Manchester almost built its own version of the Elizabeth Line in the 1970s, but was stymied by central government funding cuts. Second time lucky??

Absolutely! Would love to see this if you're happy to share 😊

Absolutely! Limited on time and space for this piece but I'd love to have been able to look into it in more depth (and I think the data is available through ONS regional sectoral GVA estimates?)

Good public transport definitely neccesary but not always sufficient for economic growth - great paper on this from 2023 if you're interested! sites.harvard.edu/uk-regional-...

Thanks Andy! Hope my attempts to explain productivity get the TPI stamp of approval 😊

Whether it's public transport, skills, investment or something else, we should all probably be paying more attention to what's happening in Manchester - there's a lot riding on getting this right (4/4 - full piece free to read!)

manchestermill.co.uk/andrew-mcphi...

It's very hard to say why for sure - but my personal hunch is that this isn't unrelated to expansion of the tram network, which has seemingly supported rapid jobs growth in the highly productive city centre (3/4)

Economic productivity has nothing to do with hard work; it measures how efficiently we're able to turn time and material into value. But the UK's productivity growth has been anaemic from 2008 on, making us all thousands of pounds worse off.

Manchester, increasingly, is a rare bright spot 👇 (2/4)

Doing things differently here? After decades of hype, Greater Manchester is starting to look like something rare; an actual UK economic sucess story. I had a look into the latest economic data for @manchestermill.bsky.social to find out more (1/4)

🚨Where’s Glasgow’s wealth going?🚨

There’s a perception that Glasgow doesn’t have the economy of, say, neighbouring Edinburgh. But data shows the city is Scotland’s economic engine.

Today, we’ve got economic geographer, James Gilmour, to map out where all the money has gone.

What else could it be? A new and revived manufacturing hub? More houses? Could the deer even make a return? Or will it stay much the same (spoiler; probably!) (4/4)

manchestermill.co.uk/trafford-par...

At its peak Trafford Park employed 75,000 workers, largely in high-value manufacturing and engineering. But industrial decline, fragmentation and the inexorable rise of logistics gave us the sprawling patchwork of warehouses, low-rise offices and roundabouts you see today (3/4)

Barring a council scheduling error, Trafford Park could have stayed a deer park and a vast green lung; something Manchester desperately lacks today. Instead it gave the city something very different; a cutting edge economy for the second industrial revolution (2/4)

What do you do with Europe's largest industrial estate, in a city slipping into a post-industrial future? I wrote for @manchestermill.bsky.social about a long-time obsession - Trafford Park (1/4)