So, the sweet smell of regeneration is blowing around the waterfront of the Manchester Ship Canal at Salford, after this industrial city was chosen as the likely site for the BBC’s much-discussed relocation of key departments from London.
The plan, announced this month, is for the corporation to shunt about 1,800 staff from the capital to a new 200-acre media village in Salford Quays on the banks of the canal. Five Live, sport, new media and children’s channels are set to make the 200-mile journey from London in 2010, joining 800 staff who will be moved there from central Manchester.
A final decision is not expected until the end of this year and is tied up with the BBC’s tangled licence-fee negotiations with the government. But Salford is cock-a-hoop and the city’s estate agents, restaurateurs and bar owners are salivating at the prospect of an influx of well-heeled, Bluetoothing, sushi-eating media types.
Indeed, the city, immortalised in its industrial heyday by LS Lowry’s matchstick-men paintings, is being cheerfully reborn as a sort of Soho of the North. A sexy video package narrated by Paul “Shameless” Abbott presents “Salford Media City” as somewhere in which “industrial heritage meets 21st-century ambition” and “tomorrow’s talent has the place to dream”, whatever that means. To illustrate the point, balmy shots of children wielding television cameras alongside the canal are presented with arty impressions of what the Media City will look like come 2010.
This is not to say the BBC will plonk CBeebies, Gary Lineker, Ian Wright, Beverley Turner and the rest into a complete wasteland. Salford has already been the recipient of some serious sexing-up. The Queen went there to open the eponymous gallery for the national collection of Lowry’s work in 2000; Daniel Libeskind, the renowned architect, followed with his Imperial War Museum North; and, more prosaically, HM Revenue & Customs is relocating staff to Salford.
“It’s had a lot of regeneration and it’s becoming very fashionable,” says Keith Hollinrake from Hunters estate agency in Manchester. “The NV Buildings on Salford Quays (which boast funky interiors by Ben de Lisi) are fantastic, and apartments there are on the market for about £180,000. It wouldn’t surprise me if prices on the Quays surge by an additional 5% when the BBC moves in, and prices are already going up 6% per annum.”
With offices in York and Leeds, Hollinrake is no stranger to the magical regenerative wand that comes when large groups of workers move outside London. “We had the Ministry of Agriculture relocating staff to York in 1996, and that meant an immediate spike in prices, which went on for about a year,” he recalls.
“Families come up and disperse over a wider area, but prior to the move most people rent very close to the work space. And so for those rental properties, you have a lot of investors buying into the area because they can see an immediate potential in buy-to-let.”
Average rents around Salford Quays are about £700 a month for a two-bedder but, according to Hollinrake, are expected to rise quite sharply. Capital values are already shifting; Land Registry figures show the average cost of a house in Salford is £123,248 — 7.5% higher than last year and 1.2% up on last quarter.
Harry Johnson, a Manchester landlord, has 20 properties in Salford. “A friend has a couple of flats on Salford Quays that have been empty for ages. He was going to sell them. Now the BBC isg coming, he might well change his mind,” he says. “It will help Salford. And Manchester. Because Salford is really a suburb of Manchester. Frankly, the IRA did us a favour by blowing up the centre of Manchester (in 1996): the rebuilding of Manchester and a massive inward investment hasn’t stopped since.”
But will BBC staff willingly swap Television Centre for somewhere much, much further away from the Groucho Club? “I’ll believe it when I see it,” says one Five Live staffer, who is understandably reluctant to be named. “Without exception, every single Five Live programme editor has said in private conversation that they will never leave London. Why would you want to go and live in Salford? I suspect most of us will use it as a chance to go and work for Radio Four.”
Even the notion that Salford might be made more bearable by the arrival of hundreds of personnel is given short shrift. “There is a direct equivalent with TVC (Televison Centre),” continues my source. “Thousands of people work here, but that doesn’t change things much. Shepherd’s Bush is still a dump, isn’t it?” The BBC has said the go-ahead for the £400m move is dependent on the government agreeing to a new financial package, which includes a licence-fee settlement of 2.3% above inflation, for several years. Unfair, shout its commercial rivals, but sources within the BBC acknowledge that by tying the licence demands so tightly to the Salford relocation plan, the broadcaster may have the government over a barrel. “The government is desperate for the BBC to appear less London-centric, and to help with the regeneration of Salford,” says one source.
If its stars don’t want to play ball, Auntie could turn nasty. “If it becomes Salford or the sack, then I suspect people might become very interested in the regeneration of Greater Manchester,” says someone from the children’s department, grimly.
Not everyone is reluctant to move. Victoria Derbyshire, a Five Live presenter born in Bury, Greater Manchester, would be happy to move closer to her roots. “If it happens, I will not be protesting all the way up the M6 because I know that part of the world and my family lives there,” she says. “I would regard it very positively. However, try telling colleagues that parts of Salford are stunning, and their jaws literally hit the ground.”
