A Salford-based company that creates reusable crackers is enjoying the benefits of support from GM Business Growth Hub ahead of its busiest time of year.

Keep This Cracker was founded by Bea Thackeray in 2013 with the ambition of creating Christmas crackers that could be kept and reused to minimise waste. With an estimated 100 million crackers pulled in the UK every year, that is enough to reach the North Pole eight times if laid end-to-end.

Bea said: “My thinking was on how to create that product and to make it something people will want to use and keep. I decided to do some product trials and tests to see whether it was something I could get manufactured at a larger scale here in the UK. That’s really where the idea came from. And then at one point I thought, now I need to go full time and give this a go.

“I’m tackling this from so many different angles. They come flat packed, which means that the packaging is minimal. The packaging is also compostable and reusable, you can store them away after you’ve used them back into the packaging. And one of the main advantages is you can put your own gifts inside. I’ve got customers that are telling me they’re still using them five years on.”

During the pandemic, Bea started to access support through webinars, before signing up for the EnterprisingYou programme through the Hub, and benefiting from support from experienced eco-innovation specialists. She said: “My business adviser on EnterprisingYou was great. He put me in touch with the departments I needed to speak to within the Business Growth Hub, such as the Eco Innovations team, which is how I ended up on Eco-FORCE workshops.”

Yvonne Sampson, Head of Enterprise at GM Business Growth Hub, said: “Small businesses like Keep This Cracker have such an important role to play in our journey to net zero. They have the innovative ideas and drive to create products that will help us all reduce our own carbon footprints, so we are thrilled to help Bea continue to grow her business and get her crackers on more and more tables for many Christmases to come.”

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Touchstones Rochdale has received a National Lottery Heritage Fund grant of just under £250,000 for a heritage project being developed as part of the museum and gallery’s major capital redevelopment.

The Dining Room – working title – is a co-curation project, which will see a diverse range of community partners work with Touchstones to curate a new museum space, which will combine the unifying theme of food with the borough’s collections.

Made possible by money raised by National Lottery players, the aim of the project is to transform what used to be a static museum display into a dynamic, evolving collections display, responsive to Rochdale’s rich diversity and creating a sense of ownership over Touchstones.

Twenty paid Community Curators will be recruited through partners Awakening Minds, Theatre in Flow, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing and the Association of Ukrainians Great Britain: Rochdale Branch, with a further 10 young people from Rochdale Youth Service invited to act as Young Curators. Touchstones will also work with delivery partner the Co-operative Heritage Trust, a major part of the food heritage story of Rochdale.

Bryan Beresford, Community and Inclusion Manager at Touchstones, said: “Food has played a key role in our community engagement work over the past few years. The Dining Room will enable us to re-tell the story of Rochdale today, through the lens of food and heritage – with and for our local communities. We’re excited to see how this transformative project reimagines how a museum functions and discover new ways of telling stories.”

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Manchester-based land promoter The Strategic Land Group (SLG), and Tract, have launched an innovative new development appraisal tool understood to be the first of its kind.

Built in response to the housing crisis and the UK’s 4.3 million home backlog, its creators hope to encourage landowners to bring forward potential sites. The platform generates instant, free of charge appraisals for landowners based on a site’s characteristics and the type of development. Tract co-founder, Jamie Rumbelow, has worked alongside SLG’s managing director, Paul Smith, in developing the new tool.

The platform generates an instant appraisal for any site in England larger than half an acre. Landowners receive a property summary which includes a location plan and a description of its planning constraints, which land specialists at SLG then use to assess its future development potential. The tool can also be used to assess a site’s potential for renewable energy installations such as solar panels, supporting the UK’s transition to net zero by increasing carbon-free power generation.

Paul Smith said: “It’s fantastic to be able to launch this innovative new tool in partnership with Tract – we’re often approached by landowners who want to understand what they might be able to build on their land. We hope this new tool will allow them to do that quickly and easily and, perhaps, help some owners identify opportunities they didn’t even know existed, whether residential development or renewable energy.”

Jamie Rumbelow said: “While the housing crisis is a political problem, that doesn’t necessarily mean it needs a political solution – we believe the housing crisis can be solved with better technology. We’ve launched this new tool to make the site appraisal process easier and more transparent and hope it will encourage landowners to start thinking about the potential for developing underused land, bringing more new homes forward.”

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Manchester brewery, Joseph Holt, has invested £250,000 in the overhaul of Swinton pub, The Golden Lion, including a striking blue colour scheme, making it the first in the family-owned brewery’s 127-strong estate across the North West to sport this look.

The shade is known as Stiffkey Blue, from the Farrow & Ball Heritage Range.

Other changes at the also includes the installation of a pizza oven to support the pub’s extensive food menu.

According to Denis Maddocks, Estates Executive at Joseph Holt, the decision to give the pub a blue make-over was as much a practical one as one based on art and design. He said: “The Golden Lion has always been a popular pub and is well known in the area.

“However, it’s on the pavement of a busy road and when we decided to do the refurbishment, we wanted to make it more of a landmark. The shade we have chosen is a distinctive shade of blue which makes it hard to miss, enhances the rendered external walls and protects it from environmental discolouring. Those who are unfamiliar with the pub may notice it for the first time, too, and so have the chance to come in and enjoy our new range of pizzas.”

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Due to significant client wins and increased demand for PR, digital marketing and comms services from businesses based in the south of the UK over the past year, Manchester’s Refresh has established a new full time base in London.

Refresh’s southern-based clients include Samsung Climate Solutions, Watco, the Glass and Glazing Federation, Accoya, Etex and more. Account director, Libby Zbaraska, who has been with Refresh in Manchester for almost three years, will relocate to London to establish the new office. Libby is responsible for a number of the agency’s construction and manufacturing clients and Refresh’s expansion plans are directly linked to these sectors.

Managing director, Laura Mashiter, said: “The business need is clearly there. We’re very much a people business and we like to get in front of our clients as much as possible – this works better for us and for them. We’re spending an increased amount of time on trains, which, as we know, aren’t perfect, so given the forecasting we’ve done for our future, we concluded the most sensible step was to form a London base. It’s one of several major changes we’re making to the business to lay more foundations down as we prepare for another wave of growth.”

She added: “It is critical that the person launching our London operation understands Refresh – our values and ways of working – in addition to being proactive and passionate as these traits run through the agency. We were extremely lucky that Libby decided this was a move that she’d like to make. Libby is an amazing, dedicated team member and I can’t think of a better person to be leading our southern business.”

Libby Zbaraska said: “Once we’d identified the need to have boots on the ground in London, led by a senior person who can visit our southern-based clients without incurring increasing travel time and costs, I jumped at the chance. I know Refresh inside out and as we work flexibly anyway, we view this very much as a seamless transition.”

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Public relations agency Citypress is to offer a range of ‘on the job’ experiences for students at UA92, Gary Neville’s boutique university, including guest lectures and workshops as well as mentoring, work experience and LinkedIn and CV training sessions.

City Press joins over 80 industry partners of UA92 and the the partnership will sit alongside the agency’s long-term partnership with Creative Access, which provides career opportunities for under-represented groups.

They also run a programme of immersive ‘work safaris’ with the Manchester Communications Academy in Harpurhey which gives school-age children their first taste of the communications industry through talks and creative tasks, and directors also provide guest lectures for the University of Salford’s MA in Public Relations and Digital Communications.