TikTokers on how Manchester became an 'influencer heaven'

Towers of luxury apartments loom over waterside bars beside Deansgate-Castlefield station. On hot sunny days, the area is packed.

"Everyone is always there during the summer," Ruwaydah says. "It's like influencer heaven."

She began making TikTok videos about her favourite places in Manchester six years ago, after moving into one of the city's sky-scraping apartments.

It seems the city is having a moment. Its economic success is being celebrated, its former mayor might become prime minister, and its influencers, like Ruwaydah, are showing the world why they think this is such a great place to live.

Content creators like her have an audience hungry for recommendations - everything from food and drink to advice on apartments and dance classes - because Manchester has a young and growing population.

For Ruwaydah, the city's compactness is another big reason why her videos have become so popular.

"I can walk everywhere in 30 minutes," the 33-year-old says. Much of her content is recorded as she goes about her daily life, whether that's meeting friends or going out with her toddler.

If she finds a cafe or bakery along the way she likes the look of, she'll try their coffee or cake and make a video about it.

Because she "never feels like anything is too far away", it encourages her to post on TikTok more often - another reason she thinks her online audience has grown since moving to Manchester from London.

The fact there are so many businesses and shops now in Manchester city centre is a result of efforts by local leaders to rejuvenate it many years ago, says Paul Swinney, chief economist at The Data City.

He points specifically to efforts that started in the 1990s, when the council was led by Sir Howard Bernstein, to revamp the city centre with the aim of attracting new money and white-collar jobs.

"There was a lot of investment that went into clearing out old buildings, converting them, and constructing new buildings for office space."

With new facilities and a tram network to help people get around, national and international businesses began setting up outposts in Manchester, says Swinney.

This influx of new employers and their employees marked the city's shift from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-driven one, he explains, including sectors such as finance, law, and the creative industries.

To house the new office workers, towers of luxury apartments were built. Bars, restaurants and cafes - like those Ruwaydah reviews - were established to entertain them.

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One such worker is Harry. The 23-year-old, from Chester, earned a graduate job at a solicitors' firm after finishing university.

He lives in a new apartment complex near Piccadilly and is studying for a legal qualification. He began posting about his revision, fitness and nutrition routines on TikTok last autumn.

Harry says being around other people making content helped him overcome his qualms about doing it himself.

"I always saw people recording in the gym and I was like... why are they doing that?"

Soon he realised he was judging them because he was feeling insecure himself. He made his first video in October and, with his audience continuing to grow, now plans to launch a YouTube channel.

Coincidentally, his flatmate began creating similar content on TikTok around the same time.

The pair are an example of Manchester's youthful population. Census data from 2021 shows its largest age group was 20-24-year-olds, and that this group's total population had increased by 9.7% since 2011.

There are about 70,000 students living in the city, according to council documents. And in terms of online mentions, an analysis by the consultancy ING found Manchester was the joint fastest rising city in Europe last year.

Harry says making videos for social media has been a big boost to his confidence and only possible because of the atmosphere the city has imbued in him - a self-confidence with little regard for what others might think.

"It's a swagger," he says. "It's so distinctly Mancunian... people here are just different."

Andy Spinoza, who wrote a book about the city's transformation called Manchester Unspun, noticed something similar after moving here as a student in the 1970s.

"There's this thing called Mancunian exceptionalism, which is 'we're the best city in the world and everyone else can do one.'"

He says that confidence has deep roots going back to the city's emergence as an economic powerhouse during the Industrial Revolution in the 19th Century.

Heavily bombed during World War Two because of its huge manufacturing capacity, Manchester became a creative hub from the 1980s onwards with bands like New Order and Oasis achieving global fame.

Spinoza says that feeling of exceptionalism was central to the city's creative rebirth 40 years ago, which helped it feel like an exciting place long before a new generation of workers and content creators moved here for office jobs and towering flats.

"I call it a social experiment of, mainly young, people living in the sky," he says.

One of those is Sufia, who moved here from New Zealand three years ago.

The 25-year-old knew no-one in Manchester beyond a few extended family members and initially planned to stay only temporarily, using it as a base to travel across Europe and explore other parts of the world.

But all that changed when videos she posted of her dance classes on TikTok took off. What started out as a hobby quickly turned into a business.

"We've been sold out for seven months," she says. Her classes cater to different dancing abilities and she can have as many as 40 people in each one.

"Northerners are so friendly," Sufia tells me over matcha in a cafe near her apartment in Ancoats. "I've felt so welcomed."

She says things are going so well she left her full-time marketing job in February to concentrate exclusively on her dance business.

High-rise buildings like those in Ancoats, which suffered huge deprivation after the war, are clear evidence of Manchester's redevelopment but Swinney says its economic "growth miracle" has been overestimated by official statistics.

"There hasn't been this huge explosion of [economic] productivity," he says.

He also points out that median average wages in Greater Manchester have not increased as much as you might think, just 1% since 2019, external when adjusted for inflation.

There are also concerns about the high-rise apartments that have been constructed with some requiring repairs for safety problems. One developer was taken to court by the government in April for using taxpayers' money for such remedial works.

Away from the city centre high-rises, Swinney thinks the council has adopted policies that could encourage economic growth in the surrounding areas.

He says transport is a good example as Greater Manchester was the first area in England, outside of Greater London, to have local control of its bus network since deregulation in the 1980s.

The buses operate as part of the Bee Network alongside trams and bicycles, which helps connect Manchester city centre with the areas around it like Salford, Bury and Rochdale.

But trains, which aren't fully part of the Bee Network yet, are often criticised by residents for being inadequate. There are also complaints about the slowness of some tram routes and concerns that the £2 cap on bus fares is financially unsustainable.

Lamar, 29, lives in one of the new apartment buildings that has gone up in Trafford, a borough south-west of the city centre.

He moved here three years ago from Milton Keynes and works at an IT firm near Deansgate. "I leave my house and I'm in the office in about 30 minutes," he says.

Lamar even ended up selling his car shortly after moving to Trafford because he feels the public transport where he lives is so good. "There's about four tram stops within a 15 minute walk."

In his spare time - there's not much of it as he's doing an Open University degree in economics - he makes TikTok videos about personal finance and investing.

He began posting about 18 months ago and, like the other influencers I spoke to, thinks there's something about the atmosphere in Manchester that encourages creativity.

When Lamar was interviewing for his IT job, his hiring manager told him how much he liked his TikTok videos - even though it wasn't mentioned on Lamar's CV. "That was quite cool," he tells me.

As we part ways outside Trafford town hall, a student recognises Lamar and says his videos prompted him to start saving into an ISA two months ago. They take a picture together.

Lamar laughs at my suggestion he's TikTok's answer to Martin Lewis. "I swear this has only happened to me once before."

The success of Ruwaydah's TikTok led her to set up a social events business, which she plans to expand next year.

"This has all started from Manchester," Ruwaydah explains during our coffee - hers is a vanilla mascarpone matcha - in Deansgate.

"The vibe of Manchester is everything. And I think you need to be here and experience it to get that."