In 2002, Manchester City Council chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein told the Observer that Manchester's aim was “to make us a very successful regional capital”.

He was speaking after roughly a decade of regeneration work and before much of the modern skyline had been built.

Twenty-four years later, Newcastle City Council leader Colin Ferguson is making a strikingly similar claim for his city.

In a recent Local Democracy Reporting Service interview published by the Chronicle he said Newcastle should become England’s most successful regional capital within the next decade.

Ferguson said Manchester and Liverpool had once come to Newcastle “to ask about how to do things”. He said Newcastle needed renewed ambition to rebuild its position.

He also rejected the idea that Newcastle should copy the “big towers of metal and glass” that changed Manchester's skyline. The ambition, he said, had to be human-scale and human-centred.

Manchester went on to change dramatically. The period that followed was shaped by what Bernstein and Manchester City Council leader Sir Richard Leese did before the powers and the skyline arrived.

Bernstein joined Manchester City Council as a junior clerk, became chief executive in 1998 and had already been appointed chief executive of Manchester Millennium Limited, the public-private task force responsible for rebuilding the city centre after the 1996 IRA bombing. He worked closely with Leese, the council's long-serving political leader.

The bomb was a catastrophe. It also forced decisions about what the city should become.

In a later Guardian interview, Bernstein recalled that he and Leese took their rebuilding plan to deputy prime minister Michael Heseltine. They asked for about £97 million, worth roughly £200 million in 2026 prices. By the time they reached Euston in a taxi, Bernstein said, Heseltine had agreed to provide it.

Bernstein described his role in similar terms in a 2009 Leaders Magazine interview. He said he did not see himself as chief executive of the council alone, but as chief executive of “Manchester, the place”.

He also said the city's major projects had been delivered through strong joint ventures because the public sector was good at some tasks and private companies had the skills to deliver major developments.

That partnership also shaped the development of Airport City. Much of the land was owned by Manchester Airport Group, the council or other public bodies.

That gave the partners control over which activity came to the site and whether a project created new employment or simply moved jobs from one part of the region to another. “Land ownership is a very powerful tool,” Leese said in a 2012 interview, “far more powerful than planning.”

The same logic appeared in how Manchester sold itself. In a 2019 fDi Intelligence interview, Leese said the city's investment pavilion at MIPIM, an international property conference, showed pictures of people rather than property.

Manchester was a place to live and do business before it was a property opportunity, he said. “One follows from the other.”

The result was not just a taller skyline. Manchester rebuilt its city centre, made living in the centre part of its economic proposition and developed major sites such as Airport City through public and private ownership working together. The transport links, university relationships and private-sector trust accumulated over time.

The Productivity Institute and University of Manchester identify the same combination of long-term collaboration, devolved decision-making and planning. The useful question here is what that history means for Newcastle now.

Greater Manchester's councils had been working together for decades. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority describes the statutory city-region pilot established in 2009 and the creation of the authority in 2011 as steps in a longer history of cooperation.

The first major devolution deal, signed in 2014, gave Greater Manchester powers over transport, housing, planning, business support and skills, alongside an elected mayor.

Leese later explained in a University of Southampton lecture why Greater Manchester was able to negotiate ahead of other places. It had already done the business planning, financial modelling and work needed to bring a proposition to government.

Devolution rewarded a system that had begun to organise itself. It did not create that system from scratch.

Andy Burnham became Greater Manchester mayor in 2017 and remained in the role until becoming prime minister in 2026. He inherited a system that had been developing for decades. His contribution was to turn transport, skills, housing, strategic planning and investment into a single political programme for Greater Manchester rather than a collection of council programmes.

The Bee Network is the most recognisable example. It brought local bus services into the wider transport strategy and gave the mayoral authority a visible programme through which to connect places, jobs and development.

A Greater Manchester Combined Authority paper, drawing on Office for National Statistics data, says Greater Manchester's economy grew by an average of 3.1 per cent a year between 2015 and 2023, compared with 1.5 per cent for the United Kingdom.

Provisional data put Greater Manchester's output above £100 billion in 2023. Those figures describe the wider city-region, not Manchester city alone.

Foreign direct investment is a narrower measure, but it shows the gap in investor reach. The 2026 Ernst and Young UK Attractiveness Survey recorded 31 projects in Manchester and 11 in Newcastle in 2025. Manchester remained the leading UK city outside London, while Newcastle ranked sixth.

Project counts do not show the value of the investment, the number of jobs or whether the projects would have happened without public support. They do show how often each city appears in the international investment market.

That sounds transferable, but Newcastle is not Manchester.

Former Newcastle City Council chief executive Pat Ritchie put the difference in practical terms in a 2021 interview. Newcastle is a regional capital without Manchester's critical mass, she argued.

Gateshead belongs within Newcastle's functional urban economy because “it all works as one region”, while Sunderland has its own substantial economic pull. The wider North East is polycentric, with several centres and identities rather than one metropolitan core.

That means Newcastle cannot simply organise a city-region around itself in the way Manchester historically could. It has to coordinate across places with distinct centres, identities and economic interests.

The regional authority also stretches across large and very different areas including County Durham and Northumberland.

The North East's history makes this harder. In a 2024 paper, then Bennett Institute research assistant Steph Coulter and institute co-director Michael Kenny describe a region shaped by rivalries between its cities, failed or short-lived attempts at regional governance and institutional churn.

That is the difference between receiving formal powers and accumulating the relationships and memory needed to use them. Ferguson is also reviving an older ambition. In a 2012 City Deal statement, then Newcastle City Council leader Nick Forbes said Newcastle took its responsibilities as the regional capital seriously.

The North East Mayoral Strategic Authority (North East MSA) now gives the region a stronger platform. Led by North East Mayor Kim McGuinness, it has powers over transport, investment, skills, housing and strategic development.

Its area covers Newcastle, Gateshead, North Tyneside, South Tyneside, Sunderland, County Durham and Northumberland, but not Tees Valley.

Ferguson is not an observer of this machinery. As well as leading Newcastle, he is the North East MSA's cabinet member for transport. His Newcastle ambition therefore depends partly on powers and relationships that Newcastle City Council does not control alone.

Forth Yards shows what this can look like on the ground. The site sits west of Newcastle Central Station, between the expanding city centre and the Tyne, with Gateshead on the opposite bank.

It is one of the few places where Newcastle can extend the centre westwards at meaningful scale. The wider masterplan area covers about 36 hectares. Within it, roughly 21 hectares, or 52 acres, is vacant or developable land.

A previous Review North article, Forth Yards, the current state of Newcastle's last major waterfront site, set out the site's ownership and development position in more detail. Its difficulty is physical as well as institutional: 16 landowners, complicated infrastructure and the need to make a long-disused part of the riverside attractive to private developers.

The response has been a coordinated public intervention. Newcastle City Council, the North East Mayoral Strategic Authority, Network Rail and Homes England are working around land, remediation, infrastructure, planning and delivery, while private developers prepare schemes within that framework.

Around £120 million of public investment is being directed towards remediation, infrastructure and enabling works to prepare the site for development. The point is not that the different interests have disappeared. It is that they are being brought together around a shared development opportunity.

Newcastle and Gateshead are also preparing a joint Local Plan, while the Mayoral Development Zone is intended to align development, transport, funding and investment across the river.

Forth Yards is therefore a practical test, but it is a constructive one. Newcastle is already using public land, infrastructure and institutional coordination to make private development possible. The question is whether that approach can become repeatable.

The same coordination question appears in inward investment. Invest North East England coordinates regional enquiries for seven local authorities, while NewcastleGateshead Initiative continues city-level investment and visitor-economy work under a separate arrangement.

The functions are complementary but still transitional. An independent evaluation recorded 1,042 gross jobs associated with the regional programme by the end of 2025, while noting that net impact could not yet be estimated robustly. This is evidence of capacity being built, not a settled single system.

Greater Manchester's advantage was not simply that it acquired powers. Its leaders accumulated working relationships, evidence, trust and a shared language before the powers arrived. The North East now has more formal tools, but formal tools do not create institutional memory by themselves.

Manchester's record also carries a warning. Growth did not erase deprivation. Manchester City Council's 2026 public health report says the city ranked fourth for deprivation out of 296 English councils in 2025, with more than 40 per cent of its neighbourhoods still among the most deprived in the country and 43.6 per cent of under-16s living in poverty after housing costs in 2023/24.

Greater Manchester is now trying to spread investment more fairly through its Good Growth Fund.

Ferguson's own formulation was “ambition for every postcode in Newcastle”. Productive activity is unlikely to be spread evenly across every neighbourhood, but the benefits of a stronger urban economy can reach more widely through jobs, homes, transport and public investment. Newcastle may need a stronger Newcastle-Gateshead core.

The test is whether that concentration produces visible gains across the city rather than only a bigger skyline or a single funding announcement.

Ferguson is right that Newcastle does not need to become Manchester architecturally. Bernstein's ambition mattered because it survived Bernstein and Leese, then passed into the hands of leaders such as Burnham. Bev Craig became Greater Manchester mayor after Burnham left the role for Downing Street. Her leadership is now a live test of whether that system outlasts its most visible individual.

Newcastle faces the same test in a different form. Ferguson's regional-capital ambition will be judged by whether Newcastle can sustain a clear economic direction through changes of council leadership, mayor and economic cycle, while making the benefits visible beyond the strongest core.

The question is not whether Newcastle can look like Manchester. It is whether it can keep building, over decades, a system that works for its own geography.