Block to Block – Film Reveals Activists Fight to Stop Tower Block

BLOCK TO BLOCK 

A 35-minute documentary that interrogates who Manchester is being built for. 

 
It was a sunny afternoon in May 2022, I was sat in Hulme Garden Centre getting an insight into the disastrous property landscape by the quietly spoken and incredibly knowledgable Isaac Rose, from Greater Manchester Tenants Union, who would go on to become my producer. Prior to this, I was making amateur videos mostly on the climate, for Extinction Rebellion, Kill The Bill, and Black Lives Matter.  
 
I came into the topic of housing by chance. I was filming Extinction Rebellion at Ryebank Fields in Chorlton, South of Manchester’s city centre, where a group of climate activists had occupied a green space called Ryebank Fields to stop Manchester Metropolitan University who wanted to turn it into luxury housing. Nobody wanted to be shown on camera as a lot of them had been arrested, or were prepared to be. However, there was one member of XR that frequented Ryebank Fields who took the opportunity to express his disgust at the state of Manchester’s housing, the private rental properties and big money interests hollowing out the city. 

A surface level glance at the statistics shows that 27 skyscrapers have been completed since 2018, there’s 20 under construction and a further 51 are proposed, (https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/newsmanchester/our-brilliant-city-centre-is-changing-so-fast-not-everyone-feels-included/ar-AA1hvFMi) yet alongside this explosion of high-priced rental properties, the homelessness population is also rapidly growing. My interest in this topic began to grow.  
 
It was him that first told me about the movement Block The Block. A group made up of resident activists who were fighting the council and the deeply entrenched interests of Manchester’s insatiable property developers. The name of the developer, was Curlew Opportunities, who wanted to knock down The Gamecock Pub, situated in between two social housing blocks in Hulme, just South of the city centre. The residents, who have mostly resided in Hulme for their whole life, were fighting to turn this historic site into something that benefits the existing community of Hulme, instead of another heartless student tower block. Throughout the documentary, I take the opportunity to reveal the vested interests of individuals within the council, and pick apart the specific projects that mostly belong to Renaker, by far Manchester’s biggest beneficiary in the property explosion happening in Manchester (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-60420685). 

Little did I know, when I was sat with Isaac in the garden, that this astounding topic was going to completely absorb me and would become the entire focus of my documentary. I outlined my plans to make a 10/15 minute film and stated that I’d have it done in about 2 months. After a year and a half of trial and error and many lessons learned, we’d finally managed to piece together a 35-minute film (and my first documentary) on Manchester’s housing crisis. 

You can watch Block to Block and speak to Joe at the People’s Powerhouse convention on the 29th & 30th November. Details are here: https://peoplespowerhouse.org.uk/this-is-the-north-convention-2023/