The Northern Rose

The Northern Rose Independent journalism from Manchester

28/08/2026

Vada Vada opened on Oxford Road as one of Manchester’s newest independent q***r venues. Since then, we’ve heard from multiple former staff members and customers raising a series of concerns — from working conditions and redundancies, to allegations involving a former co-director, AI-generated menu imagery, customer experience, and disability access.

We put every allegation to Vada Vada and are publishing their response in full alongside what we were told by staff.

26/08/2026

Operating theatre staff, nurses, clinical support workers and housekeepers at Salford Royal, Royal Oldham, Rochdale Infirmary and Fairfield Hospital (Bury) are staging three 24-hour strikes this week - 24th, 26th and 28th August - after the Northern Care Alliance withdrew a pay offer over unpaid overtime.

UNISON says staff are losing over £80 a shift when NHS Professionals covers gaps at less than the standard rate. It's the second round of walkouts this year after staff struck in June, and the trust has now declared a critical incident to keep urgent surgery running.

UNISON reps Kevin, Lisa and James told us the current levels of staffing and pay have had a disastrous effect on the quality and standard of care, and on nurses' mental health.

Full video on our YouTube.

24/08/2026

St Catherine’s Wood is a new 2.7-acre riverside park beside the River Irk in Manchester, opened to the public on 24 July 2026. It sits between Collyhurst and Cheetham Hill, a 15-minute walk from the city centre, in the emerging Red Bank neighbourhood.

It’s the first completed green space in the Victoria North regeneration programme — a joint scheme between Manchester City Council and Far East Consortium — which plans around 15,000 new homes across seven neighbourhoods over the next 15-20 years, alongside 113 acres of connected parks, woodland and green space. The park itself was funded partly through a £51.6m Housing Infrastructure Fund grant from Homes England and £7m from the GMCA, and features gabion-lined paths, stepped walkways, and newly planted endangered Manchester poplar trees.

21/08/2026

Protesters gathered outside Heron House in Albert Square - now home to Andy Burnham's "No. 10 North," the Prime Minister's outpost in Manchester - from 12-1pm today.

77 newly qualified Clinical
Psychologists facing unemployment despite years of NHS training, and organisers' warnings that hundreds of millions in public training spend is going to waste with no jobs guaranteed at the end.

They're calling for the delayed NHS workforce plan and safe staff-to-patient ratios — and for accountability over a reported £335m cut to Greater Manchester's mental health budget.

20/08/2026

It’s no secret that social media is bad for people’s mental health - especially children and over in the U.S, Meta are being fined for designing their products to be damaging to children.

Is it time we do the same here?

19/08/2026

Institute of Cancer Research workers have gone on strike after key working conditions had started to be eroded away.

Unwilling to accept their circumstances the workers boosted union membership from 100 people to 400 and received four pay offers with one day.

With strikes on going across Manchester the ICR shows how collective bargaining can help lead to real positive changes for workers.

16/08/2026

There was a gathering in St.Peter’s Square this afternoon to have a 3 minute silence for former Cambridge professor Jason Arday.

Arday - the youngest black professor at the uni - was found dead at 3pm on Friday after an intense media pile on over plagiarism claims which Arday later resigned over.

Arday’s death and the 3 minute silence forced us to reflect on how the media scrutiny was far beyond what anyone could consider to be fair, hitting us with the reality that Arday’s race was clearly a contributor to the scrutiny which has led to his death.

16/08/2026

A Manchester-area buyer paid £400 for a Prada bag on Vinted, using the platform's own authentication service. It turned out to be fake — Prada staff didn't recognise it, and an independent check confirmed it wasn't real. Vinted only refunded her after the BBC stepped in.

We break down what Vinted's "verification" actually catches - and why cases like this are raising bigger questions about who, or what, is checking these items.

14/08/2026

We sat down in Hulme park to chat about the real Manchester problems that current politicians aren’t talking about and reacted to Bev Craig’s BBC phone in called ‘the hot seat’.

For something that was meant to be a tough examination of the mayor and the issues that are facing the city - we found the call in to be a relatively softball interview.

For more - you can watch the full video on our YouTube channel.

12/08/2026

St Peter's Square isn't just a name — it's named after a church that stood on that exact spot from 1788 until it was demolished in 1907. What most people crossing it every day don't know: the church's crypt, 46 vaults packed with coffins, was never cleared. It was simply sealed up and left in place - and it's still down there today, right beneath the tram tracks.

In this video, we uncover the hidden history of St Peter's Square: how the crypt was rediscovered by accident during construction of the £165m Second City Crossing tram line, the forgotten burial ground nearby that held over a hundred more bodies and the stone cross marking the site of the original altar - including how the 2015 relocation may have left its mark.

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