It would be wrong to say Mike Ingall is back because he never really went away but Allied London’s CEO has certainly got a spring in his step.
The man who gave Spinningfields to Manchester has done it again with the St John’s development.
After joining him on a behind-the-scenes tour of Manchester’s newest neighbourhood, I sat down with the 65-year-old for a typically punchy interview.
Before then a quick recap. Ingall is the qualified chartered surveyor who joined the board of Allied London in 1995 and never left.
He took the Allied London private in 2000 and has been responsible for a complete overhaul of the business.
Over three decades he has earned a reputation for tackling complex, difficult and pioneering developments, as well as the restoration of a string of iconic landmarks.
I canvassed the views of Manchester’s property sector about Ingall and the new St John’s development in particular after my visit.
“Mike Ingall is a mercurial genius,” one person told me. “He may have been perceived as keeping a low profile but in the background he’s been peddling away.
“He’s reinvented himself from a developer to someone who not just builds buildings but also operates them.
“He’s got big corporate brands at St John’s that are embracing the wider ecosystem and inventory, such as Versa Studios.”
St John’s is a redevelopment of the former Granada Studios in the heart of Manchester’s city centre.
It’s been billed as a mix of living, enterprise and culture, sitting alongside, office and residential space, hotels, a theatre, green spaces, numerous restaurants and shops.
Visitors will be familiar with attractions such as Bonded Warehouse, The Crystal Maze, Chaos Karts and Aviva Studios, the home of Factory International.
St John’s Development
I joined Ingall and a handful of other journalists for a private tour of St John’s, through Aviva Studios, the newly-created Versa Studios, the ABC Building and the upcoming Campfield project, which is being turned into a digital hub for media and creative businesses.
I won’t lie, it blew my mind and I sought out the views of Andy Spinoza, a doyen of all things Manchester and author of the brilliant book ‘Manchester Unspin: How a City Got High on Music’.
He told me: “The new St John’s effectively creates a new destination. Not just a visitor destination because it’s also a huge employment site with Aviva Studios and the new Versa production facilities. It really is a new mixed use neighbourhood which links Salford and Manchester.
“As such there are numerous challenges in making people understand what is there, both to visit and to live. No-one wants to impose an overall character on an area. It has to be allowed to grow organically but it does have benefits and an incredibly rich history.
“In my book I describe Salford and Manchester as the conjoined twin cities of the UK (and) the only place in the nation where two city centres have a land boundary. If that’s the boundary, St John’s is the umbilical cord linking the two cities.”
Spinoza said it’s fitting that St John’s has paid homage to the site’s long association with Granada Studios.
“Granada Studios was the independent television company that gave Manchester its identify for decades producing creative and pioneering TV,” he said.
“It’s fitting that the area is now the home of so many creative media businesses in the 21st century. Versa Studios is a major investment in Manchester’s cultural industries.”
All of which brings me on to my interview with the man who made it all happen – Mike Ingall.
The last time we met was at November’s memorial service for ‘Mr Manchester’ Sir Howard Bernstein and it didn’t take long for Ingall to name check his close friend and former council chief executive.
Andy Spinoza
It was back in 2014 that Ingall and Sir Howard sat down and completed a joint venture to acquire the entire Granada Studios site.
“Allied London came up with the idea for St John’s,” he said. “We delivered a neighbourhood of enterprise, culture and living but probably not with the clean lines that people would have expected from us, particularly bearing in mind our history of Spinningfields.
“Spinningfields is very easy to understand. It’s a new corporate area of glass and steel and fine restaurants.
“It mainly consists of two main uses – commercial offices; restaurants and leisure; and a bit of retail but it has been a massive catalyst.
“The one thing Spinningfields did is change the face of commercial buildings in Manchester, so much so that First Street, NOMA, Circle Square all saw you can build big buildings in this city and the city had come of age to need and want that sort of infrastructure.”
In terms of St John’s, Ingall recalled: “We acquired a 27-acre site in the middle of Manchester which for 70 years had been used for the country’s largest media production business (in) ITV and Granada.
“You already have a DNA. Clearly to generate a new neighbourhood of diversity and interest, you can’t ignore that DNA and we haven’t done.
“We have retained and now operate a whole series of former studios that were never not fit for purpose, they just weren’t fit for investment by those corporates.”
Our interview fittingly took place at the exclusive Caravan restaurant at the heart of St. John’s.
Today the development is home to 10,000 workers and major employers include Booking.com, Cloud Imperium Games and the BBC.
Ingall said: “I think Spinningfields would be my biggest ever development (but) my most interesting and most diverse and most creative is definitely St John’s.
“When you’ve got no food in the house, you have a look in the larder and the fridge and suddenly you go ‘I’ve made an amazing meal’.
“We’ve had no public money on this development. The public money has really gone into Aviva Studios.
“It makes you lean and focus on what value (you can develop) and what’s really important.
“You take out a lot of the guff and I think it would fair to say in St John’s over the years, particularly in 2016-17-18, we probably went down a few rabbit holes.
“That’s all part of learning. Those rabbit holes have been closed up. You walk around here and you wouldn’t say it’s a billion pound development, you would say a lot of this has been here for a very long time but it’s been remodelled, reemphasised and recreated.
“It’s far from complete. It may not be complete for five years and I make no apology for that because that was always my principle here. We’ll do this organically. This is not going to be Spinningfields.”
Campfield, St John’s Development
One of the most impressive parts of the tour for me was Campfield, which was previously the Science and Industry Museum’s Air and Space Hall. It’s being transformed into a tech and creative campus and is stunning.
The tour also included stops to the ABC Building, which is home to the BBC’s Morning Live show, and Versa Studios, which is already being used for hit productions like Dragons’ Den.
Ingall is personally heavily invested in Versa Studios, which has hosted productions for Sky, Amazon, ITV, Paramount, BBC, Netflix and more.
It’s clear Ingall likes proving people wrong. He said: “I read a bit of social media and I get ‘Has Allied London lost its way?’ (or) ‘Has Allied London run out of money?’ Probably both of those at a certain point but I don’t mind that because what we’re going to end up with is something that is so powerful.
“There’s nothing with this activity in any neighbourhood possibly outside of London (and) I don’t think this is even in London.
“We’re very fortunate that within a space of less than two years we can count our broadcast clients as Netflix, Amazon, Sky, BBC, ITV. We’ve worked with some of the biggest mobile production companies.
“The BBC are back in the city. We’re quite happy to do drama and immersive entertainment. We have a lot of expertise.
“Manchester has been a centre of media production for 75 years. BBC and ITV have been strong here for all that time. (Now) we can bring Netflix up here as well. When people come here to Manchester they will come back.”