In November 2025, Andy Burnham stood up in Stockport and announced a plan. Not a consultation. Not a proposal. A plan: the GM Good Growth Fund, £1 billion, 30 projects across all 10 boroughs of Greater Manchester, the first of its kind in the country.

The first wave: £400 million, nearly 3,000 new homes, more than 22,000 jobs, 2 million square feet of employment space. Projects in every district — Oldham, Bury, Bolton, Stockport, Trafford, Salford — simultaneously. The ambition behind the number was explicit: growth at a pace and scale not seen this century.

By March 2026, the fund had almost doubled. The National Wealth Fund committed at least £500 million. The UK Government added £175 million from its City Investment Fund. Andy Haldane, President of the British Chambers of Commerce, called it "a fantastically innovative way of solving a really deep-rooted longstanding problem in the UK, which is that far too little money is flowing outside of the South East."

Burnham has a name for what he is building. He calls it Manchesterism.

Manchesterism is not a policy programme. It is a governing philosophy: economic growth and social progress delivered together, at city-region scale, through devolved power. It involves bringing buses back under public control through the Bee Network. Removing time restrictions on free bus travel for the elderly and disabled. Establishing Mayoral Development Corporations in town centres that the market had written off. Creating a Greater Manchester Baccalaureate that gives young people a route to high-skilled jobs that doesn't require a university degree.

The central argument is structural: Westminster retains powers it cannot effectively deliver. Greater Manchester can deliver them. The evidence of the past decade is the case for the argument. Since devolution began in 2015, Greater Manchester has been the UK's fastest-growing city region, with annual growth consistently outpacing the national average. The analysis projects that if the same growth rate continues for the next decade, the Greater Manchester economy will be more than a third larger than it is today — adding £38 billion to the national finances.

Manchesterism, Burnham argues, depends on how far the UK is willing to go in devolving power to its city regions. The Good Growth Fund is not the destination. It is the demonstration.

This week, Manchester hosted the MOBO Awards for the first time in their 30-year history. Earlier this year, it hosted the BRIT Awards outside London for the first time in nearly 50 years. The city is also bidding to host the 2035 Ryder Cup. Culture, sport, investment, and governance are being assembled, deliberately, into an argument: Manchester is not waiting for London to tell it what to do. It is building what it needs.

That, Burnham would say, is the point.

(Sources: Greater Manchester Combined Authority / Centre for Cities / Invest in Manchester / Bloomberg CityLab / Construction Enquirer — November 2025 – May 2026)

Seoul 🇰🇷 — South Korea's regional cities are watching Manchester with a very specific kind of attention. In Korea, the structural problem Manchesterism is responding to — economic and political power concentrated in a single capital city, starving regional cities of investment, talent, and autonomy — is more extreme than in almost any other OECD country. Seoul contains half the country's economic output. Korean regional governments have been arguing for genuine fiscal devolution for decades. The response from the centre has been incremental at best. What the Manchester model demonstrates for Korean regional cities — Busan, Daegu, Gwangju, the cities steadily losing young people to Seoul — is not a technical funding mechanism. It is a proof of concept: a city that decided to stop waiting for the capital to solve its problems and built the institutional capacity to solve them itself. Korea's devolution conversation is not over. Manchester just gave it a new data point.

London 🇬🇧 — London is the capital that Manchester is, in a very particular sense, arguing against. Not against its existence or its success, but against the assumption that what is good for London is automatically good for the UK. Burnham's Good Growth Fund is partly funded by the National Wealth Fund, which is a national institution. The £175 million City Investment Fund came from the Chancellor. Manchester is not anti-London. It is making a different argument: that the UK's growth problem is a concentration problem, and that the solution is to build institutional capacity in the places that have been systematically underinvested. London, interestingly, has not been the obstacle. The UK Government has supported Manchester's devolution agenda. The obstacle has been the assumption — embedded in decades of Whitehall practice — that investment decisions made in London produce better outcomes than investment decisions made in Manchester. The Good Growth Fund is a test of that assumption. Early results suggest the assumption is wrong.

São Paulo 🇧🇷 — São Paulo is the Manchester of Brazil — the industrial origin city, the economic engine that is not the capital, the place that generates the wealth that flows elsewhere. Brasília is São Paulo's Westminster: the political capital that holds fiscal powers the city of production believes it could use more effectively itself. Brazil's federal system gives São Paulo more formal fiscal autonomy than Manchester's historically centralized model provides — but the political economy of a country where federal transfers determine so much of municipal budgets limits that autonomy in practice. São Paulo Innovation Week opens in two weeks. The city’s entrepreneurs and investors will discuss the future. Burnham’s question is worth asking in that room: how much of the growth São Paulo generates stays in São Paulo? And what would change if more of it did?