For decades, Fallowfield has provided a home for new arrivals in Manchester.
An historic connection with the city’s higher education institutions means many newcomers are students. Mention Fallowfield to residents, past and present, and it frequently evokes fond recollections and nostalgic affection. If you have ever lived in Manchester, you may well have stories of your own.
But everything in Fallowfield is not as rosy as such nostalgic sentiments may suggest. Walking around its streets, there are signs everywhere of neglect and disrepair. Landlords seeking to maximise occupancy levels have partitioned rooms and built extensions across gardens and into the roofs and basements of their multi-occupied properties. This has led to over-crowding within the neighbourhood, mounting pressures on resources, and the concreting over of green spaces. The high street overflows with takeaways and vape shops, but many other needs are significantly under-served. The situation is particularly acute in the area known historically as Fallowfield Village, which largely coincides with the postcode district M14 6.
It would be easy to blame students for Fallowfield’s ills. Data shows that the suburb has the densest student population in the city. Some streets have over 85 per cent student residents, with only a handful of owner occupiers remaining. Residents suggest litter, anti-social behaviour and late-night noise are perennial problems, echoing common criticism of other heavily “studentified” areas across the UK.
Yet our Collective Inquiry research project, carried out during 2025 and focusing specifically on the M14 6 area, demonstrates that this demographic imbalance is harming not just permanent residents but also students.
Housing lies at the heart of the problem. While many students have the misfortune of living in sub-standard yet over-priced housing, the knock-on impacts are felt throughout the community. Substantial monetary outflows (to absentee landlords amongst others) reduce the ability and will of others to invest in, and commit to, the neighbourhood.
In recent decades, the number of permanent residents has shrunk dramatically, depriving the area of those who might otherwise perform the often invisible civic work that is vital for a well-functioning neighbourhood. Indeed, after only a year, even students frequently move on. Dense impermanent and transient populations make the neighbourhood a target for criminals, giving rise to frequently repeated safety concerns.
Civic universities and the hyperlocal
The situation in hyperlocal neighbourhoods like Fallowfield is a problem for the growing ambitions of civic universities. Historically, universities were focused on the on-campus lives of their students. But in recent years, promoting student welfare has increasingly entailed actively supporting students to navigate off-campus issues as well, such as cost-of-living pressures, the private housing market, safety concerns, and health, wellbeing and belonging.
Meanwhile, there is increasing demand that universities deliver positive social impact: not only in far-flung corners of the world, but also on their doorstep. The five Manchester-based universities have united behind a recently refreshed civic university agenda, aiming to deliver impact for the city region in four key priority areas: opportunity and prosperity, health and wellbeing, culture, and environment.
They are undoubtedly key anchor institutions in the city, creating thousands of local jobs, delivering significant economic and social impact, and helping make Manchester a highly desirable place to work, study and live. Both Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Manchester independently contribute more economic value (GVA) to the city region than the city’s two leading football teams combined.
Nevertheless, there remains a persistent gap between high-level civic ambitions and the lived realities of hyperlocal neighbourhoods. Organisations like the United Kingdom Town and Gown Association (UKTGA) have long highlighted the importance of long-term, place-based neighbourhood partnerships that recognise students as residents and citizens within shared local spaces.
Yet too often, civic university activity is still articulated at the scale of city regions, innovation districts or strategic partnerships, without translating into sustained relationships with the communities living alongside campuses and student populations. As a result, the civic agenda can ring hollow in long-suffering areas like Fallowfield, where residents’ prevailing lived experience of university neighbours may be a significant negative impact on their quality of life.
Overcoming fragmentation
The Collective Inquiry was a co-created project based on the principle of researching with rather than on communities. The research team consisted of over thirty participant-researchers including long-term residents, staff and students from two universities, representatives from the local authorities and other partner organisations. From the beginning, permanent residents and students were at its heart. We took a multi-perspectival approach to better understand the challenges facing the M14 6 neighbourhood using a variety of techniques, including a walking methodology, a systems mapping exercise, and follow-up interviews. Whilst the team did not agree on everything, we were able to identify points of convergence to focus on shared goals.
Our report identified long-term fragmentation as a key driver behind the problems faced here. Over many decades, as a result of deliberate policy decisions, governance gaps, and unintentional oversights, Fallowfield has fallen between the cracks.
Institutionally, responsibility for proactively supporting and managing student populations in local neighbourhoods sits uneasily between public authorities and universities. Partnerships are typically focused on symptom management, such as minimising the disruption of the annual student move in/move out.
Politically, the area sits between three wards and two constituencies. Ward-level data reporting can serve to obscure demographic characteristics of areas like M14 6 where boundaries meet. Meanwhile local councillors, who are elected to represent residents of their own ward, have struggled to tackle deeply engrained challenges across ward boundaries. As a result, the approach to M14 6 is all-too-often reactive and piecemeal.
Socially, there is a lack of cohesion across the whole community. There are strong student communities as well as strong, if depleted, communities of permanent residents. Yet these worlds rarely overlap and interactions that occur tend to be negative. Conflict between individuals takes the place of collective contestation of the systemic harms impacting both groups: a dynamic not dissimilar to many other polarised societal contexts.
We want to recognise that many groups and individuals have worked hard over the years to overcome these challenges. For example, residents’ groups undertake the grinding work of monitoring and objecting to planning and licensing applications. Community-led projects, often supported by the council’s local neighbourhood teams, seek to restore pride in the area. Recent examples include new public murals, the volunteer-led restoration of the Shakespearean Garden, and Clifton WEB’s tree-base planting. The small Manchester Student Homes Team, supported by excellent student ambassadors, work hard to support local residents and students attending both centrally located universities. Yet in all cases, resources are tight and volunteer initiatives rely on too few people to be sustainable.
Meanwhile, opportunists – many operating in a poorly regulated for-profit housing market – have taken advantage of gaps in governance to extract large profits from Fallowfield and the students who call it home. This has outwardly reduced a distinct neighbourhood with a rich, diverse heritage to a generic student area, reinforced by long-standing cultural narratives and institutional communications. Far from the “vibrant neighbourhoods” championed by the local authorities, fragmentation has left Fallowfield run-down, neglected, imbalanced and unsustainable.
Co-creating hope
In March this year, we held a roundtable to share the outcomes of the Collective Inquiry and discuss how to implement its recommendations. Hosted in Ladybarn Community Hub, the event brought together over 50 participants representing key actors in M14 6: the universities, local authorities, elected officials, student unions, long-term residents, police, landlords, renters and others. To the best of our knowledge, this was a truly historic gathering: the first time that so many key stakeholders have come together to focus on collectively building a better future for the neighbourhood in the neighbourhood.
[image]
In the spirit of the Collective Inquiry, the roundtable was co-led by permanent residents and students. Side-by-side, speakers argued for a strategic, holistic, inclusive and data-informed approach to the neighbourhood. One resident spoke movingly of the experience of ostracism from a neighbourhood in which her family had lived for three generations. Student representatives shared lived experiences of poor housing, exploitative landlords and the need to be valued and supported as citizens of the city. Both groups proposed constructive and complementary measures to drive up the quality of housing, improve communications and develop a place-identity for the benefit of all those who live, work and study in Fallowfield.
We then welcomed three senior respondents: University of Manchester president Duncan Ivison, Manchester Metropolitan University academic registrar Joe Rennie, and Councillor Gavin White, Executive Member for Housing and Developing. We were delighted with their positive responses and commitments to a new shared partnership approach.
The next step is to create a new taskforce for M14 6, co-chaired by students and residents, which will work to improve data, housing standards, communications and place-making. We anticipate that the taskforce will both address long-standing challenges in this neighbourhood and provide a new collaborative model for managing ever-growing student populations across the city region. It will address GMCA priorities particularly around housing, with the potential to connect to innovations like the Good Landlord Charter, and support the implementation of additional HMO licensing. It is our hope that this work will begin to overcome decades of fragmentation.
As participants left the roundtable, many commented on the hope that they now feel for the neighbourhood’s future. This reaction suggests that initiatives like the Collective Inquiry can help to better ground civic universities in place.
At the hyperlocal level, universities need to not only honestly recognise and collectively address negative impacts, but also allow themselves to be impacted by those with whom they share space. This project shows the power of slow, inclusive, co-created and democratically organised research to connect people around shared concerns and empower diverse communities to develop inclusive solutions. We are profoundly grateful for the time, dedication and (often unpaid) work of everyone who has supported this project. The hope now is that the taskforce will drive forward the changes that Fallowfield urgently needs to become a unified, peaceful and sustainable neighbourhood.
This article was written in collaboration with members of the Collective Inquiry research team, whose contributions significantly shaped its development: Helen Aczel, M14 6 resident, founder and former co-ordinator of the South East Fallowfield Residents Group and coordinator of Clifton WEB; Heather Alberro, Lecturer at the University of Manchester; Joel Dowson, Greater Manchester Student Partnership Manager; Kattie Kincaid, M14 6 resident and project lead for the Shakespearean Garden; Jason Lee, University of Manchester graduate and former chair of the Manchester Student Renters Union; and Rosalyn Marron, Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.
We would also like to thank Cooper Healey, Manager at Manchester Student Homes, for her helpful comments on an earlier draft, and colleagues at Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Manchester and Manchester City Council for their ongoing support.
