This covers nearly three weeks rather than one. The last round-up went out on 30 August, so everything here is from 31 August to 18 September, and there’s a lot in it.
The Harworth takeover reached the point where it stops being a negotiation. Peel’s stake crossed 30%, which under the Takeover Code forces a bid, and Harworth responded by announcing it’s leaving residential altogether. Underneath that, a second thread ran all period: Northern businesses shipping outward rather than waiting for capital to arrive.
Peel crossed 30%, so the bid is no longer optional
Peel’s stake in Harworth has hit 30%, triggering a mandatory offer at 177.5p a share. Harworth’s board unanimously told shareholders to reject it (Place Yorkshire).
Peel opened at 172.5p in August, was rejected, and raised to 177.5p, valuing Harworth at £599.77m. Crossing 30% changes the mechanics: below it a bidder can walk away, above it the Code requires an offer to everyone else at no less than the highest price paid in the previous twelve months. So 177.5p is now the floor.
Harworth’s three largest shareholders hold roughly 76% between them. A board recommendation carries weight, and the decision sits with those institutions.
Harworth is quitting residential
The half-year results on 9 September weren’t a strong hand. Net asset value fell to £670.8m from £698.3m, EPRA net disposal value per share dropped 4.3% to 214.8p, and total accounting return came in at minus 3.7% against plus 1.1% a year earlier.
Alongside them, Harworth announced an exit from residential and a £7.4m cost-cutting programme, reallocating capital to become a pure-play powered land and industrial business (Property Week).
Read that next to Peel’s criticism and the two sides are closer than the public row suggests. Peel said cut costs and stop spreading yourself thin. Harworth has now done both. The argument is about price, and about who captures the upside if powered land is worth what Harworth thinks.
The question I keep coming back to is the housing. Harworth’s land has capacity for something like 29,000 homes. Leaving residential keeps that capacity on the map and takes Harworth out of delivering it, and nobody has said who picks it up.
Peel also put a 58,000 sq ft Salford Quays office on the market for £9m in the same week, which is a reminder it’s reshaping what it holds rather than only adding to it.
A Sheffield firm is now answering restaurant phones in ninety-odd countries
MyAutobot has gone live as an official integration inside Eat App, the Dubai-headquartered reservations platform. Restaurants can switch on an AI voice agent that answers the phone around the clock, takes the booking in a natural voice, and writes it into their Eat App diary during the call.
Disclosure: MyAutobot is my company, and The North is published by FU7URE, which I also run.
Eat App says it’s used by more than 5,000 restaurants across 90+ countries, and the integration page sets out what it does. The agent handles changes and cancellations against live availability, answers the questions that pull staff off the floor, takes wait-list requests, escalates complex calls with the full conversation attached, and works in 30+ languages.
The part worth noticing for this briefing is the direction of travel. Software written in Sheffield, embedded inside somebody else’s global platform, is a different kind of export and there isn’t much of it coming out of the North.
Northern firms going outward
That wasn’t the only one. NG Bailey has returned to the top of the UK mechanical and electrical rankings after 18% growth to £706.7m turnover (Place Yorkshire). It’s employee-owned, Yorkshire-headquartered for its whole history, and one of very few Northern firms that leads a national construction table rather than appearing in it.
And Oliver Cookson has partnered with Hilton on a £60m hotel on the former Shena Simon campus in Manchester. That’s MyProtein money going back into Manchester buildings rather than into a portfolio run from somewhere else.
Greater Manchester is now running three funding routes at once
GMCA allocated another £163m from its Good Growth Fund, split £53m transport, £25m innovation and £70m towards 789 homes (Place North West). That’s about £89,000 of public money a home, which is gap funding on sites that don’t stack up alone.
Separately it’s lending £27.4m to a 153-flat build-to-rent tower in Manchester. A grant is spent. A loan comes back and can be lent again, and it also means the combined authority carries risk that a grant never creates.
Add the £529m Greater Manchester was allocated from the national social homes programme and there are three instruments running at the same time: grant, loan, and national programme money. Manchester has never been short of permissions. It’s been short of schemes that can raise the money to start.
Homes, and the tenure question that keeps going unanswered
Kellen and ForHousing have tabled 218 affordable homes on a former Swinton toy factory. Grainger proposed £60m and 300 build-to-rent flats in Chester. Avant started work on 104 homes at Great Houghton in Barnsley, a £23.5m scheme due summer 2027. Strata is entering the North East for the first time with 248 homes at Spennymoor, with Adderstone on civils.
In Knowsley, the Grace Park overhaul was approved alongside 88 affordable homes at Halsnead, which closes a loop we opened in August. That park is funded partly by £13m of Section 106 money from the 1,500-home East of Halewood masterplan, and Section 106 landing on something the new residents will use is rarer than it should be.
At the contested end, Taylor Wimpey’s £133m plans for 600 homes at Yarm are at a planning inquiry after refusal (Place North East). And a former BT building in South Shields is becoming 125 student beds, in a borough that scored 53% on the Housing Delivery Test.
On almost none of these is the tenure split published. I’ve asked that question on every housing announcement since August and it’s still the gap.
Industry, workspace and power
Legal & General has commissioned Bowmer + Kirkland to build a 12-storey, 200,000 sq ft workspace at Ralli Quays in Salford. That’s the same institution behind Maker and Faber at Riverside Sunderland, and the same bet Igloo is making in Newcastle: occupier demand has concentrated into the best space rather than disappeared.
eCorrugated took 198,000 sq ft at Aviator Park in Ellesmere Port for cardboard box manufacturing, which employs more people per square foot than storage does. Tritax bought 40 acres in St Helens for an 8.2m sq ft logistics scheme with a rail freight interchange, and the rail connection is the detail that separates it from an ordinary shed park.
Cubico resubmitted Scout Moor II with 12 turbines instead of 17. Fewer turbines doesn’t automatically mean less power, because modern machines generate considerably more than older ones. The megawatt figure is the number to ask for.
Buildings brought back
Hull’s National Picture Theatre has reopened, bombed in 1941 and out of use ever since. It’s the last surviving civilian Blitz ruin in England, restored by Hull contractor Hobson & Porter (Place Yorkshire).
In Bradford, the Department for Education has filed plans for BRIT North, a four-storey performing arts school. For about four decades there has been exactly one BRIT School, in Croydon. A second one in Bradford changes who can realistically reach it.
Also: Sunderland Museum’s £13.6m transformation is moving to construction, Manchester’s Portico Library has £6.4m of Lottery money towards a £12m expansion with £5.6m still to raise, and Capital&Centric has launched a paid commission for two murals in Sheffield. The word doing the work there is paid.
What I’d watch next
Whether the institutions holding 76% of Harworth take 177.5p. Who picks up 29,000 homes’ worth of residential capacity that Harworth has just walked away from. And whether the Scape £8bn construction framework, which opened tendering last month, gets split into regional lots so Northern contractors can compete. That still hasn’t been published.
The 30 August round-up is here if you missed it.
The North is FU7URE’s briefing on the people, capital and infrastructure reshaping the North of England. Subscribe to the free newsletter to get it in your inbox.
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