Piccadilly East is on the way to becoming one of Manchester’s coolest new neighbourhoods, but the once little-known corner of the city has a fascinating hidden history.
Like Castlefield, the Northern Quarter and Ancoats before it, the district – set between Piccadilly Station and Great Ancoats Street – is making waves as one of the up-and-coming places to live for people wanting to get ahead of the property curve.
The team behind Ramona and The Firehouse recently revealed plans to transform Piccadilly East’s Diecast building into a massive beer hall and night market, alongside creative workspaces and gardens.
This spring will also see the opening of the striking Leonardo Hotel – the brand’s first spot in the city, with bar, restaurant and wellness spaces.
Add to that plans for more homes, pocket parks and community events and a proper buzz is building, with Piccadilly East being named by The Times as one of the ‘next great places to live’.
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But those calling it home will be the latest in a rich and colourful history. From rival gangs and gritty industrial slums, to a former life as a red light district, the streets echo with the stories of the past.
The Commune
Piccadilly East has been named as one of the ‘next great places to live’.
It might seem mad today, but most of the area surrounding Crusader Mill on Chapeltown Street was slum housing and back-to-back terraces.
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Sometimes nicknamed The Dardanelles or, more locally, The Commune, the communities housed workers from Crusader and the surrounding mills.
The tiny houses were often home to around nine people living in poverty, including local workers, their kids and lodgers.
It’s where machinists, carters, and railway labourers rested their head after their shifts, alongside cotton spinners and reelers, tailors, packers, stay (corset) makers, and paviers who were working on the rapidly expanding city’s infrastructure.
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The success of the neighbourhood played out in the local pubs, mostly lost to slum clearance. Whilst their daily life and celebration likely played out in these boozers, sadly it’s the stories of strife and sorrow that are usually logged in the history books.
Gangs and scuttling
Crusader Mill
The area was once rife with crime, with young boys making up the gangs of Manchester. The Scuttlers and The Quality Street Gang (the inspiration for the Thin Lizzy song ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’) ran the streets around Piccadilly East and Ancoats.
Like George Moran, described in records as ‘a rough’, who lived there in the 1890s and was part of the gang that served as the influence for TV smash series Peaky Blinders. By the time George was in trouble for scuttling it was their peak time in history, with more young people in Strangeways prison for scuttling than anything else.
Scuttling – involving groups of young men fighting – all but vanished when the slums in the area were cleared in the following decades.
Colourful characters
Ferrous
The Leonardo Hotel
Developments transforming Piccadilly East
Loads of colourful characters make up the very human history of the neighbourhood.
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Tales like that of Elizabeth White, who lived on Travis Street. She met a man – George Craven – that summer in Blackpool, and he began lodging with her. It turned out Craven was a wanted burglar who had cut a hole in the ceiling of a jewellers so he could wriggle in and raid the joint.
Police tracked him down to Elizabeth’s home in 1872, where he shot a Detective Rowbottom, who survived a bullet that passed straight through his wrist.
Or the likes of the McGlynns, two local performers believed to have been part of Hengler’s Grand Cirque, a circus that stood for only four years before it was demolished to make way for the Hippodrome.
Performances included an early incarceration of the living statues now common on Market Street, and ‘Siberia’, which saw soldiers and horses plunged in water ten feet deep.
The McGlynn family vanished from the records around the time the circus was demolished – some believed they went to Paris to join the era of the Moulin Rouge.
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Or the people who kept the community going, like knocker upper Rueben Holland, lamplighter Thomas Kennedy, fireman Thomas Taylor, Alice Baths the umbrella maker, and a pickle packer named Elizabeth Grice.
A new chapter
Crusader Mill
Crusader Mill
Phoenix
Phoenix
New Capital & Centric developments in Piccadilly East.
Social impact developer Capital&Centric are leading the re-birth of the neighbourhood, with projects including the restoration of the historic 200-year-old Crusader Mill into homes and the neighbouring new-build Phoenix, industrial loft apartments. Their new-build community Ferrous, featuring ground floor cafes, bars and outside event space has also just been given the go ahead.
Crusader dates back to the 1840s, when it was the home of manufacturing company Parr, Curtis and Madeley and a key cog in Manchester’s Cottonopolis past.
A huge fire destroyed much of the mill, then known as Phoenix Works, in 1861, with the weight of the machinery and the damage brought by the flames causing the floors to collapse.
It was rebuilt, and by the 1920s was known as Crusader Mill, occupied by creative industries like the arts and publishing.
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Thankfully, the days of slums and Scuttlers are long gone. A new chapter for the building and neighbourhood has already begun, with residents living where hundreds of people once worked.
But whilst the next era of Piccadilly East will be one buzzing with community life, the Mancunian stories that have shaped its past will always be a part of its heritage.
Visit the Crusader and Phoenix websites to find out more or call 0161 222 0204 to arrange a viewing.
Property
Top 10 cheapest UK areas for first time buyers revealed – and two are only an hour from Manchester
Emily Sergeant
The 10 cheapest areas to buy your first house in the UK have been revealed, and two are only an hour away from Manchester.
After it was revealed that more than 70,000 home buyers across England are estimated to have missed the stamp duty relief deadline, which means that they’ll now be required to fork out thousands of pounds extra as of yesterday (1 April), the cheapest places to get your foot on the property ladder in 2025 have now been named.
While the end of the stamp duty relief will mostly affect those who had already previously purchased properties, first time buyers are sadly not exempt, as their current stamp duty threshold of £425,000 has now fallen back to £300,000.
So if you’re looking to buy your first home, this is a list to keep a close eye on.
The top 10 cheapest UK areas for first time buyers have been revealed / Credit: Pavel Danilyuk (via Pexels)
Property platform Rightmove has crunched the numbers and come up with a top 10 list for those on a budget and considering lower-priced areas they can move to, with the Scottish town of Kilmarnock in Ayrshire being named the cheapest area for a first time buyer to get onto the property ladder, as the average asking price for a typical first time buyer-type home here is just over £84,000.
Scotland keeps on pulling through, as the twon of Greenock in Inverclyde is second on the list, with an average asking price of £88,862, followed by Grimsby in third at £93,427.
As far as the North West is concerned, no residential areas in Greater Manchester have made the cut this time around, but the region’s two representatives on the list are only around an hour away from Manchester.
Top 10 cheapest UK areas for first time buyers
Kilmarnock – £84,325
Greenock – £88,862
Grimsby – £93,427
Blackpool – £93,711
Middlesbrough – £95,473
Hartlepool £99,525
Paisley – £99,570
East Killbride – £100,814
Ayr – £101,391
Burnley – £102,848
You’ll have to cross over the border into Lancashire if you’re looking for a budget-friendly first time home, as Blackpool takes the fourth spot on the list, with an average price of £93,711, and Burnley also makes an appearance at number 10 with an average price of £102,848.
The North overall is pretty well-represented, with other towns and cities such as Middlesbrough and Hartlepool featuring in the top 10, but according to the data, Scotland is by far the cheapest country to get on the property ladder in the UK.
Paisley, East Killbride, and Ayr also find themselves on the list lower down, as well as the two aforementioned Scottish towns in first and second place.
Experts at Rightmove explained that wage growth has unfortunately ‘outpaced’ the rise in average asking prices for first time buyer homes in the last five years, so while this has slightly increased the mortgage borrowing power of first time buyers, affordability is still said to remains ‘very stretched’ overall.
Featured Image – Benjamin Elliott (via Unsplash)
Property
More than 70,000 home buyers set to pay thousands after missing stamp duty relief deadline
Emily Sergeant
More than 70,000 home buyers across England are estimated to have missed the stamp duty relief deadline.
This sadly means they’ll be required to fork out thousands of pounds extra.
In case you hadn’t heard, up until yesterday (31 March 2025), anyone who was moving and had bought a home in the past was not required to pay Stamp Duty Land Tax, better-known as just stamp duty, on the portion of the property price up to £250,000.
But from today (1 April), this threshold has now fallen back to £125,000, which unfortunately means that property purchasers are facing an extra £2,500 in moving costs, on average.
While the end of the stamp duty relief will mostly affect those Greater Manchester buyers who had already previously purchased properties, first time buyers are sadly not exempt from the deadline changes too, as their current stamp duty threshold of £425,000 has now fallen back to £300,000 as of today.
Person holding the keys to a new house in their hand / Credit: Maria Ziegler (via Unsplash)
Given that the average property price for a first time buyer-type home is currently around £227,965, according to Rightmove, the new £300,000 threshold may hit those purchasing properties in more expensive areas – particularly the South East.
A third of those estimated 70,000 home buyers who have missed the deadline are thought to be first time buyers.
Leading property platform Rightmove published an analysis in February into just how much of an impact the end of the stamp duty relief would have on home buyers, all while calling on the UK Government to announce a short extension to the deadline to help people in the middle of the property purchasing process avoid potentially thousands of pounds in extra moving costs.
But despite these calls from industry leaders, there was no extension to the deadline announced in the last week’s latest Spring Statement.
“It’s extremely disappointing that the Government has not used the Spring Statement as an opportunity to extend the impending stamp duty deadline for those currently going through the home-moving process,” commented Rightmove’s property expert Colleen Babcock.
“We estimate over 70,000 people are going to miss the deadline and complete in April instead, and a third of those are first time buyers.”