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Manchester’s post-industrial regeneration is one of the most remarkable British economic stories of recent decades. Sir Howard Bernstein was the principal author.
Bernstein, who died Saturday at age 71 after a brief illness as leader of Manchester City Council, led a generation of imaginative civic leadership that provided an example for other towns and cities seeking to shake off the blight of decline in the 1970s and 1980s.
Bernstein’s influence and reputation extended far beyond that of a traditional City Hall civil servant, with former Chancellor George Osborne describing him as “the star of British local government”. A capable fixer and negotiator, his dogged pragmatism led him into any realm he saw fit, from the corridors of Whitehall to the palaces of Middle Eastern sheikhs, and in later years he usually wore his trademark scarf and sovereign ring.
Bernstein’s extraordinary ability to cajole, persuade, and adapt ultimately changed the face of his city.
Born to Jewish parents in April 1953 in Cheetham Hill, a multicultural suburb north of Manchester, Bernstein’s path to the top of British civic leadership was rare then, and even rarer now. Having joined the town hall straight out of school in 1971, he served the neo-Gothic neighborhood for almost half a century, rising to chief from 1998 to 2017.
His early years at City Hall were formative. By the end of the decade, Manchester and its surrounding cities were losing 121 manufacturing jobs every day, and the city’s raison d’etre was unclear. “We are lost,” Bernstein said.
By the mid-1980s Manchester’s political leadership had been replaced by a new generation of Labor MPs who were impatient for change. City leaders under Graham Stringer and Richard Leese concluded that pragmatism, including dialogue with Conservative opponents in Westminster, was essential to economic revival.
Bernstein’s technique proved to be invaluable. The ten city council’s takeover of Manchester Airport in 1986 was led by a young officer still in his early thirties. The early ’90s reconstruction of Hulme’s inner-city slums, a project supported by then Conservative minister Michael Heseltine, was considered one of Europe’s greatest urban regeneration success stories. Bernstein considered this one of his proudest achievements.
When an IRA bomb devastated Manchester’s central business district in 1996, Bernstein and Leeds, who had taken over political power just days before the blast, formed a partnership that would last two decades. Put Hulme’s lessons to good use. Always eager to move forward, Bernstein has tended not to talk extensively about rebuilding, but acknowledged in 2017 that putting together the necessary real estate deals represents his “biggest intellectual challenge.”
Bernstein went on to help secure not only the 2002 Commonwealth Games but also its legacy, negotiating the move of his beloved Manchester City to a stadium built for the games. When Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the United Arab Emirates purchased the football club, Bernstein made Manchester City the anchor for the regeneration of the surrounding post-industrial area.
His relentless pursuit of delivery has inspired respect, confidence and, to a certain extent, awe, across many disciplines. He was knighted for his services to the city in 2003 and his message to both the private sector and government was the same. Manchester was about doing business.
Not all gambles pay off. He acknowledged that the attempt to introduce congestion pricing to increase investment in public transport – a move rejected in a 2008 referendum – had misread the room. During the period of austerity since 2010, the city’s children’s department failed and homelessness soared.
Nevertheless, Bernstein argued that reviving Manchester’s economy was vital to the well-being of the city’s poor. Once Osborne took up his post at the Treasury, Bernstein convinced him of the untapped economic opportunities the North of England offered, helping Greater Manchester secure the UK’s first devolution deal outside London in 2014.
By the time he retired, much of Manchester looked dramatically different from the post-industrial wasteland that had been the backdrop of Bernstein’s early career. Foreign investment poured into the city centre, the population soared and the city showed early signs that its productivity gap with London was beginning to narrow.
When asked in retirement how he persuaded people to follow his ideas, Bernstein was characteristically candid.
“I put the city first,” he said. “If you don’t want it, make way for anyone who does.”
Bernstein lived a few miles from his birthplace, Prestwich, Bury, until his death. He leaves behind his wife, Vanessa, two children and three stepchildren.
