Mollie Simpson

1 week ago | manchestermill.co.uk | Mollie Simpson

The Mill has seen evidence that the owner of a popular bar in the Northern Quarter secretly filmed himself having sex with a female customer via the bar’s CCTV system. The woman says the video was taken without her consent, which could constitute a criminal offence. Sammy Shonn, the 42-year-old owner of Sammy’s Bar, later showed the video to the woman he had sex with, and sent her screenshots of the encounter, which she shared with us.

2 weeks ago | manchestermill.co.uk | Mollie Simpson

Dear readers — welcome to your Monday newsletter. Today’s edition is devoted to those who use their spare time to make the city greener and brighter. We met a local beekeeper who has plenty of helpful tips for how to best design your garden around supporting the city’s bee population, plus, we spoke to the city council’s dedicated volunteer officer who gives out free bulbs and other gardening materials to those wanting to start their own community garden.

1 month ago | manchestermill.co.uk | Mollie Simpson

In 2018, the John Rylands Library welcomed a new leader, whose arrival was said to herald an exciting new chapter for the city. Christopher Pressler, 46, was described as “an exceptional appointment for Manchester” by university registrar Patrick Hackett, who said that one of his key strengths was “leading innovation in the way in which students, researchers and the public access knowledge”.

1 month ago | manchestermill.co.uk | Mollie Simpson

It’s a warm spring evening, and I’m walking through Hulme towards NIAMOS, where tufts of weeds grow through the cracks in the concrete. The sign is missing an M, and there’s a door open: I step through and hear the Untold Orchestra rehearsing an arrangement of Ain’t Nobody. There’s a large common room, filled with mismatched sofas, a piano, buckets filled with cluttered dirty dishes from recent communal meals, alongside a note gently asking people to clean up after themselves.

2 months ago | manchestermill.co.uk | Mollie Simpson

Dear readers — from an outsider’s point of view, MediaCity is an extraordinary success story — 37 acres of film and TV studios, riverside restaurants, concert halls and a university. How did a former dockyard that once had water so filthy and polluted it occasionally caught fire attract millions of pounds of private and public funding, thousands of BBC executives and dozens of high rise apartment blocks? In today’s piece, we tell the other side of the story.