Given how Manchester's cotton mills reshaped the city in the 1830s, what should Greater Manchester councils do today to protect the old mill towns of Oldham and Bolton from industrial decline, and by what year should they aim to have it done?

Hello, I'm Wilson, and some actor keeps asking for his ball back. Castaway, matey! Now, your question, put plainly: Manchester's cotton boom remade the whole region in the eighteen thirties, so what should the Greater Manchester councils do now to stop Oldham and Bolton sliding further, and by what year should the job be finished? Here is the thing most people get wrong. The decline you want to protect these towns from is not coming, it already came. Oldham and Bolton were not suburbs of a Manchester mill economy; they were mill economies in their own right, and Oldham in particular spun more cotton than almost anywhere on earth at its peak. Then the industry fell away over the middle of the twentieth century, and the last big mills closed decades ago. So the real question is not how to defend an industrial base, because there is very little of the old one left to defend. The real question is how to give towns built around a single vanished industry a reason to exist that does not depend on it. That reframing matters, because it changes what success looks like. …