Market Operations: ‘This is a story about regeneration’

Widely credited with pioneering the modern wave of food halls in the UK, Nick Johnson and partner Jen Thompson set about transforming Altrincham Market some nine years ago.

Yet it was never their intention to create a communal dining concept, a phrase Johnson bristles at.

Instead the story starts much further back, with architect and property consultant Johnson opening Atlas bar in the early 1990s as a way to generate some cash flow.

It was in the days of the Hacienda and The Boardwalk, and it became a hangout for the city’s movers and shakers, with Factory Records’ Tony Wilson, Peter Saville and Rob Gretton all familiar faces.

“We were part of this wave of post-punk activity,” Johnson says. “Probably for five years Atlas was the place where the vigorous imagination of the city would meet. Everybody would go on the Friday night and have a pint. It was really quite pivotal, that exchange.”

This meeting of minds would go on to have a huge influence in the redevelopment of Manchester in the aftermath of the IRA bombing in 1996.

The counter-cultural clique were solicited for their advice in developing a new marketing strategy for the city in the wake of the traumatic episode.

Rebel against mediocrity

But Johnson and his friends were so dismayed by the banality of the messages the local authority proposed (‘We’re up and going’, which he likened to a cycle proficiency test), that they were invited to join the board of Marketing Manchester and shape its direction.

“We were rebelling against some of the mediocrity coming out of the city,” he says. “Because the worst thing you could do is be mediocre, and that’s what the city was suggesting. We thought fuck that, the city’s better. We need an alternative.”

Saville, who had designed Joy Division’s early artwork at Factory, would go on to craft the city’s cultural identity as creative director.

Meanwhile, Johnson was attempting to redefine the metropolitan landscape at regeneration specialist Urban Splash with provocative and challenging property developments.

At the same time, he had become a visiting professor at Yale, a Cabe commissioner and sat on the local enterprise partnership.

It was in the aftermath of the sub-prime mortgage crisis and global financial crash that Urban Splash’s debts were sold on to a vulture capitalist that Johnson saw it was time to get out.

“We weren’t in control of our own destiny. It was unpalatable for me. I decided that I needed to bail out. I realised I had become part of the establishment, which wasn’t me. I was supposed to be part of the post-punk generation that said fuck off to everyone, I didn’t want to grow old and be subservient to the system.”

Johnson decided to renounce all positions of authority and never sit in a board again, in order to rediscover some of the naivety and idealism that had inspired his early work.

“One of the defining reasons for success in business I think is naivety,” he says. “It’s usually meant as a put down, for somebody who doesn’t fully understand, but I think it’s really important to not fully understand, because if you knew how difficult it was going to be you probably wouldn’t embark on that adventure.”

Vision for Altrincham

Having played a pivotal role in shaping Manchester’s urban landscape, he was inevitably called upon by the local authority to help out in Altrincham, an affluent suburb of Greater Manchester but with a high vacancy rate, and in Johnson’s words, “a shithole”.

Though still refusing to sit on a board, he proposed a vision for the town which would see the beating heart of its market revitalised and made fit for modern purpose.

For Johnson, the genesis of Altrincham Market is largely consistent with the principles of his earlier career. “It’s always been in my mind that the identity of places was being eroded by large scale corporate entities going into towns and cities,” he says.

“That’s now come to pass. What I was championing all that time ago, about the impact on places and the failure of places to be distinctive, is now what we’re seeing, and what we’re having to challenge.

“Independence is a vital component in terms of defining unique identity.”

Though not immune to accusations of gentrification, Johnson points out that the model he and Jen have created preserves economic activity within the community, so the revenue stays within the city limits.

As well as shaking off the corporate yoke synonymous with large scale property developments, Johnson reversed his long-standing, design-led philosophy with Market Operations.

While still an architect with a keen eye for detail, Altrincham Market ultimately placed content over presentation.

“What I realised was, having been championing the value of good design for 25 years and working with some of the world’s biggest names in architecture, good design doesn’t matter.

“It was a wilful choice to say, why don’t you go completely in the opposite direction and say, what matters is people and what people do?”

Other then social media, the enterprise took out no marketing or advertising at all, and allowed the quality and authenticity of the food traders to drive interest.

“It was an attempt to go back to word of mouth. If you believe what you’re doing is good and you put it together, then theoretically it should sell itself.

“Ultimately, this is a story about regeneration. The reason we did it in Altrincham was because we live there and it was a shithole.

“It’s not about large investments in real estate. It’s not about architecture. It’s not about PR. It’s about content and about curation. And so that was a deliberate attempt to show how, with less than a million pounds, you can reinvigorate and regenerate a place with very little money simply by curating people and what they do.”

A food market, not a concept

Johnson is offended when commentators describe Altrincham Market, Mackie Mayor and The Picturedome in Macclesfield, as “great concepts”.

From a consumer perspective, he says it was born out of a simpler desire to create somewhere for the local community to eat together, a contemporary version of the great markets of the world.

“It wasn’t conceptual. It was based on all of these things that were flying around in our minds.

“We were attacked, and told ‘you’ve ruined this market’. But we were tenacious enough to stick with it and see that through.

“Then all of a sudden we have the restaurant industry looking at us thinking, what is happening here? Because it’s really successful and everybody’s talking about it.”

Having been an early example of the food hall phenomenon in the UK, Market Operations is cited as a major influence on the subsequent examples that continue to crop up, and Johnson has mixed feelings about those he sees as imitators.

Market Halls bears some of the similar hallmarks, but is more corporate than community-orientated, while Graffiti Spirits Duke Street Market in Liverpool is an outright copy, he says.

“It’s just disappointing, that you haven’t got the sense of originality to go and carve out your own identity. The problem with plagiarists is they’re just taking a façade.

“Sitting at a table eating food isn’t original as a concept. This is merely our interpretation of an amalgam of ideas that have been knocking around in our heads. It’s like a piece of music, it’s how it’s assembled that makes it distinctive.”

Johnson cites empowering independence, enterprise, liberating talent, enabling access to funding, and employing disabled people as just some of the differentiating principles which define his model.

Yet consumers should also be able to enjoy it at face value, he says.

“You should be able to walk in here and not give a shit about any of that backstory and still come away with a rewarding experience.”