One year in Manchester: starting again and building a life
THE MANCHESTER PROJECT · YEAR ONE
A year after moving from Perth to Manchester, I've been thinking about what it really means to start again. Not the dramatic moments, but the work, family, music, acting, homesickness and ordinary routines that slowly turn somewhere new into a life.
Manchester city centre, one year into building a life here.
Leaving Perth
On 7 July 2025, my dad’s birthday, I left Perth.
The week before had been full of endings. On my final day at the Western Australian Department of the Premier and Cabinet, my old team in the Strategic Communications Unit gave me a vinyl made to look like a campaign record. The sleeve used an old Discover the Other Side campaign asset, with me superimposed walking into ‘the other side’. The back of the sleeve listed the projects and campaigns I had worked on as song titles, while the vinyl record itself was covered in handwritten goodbye messages from the team. It was funny, thoughtful and exactly the kind of send-off that reflected the people who had helped make me the communications and campaigns professional I had become.
A few days later, I hugged Jake, our old and very loved staffy, said goodbye to friends at the Iluka and spent one final evening with my family at the Esplanade in Fremantle for Dad’s 60th birthday weekend. After my brother, sister-in-law and nephews went home, I had one last drink with Mum and Dad. They were up again a few hours later to say goodbye before my sister Natalie drove me to the airport.
At 5.35 the next morning, she drove me to the airport while Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros played in the car. She walked with me as far as she could. I do not remember exactly what we said. Funny how that works: when you feel so much, you almost say so little. We both knew that if either of us kept talking, we would probably cry.
After security, I sat with a beer and started second-guessing the entire thing. Was I doing the right thing? What about my job? What if the career I had built did not translate? My own subconscious seemed to be making one last attempt to keep me inside the life I already understood.
Then I got on the plane.
One final family weekend in Perth, followed by arriving in Manchester on 8 July 2025.
Arriving in Manchester
I landed in Manchester on the morning of 8 July and went straight to Chadderton, in Oldham, where I would stay with family while I found my feet. The room felt oddly familiar and foreign at the same time. I slept fine because I can sleep almost anywhere, then went walking along the canal in the sun, trying to understand the place I had just moved to.
For the first few days, it still felt like a holiday. I also felt a quiet pressure to report back that everything was brilliant. If I told everyone back in Perth that I missed them too much, part of me worried it would sound as though I had failed or made the wrong decision.
Three days after arriving, I was in Heaton Park with my cousin Becky and Dan, watching Oasis. It was hot, loud and slightly surreal. We ate in Prestwich beforehand and, when thousands of people spilt out after the concert and an Uber became impossible, we walked all the way from Heaton Park into Manchester city centre. I had booked a room at Motel One because I knew it would be a big night, so we finished the evening there with an Old Fashioned and a late McDonald’s. It felt fitting that the first real marker of this new chapter was music. I had moved across the world, and Manchester immediately gave me one of the reasons I wanted to be here.
Three days after arriving, Manchester gave me Oasis at Heaton Park, plus a conveniently misspelled sign.
Leaving without rejecting
I did not leave Perth because I hated it. That would make this story much cleaner, but it wouldn’t be true.
Perth is where my parents are, where many of my closest friendships still exist and where most of my professional life began. I knew the roads, the rhythms and the version of myself I had become there. That familiarity was comforting. It was also part of the problem.
I wanted more movement in my life: professionally, creatively and personally. I wanted to know whether the career I had built in Australia would travel. I wanted to live in a city with music, culture and enough space to try something new without feeling watched by the version of myself I had already become. I wanted independence. More than anything, I wanted to stop talking about the life I might have one day and see what happened if I actually went and lived it.
Moving to Manchester was not a rejection of Perth. It was an attempt to make my life bigger.
The reality of starting again
The first few months carried plenty of novelty: Barcelona, a second Oasis show at Wembley thanks to a spare ticket from my best mate Josh, day trips to York and London, cricket at Old Trafford and long walks along the canals. Friends from Australia visited, and I met family I had previously known across a vast distance.
Then the holiday feeling wore off.
I had experience. I had worked on serious campaigns and complex communications in Western Australia. But arriving in a new country has a way of making even a solid career feel temporarily theoretical.
There were applications, interviews, unanswered emails and weeks where I tried to make job hunting feel like a job in itself. Coffee. CV. Application. Walk. Refresh inbox. Try again.
I never reached a dramatic point where I wanted to go home, but by January the holiday feeling was long gone. I was living in someone else’s house, working in a role that was draining me, getting sick and starting some mornings already exhausted by the day ahead. Waking in the dark, cold and rain, I kept thinking: this cannot be the reason I moved across the world. I had not come this far to recreate the same burnout in a colder postcode.
Finding professional footing
When I got my first UK role, I felt two things at once: relief and imposter syndrome.
The company offered me £5,000 more than the advertised salary. It was a small but meaningful vote of confidence. Part of me thought, maybe I actually do know what I am doing. Another part wondered how long it would take everyone else to realise I did not.
Settling into my first UK communications role in Manchester.
The role gave my new life structure and proved I could create professional momentum here. It was also the wrong fit, and losing it hurt. I had just moved into my flat at the Slate Yard, so for a while recovery looked less like a polished career reset and more like watching the entire Star Wars universe in chronological order from my couch.
A solo trip to the Canary Islands helped. One evening, I spoke with an Irish couple outside a bar about how so many people move from Britain and Ireland to Australia, while I had done the opposite.
There was a strange irony in that. Back in Western Australia, I had helped lead the Build a Life in WA campaign, which encouraged skilled workers from the UK and Ireland to move there. Now I was sitting on an island explaining why I had gone the other way.
It was the first time I had properly talked through what had happened with the job to people who did not know me. Saying it out loud to strangers was unexpectedly freeing. Their perspective landed differently because I did not feel I was disappointing them.
I later joined AND Digital and began supporting communications and content work within the UK Department for Education. Much of the work involves taking complex information about change, digital capability, leadership decisions and plans, then helping shape it into something people can understand and use.
In some ways, it was completely different from my work in Western Australia. In others, it drew on the same skill: finding the useful thread in a lot of information, balancing different perspectives and creating clarity for the people who need it.
The important shift was realising my Australian experience had travelled after all. I had to learn a new system and new expectations, but I did not have to abandon the judgement, campaign experience or writing skills I had already built.
Creating a home of my own
On 15 January 2026, I moved into a furnished flat at the Slate Yard.
I did not bring much with me. Family over here had given me a microwave and some cutlery. I had clothes, groceries, my guitar and not a lot else to make the place feel like mine. Even furnished, it felt sparse, but it also felt peaceful and exciting.
Most importantly, it was mine.
After six months without much space or independence, closing the door on my own flat felt like the beginning of a different chapter. One of the first things I did was take a whiteboard marker to the bathroom mirror and write one word:
Consistency.
Whether I have lived up to it every day is another question. But I wanted the reminder in front of me: keep showing up, keep putting one foot forward, keep having a crack.
The flat slowly filled with my own things: mugs, books, laundry, work and the mildly alarming amount of administration required to keep one person functioning. Home was not something I found waiting for me. It was something I assembled.
The first days in my own Manchester flat: furnished, still sparse and finally mine.
A life between places
In December, I returned to Perth for two weeks for my friend Georgia’s wedding, then flew back to Manchester as planned. The short trip sharpened the contrast.
I was back in my old room. I saw Jake, swam and played guitar with my nephews, caught up with friends and stayed up late talking with Dad over a glass or two of Jameson. Being back felt like seeing a long-lost mate, while also feeling as though I had never been away.
Back in Perth for two weeks for Georgia’s wedding, and straight back into the family life I had missed. Wedding photograph by Amanda Afton.
Leaving a second time was harder. Dad drove me to the airport, and I knew exactly what I was returning to: a life where the people I loved would again exist through screens, calls, time differences and carefully timed visits. I was not sad to be returning to Manchester. I was sad because I understood the cost more clearly.
That trip confirmed something important. Perth was still home, but Manchester was no longer merely somewhere I had gone. It was somewhere I was returning to.
In April, I formally resigned from the permanent communications role I still held with Western Australia’s Department of the Premier and Cabinet. It was a practical decision, but it also felt symbolic. I was no longer keeping one foot planted in my old life just in case this one failed.
Perth is home. Manchester is home too. One does not cancel the other.
Being a beginner again
One of the best decisions I made this year was joining Manchester Actors Studio.
It was also slightly ridiculous. I voluntarily walked into a studio where I had no idea what I was doing, then agreed to perform in front of people.
Acting gave me something work could not. It made me a beginner again. Nobody cared about my CV, my campaign experience or whether I could make a senior-leadership deck look coherent. I had to listen, make choices, take risks and occasionally feel like an idiot in front of other people.
Before my first acting showcase, my main concerns were surprisingly practical: how I would walk past the audience in the dark without accidentally hitting someone, why the room was so hot and how we could quietly put the stage back together after the previous scene had rearranged half the chairs. I was nervous, but less than I expected. Maybe years of playing gigs with GC Acoustics had helped. Maybe getting older had made embarrassment feel less dangerous.
Standing onstage did not mean I had suddenly become an actor. It meant I had stopped waiting to feel fully qualified before doing something that interested me.
That is still one of the things I am proudest of. More broadly, I am proud that I built this year myself: I made the decision, sent the applications, walked into unfamiliar places and kept going. I accepted help and kindness along the way. I made the decision myself; I did not make the journey alone.
Performing in my first Manchester Actors Studio showcase.
Participation creates luck
I have started to notice that Manchester tends to give something back when I make the effort to take part.
An open-mic night led to the first person here I could ask to hang out and grab a beer. Acting led to lifts home after class, plans outside the studio and eventually a house party. A gig review turned into drinks and dancing at Albert’s Schloss with people I had only just met. Becky and Dan also became the kind of people who made difficult weeks feel manageable, whether through random chats during the workday, Friday beers or simply being available for a yarn when I needed one. The more I filled my calendar with music, acting, writing and other things that genuinely felt like me, the more life seemed to open up.
Maybe that is the universe rewarding me. Maybe it is simply what happens when I keep putting myself in places aligned with the life I want. Participation creates luck, and confidence usually arrives afterwards.
I have also learnt that meeting people is not necessarily the hardest part. Turning those meetings into lasting friendships is.
Back home, most relationships grew through school, work, music or years of shared history. I have never really been someone who chased people or fought for their attention. I tended to assume that if someone wanted to be in my life, they would come to me.
In a new city, that does not quite work. You have to follow up, suggest the beer, make the plan and show up enough times for a promising conversation to become a real friendship. Learning when and how to put that effort in still feels like new territory.
That remains unfinished. I have met good people; what I want next is the kind of group where you can ask who is free for a beer without it becoming an event that needs six weeks’ notice.
Music, writing and feeling like myself again
Music was one of the reasons Manchester appealed to me in the first place. Over the year, gigs, open mics, reviews and writing became more than entertainment. They were a route back to a creative part of myself that had been easy to postpone while concentrating on work and practical life.
Some moments were obvious highlights: Oasis twice, spontaneous trips, playing an impromptu GC Acoustics set with Georgia at Atomeca, reviewing Don West, open-mic nights and seeing Harry Styles at Wembley. Others mattered because they reminded me I had not moved across the world only to become efficiently employed.
I am writing again. I write about music, culture, travel and what it feels like to become a beginner. I am also turning my website into a proper home for that work.
After I published my review of Harry Styles at Wembley, it started appearing in Google search before I had properly promoted it. It was not a life-changing traffic spike. It was simply proof that putting work into the world creates possibilities that keeping it in your notes app does not.
Harry Styles at Wembley, one of the experiences that helped bring music writing back into my life.
The year has made my professional and creative ambitions feel less separate. The same instincts run through both: finding the story, making complex things clear, understanding an audience and giving ideas a shape people can engage with.
I am now building independent communications and content work alongside my current role. The longer-term goal is not simply to sit somewhere photogenic with a laptop. It is to create enough freedom to work from Manchester, Perth or anywhere else in the world without having to rebuild my professional life each time.
What remains unfinished
A year is long enough for a life to change and short enough for almost everything to remain unresolved.
I have not mastered Manchester. I am still building a social life. My fitness routines are more consistent in theory than in practice. I am learning the balance between saving money and actually living: paying for my own place, travelling, saying yes to things and still trying to build some financial security.
The biggest sacrifice has been access. Back home, close friends and family could be part of ordinary life. You could ask someone to grab a beer or coffee, or ask for help, without negotiating time zones or buying a plane ticket. Here, even strong friendships need more deliberate effort.
I miss the beach, good coffee, the salt, the sun and the sand. I miss driving for ages on my own with The 1975 playing far too loudly, mostly so I cannot hear my own thoughts. I miss Jake, my family and friends, but sometimes it is those ordinary sensory details that catch me off guard first. I’ve missed engagements, birthdays and ordinary afternoons I would have attended without thinking. There have been lonely moments and periods when I looked productive from the outside while feeling uncertain about what I was actually building.
But I no longer treat those feelings as proof that the move was wrong.
A new life does not arrive as a finished product. It becomes yours through repetition, relationships and participation.
Year two
The first year was about proving I could move, geographically, professionally, creatively and emotionally.
The second needs to be about building something that lasts.
By July 2027, I want the independent side of my work to feel established: clearer services, regular paid projects and more freedom to work from Manchester, Perth or wherever work and life take me. I want to make more music, keep acting and remain involved in the arts, and turn promising new connections into a proper group of friends.
I also want to take better care of myself instead of continually scheduling it for next Monday.
Very little about the best parts of this year came from having a perfect plan. They came from applying, attending, asking, travelling, performing, writing and saying yes before I had enough evidence that everything would work. The more I have put myself in places that feel aligned with who I am, the more life has seemed to meet me halfway.
If I could speak to the version of me sitting at Perth Airport with a beer and wondering whether he was making a mistake, I would not give him a grand lesson.
I would tell him that the first months would be harder and less straightforward than he expected. I would tell him that his experience would eventually make sense here. I would tell him that feeling ready would usually come after he had already shown up.
And I would tell him that a year later, Manchester would not feel conquered or entirely certain.
It would simply feel like his life.
Manchester, still unfinished and increasingly mine.
About Greg
I’m a British-Australian communications consultant and writer based in Manchester. I help organisations turn complex ideas into clear content, communications and campaigns, and write about music, culture, place and creative life.
