MEDIA CENTRE - Off The Wall

Phil’s Travels – Manchester, England (09.24)

Phil’s Travels – Manchester, England (09.24)

The last days of September were miserable affairs, especially if you were a Man United fan (thrashed by Tottenham the night before). In London, we even put the heating on before month-end. In my mind, winter had officially arrived early, because I caught my seasonal cold two months early and trained north to Manchester with a strained voice and runny nostrils. The north was just as dark, overcast, misty and cold.

I walked from Manchester Piccadilly to my hotel through heavy rain and realised very quickly that for a city that is no stranger to rain its drainage systems were appalling. The streets were running with rivers and the concave pavements trapped lakes of water. As if the air was not wet enough, the ground was more so.

Despite the rain, the city was busy, with lots of people pulling trolley bags up and down the sodden streets. Maybe some were Spurs fans from the night before. I stayed at a Premier Inn with the world’s most discrete front door. The entrance was a single door in a faceless facade. No sense of arrival and more importantly no porte cochere to protect one from the incessant precipitation.

The tiny entrance (literally a hole in the wall, next to a bus stop) belied a vastness within. My room was in the farthest reaches of the building, which occupied an entire city block and had only three storeys. Either which way I went around my floor, it took an average of 183 steps from the lift to my bedroom door. I burnt quite a few calories over the next day or so.

My room overlooked an adjacent office building, only a few feet away, and I had a perfect view of Allianz’s underwriting floor. Had I known in advance, I would have delayed renewing our home insurance and reached out to underwrite my own policy. As it was, the office building shone through the day and night, brighter than the sun. Fortunately, the blackout curtains in my room worked a treat. Why do offices still keep their lights on during the night when no one is working. Have they not heard of ESG?

My room was large, the bathroom small and it had no heating. The small electric wall heater was under the window and had no controls. The thermostat on the wall near the door had wires hanging from it. All very Mancunian dystopia on a wet, miserable night with unnatural lighting.

Fortunately, I did not spend much time in the Tardis (which charged me £10 for early check-in). I was too busy out and about, getting wet, drinking coffee and chatting with compatriots of our glorious industry.

So, what did I learn from these chats? It was a difficult climate in which to make projects fundable. Developers were asking operators to really stretch their KPIs and/or offer incredible rents. Key Money was rising as the competition increased for fewer deals. Tough to be viable at the moment and likely to remain so until there is a price correction on site values. Everybody liked conversions, from office to hotel, but complex to do in the capital where the new, unhelpful London Plan protects office use (although City of London keen to explore such ideas and better staffed than most Boroughs to consider such flexible interpretation of said London Plan).

Manchester had a significant pipeline of new hotels, some already in development (including the new W Hotel, with its hugely successful branded residential component) and yet market performance levels were no better than pre-C19. No wonder. There were hotels on virtually every street corner in the city as I walked about. The city has changed massively since I lived nearby 40 years ago and will continue to change at an incredible pace, melding the historic with the contemporary.