manchester just felt like a pretty great place to be.