Inside Burnham's 1,500-Home Bet to Revive a Bankless Town

Manchester mayor Andy Burnham's blueprint for Middleton commits to 1,500 new homes, a £4.5m community budget and a co-operative takeover of empty shops, banks and a derelict cotton mill. The mayoral development corporation, launched months before Burnham left for Downing Street, puts Bafta-winning actor Steve Coogan and Co-operatives UK chief Rose Marley in charge of reshaping a town of about 50,000 people that has lost every one of its banks.

What does the plan actually promise?

The MDC carries three formal powers: setting lower business rates, acquiring underused land and property, and pushing through housing development. A 2,000-person resident survey is shaping the agenda, with locals flagging Warwick Mill and other empty buildings as the first priorities.

Middleton Co-operating, the grassroots group feeding the plan, won £4.5m from the National Lottery's solidarity fund in June. Its near-term build-out runs through solar panels and small wind turbines powering a secondary school and a hospice, plus a heat-pump and solar trial on a terrace of Edwardian homes. A banking hub, where Lloyds, NatWest and others would rotate through on different days, sits in the pipeline. The group operates six miles from the 1844 birthplace of the modern co-operative movement in Rochdale.

"This is about rewiring the whole of the economy locally," said Mark Fraser, a founder of Middleton Co-operating. "These are all things that have the biggest impact on people's day-to-day lives and they're generally all owned by big business and private equity – they cost too much and are a cause of a lot of stress in the community."

Strip out the politics and the MDC is a development tool with three explicit levers: rates, land and homes.

Why is Warwick Mill the centrepiece?

Warwick Mill is a Grade II-listed former cotton mill that once powered Middleton's economy. It went silent decades ago and, until last month, belonged to Kam Lei Fong, a Macau-based developer who let it sit derelict. Rochdale council used a compulsory purchase-style process to wrest the site from Fong.

Property firm Capital & Centric, which renovated Stockport's Weir Mill, is in early talks. Co-founder Tim Heatley took a 7pm call from Burnham in January, after the mayor spotted the Stockport conversion and asked him to look at Warwick. Heatley had already been talking to Fong when Burnham dialled in.

"For me, the opportunity is much bigger than doing a nice conversion of an old mill," Heatley said. "Warwick is absolutely colossal and has loomed over Middleton for more than a century. If we can fill it with life again, it has the potential to become an anchor for the town … and give confidence for investment to follow around it."

The price tag is steep. Heatley called the cost of rescuing and converting a mill that size "colossal," and his firm's back-of-envelope puts the bill in the tens of millions of pounds.

One mill, one compulsory-style seizure, and a single phone call from the then-mayor are doing the heavy lifting so far.

How bad has the decline actually been?

Bad. Middleton sits a few miles between Manchester and Rochdale, carries a Manchester postcode, pays council tax to Rochdale and has no tram stop. A decade ago the town centre still had grocers, butchers and banks. A Tesco opened in 2013 and drew the cash out. Every bank branch has since closed; the last post office shut earlier this year after Modella Capital, the private equity owner of WH Smith, pulled the lease.

The shopping precinct now leans on bookmakers, vape stores, pawnbrokers and fast-food outlets. One pawnbroker recently signed a 10-year lease on a unit that, until earlier this year, housed an arts venue run by Middleton Co-operating. The co-op could not cover the £43,000-a-year rent and service charge demanded by a landlord owned by two London-based real estate companies incorporated in the British Virgin Islands.

"It was a bit of a sickener," Fraser said. "It was a lesson in that they were saying they loved what we were doing for the community, but when it came to it what counts is the bottom line."

The numbers tell the story: every bank gone, one cash machine, no tram stop, and a co-op priced out at £43,000 a year.

Can the plan survive without Burnham?

Coogan is blunt about the politics. He argues that 35 years of "post-industrial neglect," compounded by what he calls a "bank ride" by firms registered in the British Virgin Islands, China and the US, has hollowed out former Labour towns and pushed voters toward Reform UK. The Middleton project, in his telling, is a test of whether local empowerment can beat top-down philanthropy.

"There's a problem in this country which is post-industrial neglect," Coogan told the Guardian. "Leaving that vacuum will mean that the extremists, populist extremists, will fill that gap. That's the problem with top-down, well-meaning, but disempowering, philanthropic, centralised socialism. People don't want to receive charity, they want to be empowered."

Burnham, now prime minister, is no longer running Greater Manchester day to day. Heatley knows the clock is ticking: "The challenge now is turning all that momentum into an actual place, getting Warwick fixed up, full of people and properly part of Middleton again. Ideally before Andy's next career move leaves us needing to find somebody else to cut the ribbon."

Middleton's revival will rise or fall on whether 1,500 homes, a £4.5m lottery cheque and a single reoccupied mill can shift the maths of a town that hasn't had a bank in years.