What can Birmingham and Nottingham learn from Manchester?

As a geographer, I have always been fascinated by the stories places tell about themselves, writes Joshua Dickerson of BWB Consulting.

Not the formal stories captured in strategies and masterplans. The informal ones that emerge in conversations with residents, businesses, developers, and local authorities. The stories people tell about where they live, work and, most importantly, where they think a place is heading.

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time travelling between Birmingham, Nottingham and Manchester. On paper, they share many of the same characteristics: strong universities, rich industrial histories and significant regeneration opportunities. They are all investing in infrastructure, attracting new businesses and grappling with challenges around housing, health and productivity.

Yet they often feel very different.

Whenever the conversation turns to urban success in the UK, Manchester inevitably features. Depending on who you ask, the explanation is devolution, political leadership, transport investment or institutional capital. All have played a role.

But I often wonder whether we focus too much on the visible outcomes and not enough on the conditions that made them possible.

Because cities are rarely transformed by buildings alone.

The most successful places tend to create confidence before they create development.

One thing that strikes me about Manchester is how naturally people talk about the future. There is plenty of debate and disagreement. But beneath it sits a broad confidence about the direction of travel: a sense that today’s project connects to tomorrow’s opportunity.

Places are full of uncertainty. Markets fluctuate. Governments change. Projects are delayed. Yet people will often tolerate uncertainty if they have confidence in the wider journey. The challenge is creating enough belief for people to keep moving forward.

In Manchester, that belief has been cultivated over decades.

Part of that story is institutional. Greater Manchester was an early mover in city-region collaboration and devolution, creating structures capable of thinking beyond local authority boundaries, individual projects, and political cycles.

That continuity matters. Confidence is easier to sustain when businesses, communities and investors can see institutions thinking about a place over decades rather than simply the next scheme.Projects such as Mayfield, the growth of the city centre and the regeneration of former industrial areas are not isolated successes. They are connected chapters in a longer narrative about growth, connectivity and opportunity.

You can also see that confidence in the investment the city-region attracts. Therme Manchester, planned for Trafford City, is a useful example. A global wellbeing operator choosing Greater Manchester for its first UK resort reflects belief in the long-term strength and draw of the wider city-region.

Therme Manchester. Credit: Therme Group

Over time, confidence can create the conditions for international organisations to introduce entirely new destination concepts because they believe in the market around them.

This is where Birmingham and Nottingham become particularly interesting.

Birmingham is entering a period of profound change through Curzon Street, Smithfield and the continued evolution of Digbeth. Nottingham faces its own once-in-a-generation opportunity through Broadmarsh and wider city-centre renewal. Both cities have strong identities and compelling stories of their own.

Broadmarsh. Credit: Nottingham City Council

Increasingly, both also sit within regional structures capable of providing something particularly important for regeneration: continuity.

For Birmingham, the West Midlands Combined Authority provides a mechanism for considering transport, housing, skills, investment, and economic growth at a scale considerably larger than that of any individual development site.

For Nottingham, the East Midlands Combined County Authority could be just as significant. Bringing Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, Derby and Derbyshire into a regional structure, supported by long-term devolved investment, creates an opportunity to think about the area’s future over decades rather than funding rounds.

These institutions do not guarantee success. But they can provide something more subtle: permanence.

When regional institutions can plan and invest over the long term, individual projects begin to form part of a much longer programme of change. Infrastructure can connect to housing, housing to skills and city-centre regeneration to investment across the wider region.

The challenge is not creating another vision document. Most places have plenty of those. It is turning that institutional capacity into collective confidence about what comes next.

We often frame devolution in terms of powers, funding and governance. Important as those things are, they are ultimately enablers rather than outcomes.

The real opportunity is helping cities and regions articulate not only what they want to build, but why it matters and how projects contribute to a shared sense of purpose.

Greater Manchester has benefited from that alignment for longer. Not perfectly. No place ever does. But sufficiently to create momentum.

Perhaps that is the lesson Birmingham and Nottingham can take from Manchester. Not the skyline.

Not the masterplans.

Not even the devolution settlement itself.

But the importance of creating confidence in a shared future and sustaining it long enough that others are willing to invest in it, too.

Cities derive much of their value from being different from one another. Birmingham should not aspire to become Manchester, nor should Nottingham. Their histories, cultures and identities are distinct, and that is precisely what makes them valuable.

The more interesting challenge is understanding how places create the belief that allows people to imagine themselves as part of what comes next.

Because once enough people share that belief, regeneration stops being something that happens to a place, it becomes something that people feel part of creating.

• Joshua Dickerson is the director of place & urban lead at BWB Consulting.