Inside Manchester's business boom where there's 'so much exciting stuff going on'

Manchester saw 36 new businesses created every day in the first half of 2022 — a huge rise of 34 percent compared to the same period last year.

Analysis of Companies House records by iwoca shows that 6,431 firms were registered from January to June of this year, meaning there were 1,165 new companies per 100,000 people. That rate is the second-highest in the country, with Manchester only behind London.

To see why the city is a magnet for start-ups, the Manchester Evening News spoke to two new businesses on how they got set-up. Primo Bagel and Loaf Mcr, both food firms, are based in the city centre.

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“There's so much exciting stuff going on in the city - it seems like people are much more willing to take a risk on somebody who's just starting out,” Niall Harley, a co-founder of Primo Bagel, said. He launched his bakery at the end of last year, when Niall and his two co-founders, Scott Shannon and Fay Brown, were working at Pollen Bakery in New Islington.

The 31-year-old continued: “We initially got stuff together to build a small kind of commercial bakery within Scott's house and it started off with just Instagram and collection and delivery through the app.

“From there, we got a pop-up with Cloudwater Taproom which was really good. We did that for three months, every weekend. And then through that we got our current residency at SEESAW.”

Niall, who handles the operations and marketing side of the business, said having access to the pop-up space offered by Cloudwater Brewery Taproom was vital to growing the business: “It's extremely important because we were just on Instagram and in our flat. So having somewhere to actually