MANCHESTER/LONDON, July 16 - For Britain's next prime minister, Andy Burnham, a sprawling car park in the centre of a former cotton-manufacturing town in northwestern England represents everything wrong with prior development projects that have hollowed out UK town centres.

He wants to reverse that process by using public money to pump-prime housing, transport and urban renewal to attract the scale of private investment needed to rebuild such towns, with a focus on providing for the needs of the local population.

Burnham, who ran Greater Manchester as its mayor from 2017 until June, is expected to become Britain's seventh prime minister in a decade on Monday, replacing Keir Starmer.

He has so far disclosed little of his team's work on a first 100-day plan, or of his wider vision of how he plans to govern.

Yet at least 10 officials, former aides and people who worked with him told Reuters plans for places such as the town centre of Middleton, which locals describe as having become little more than a "drive through" because of the large car park and two major roads dissecting it, offer a starting point.

Like several post-industrial towns surrounding Manchester, Middleton's best days are long gone, with a shopping centre full of charity and budget shops, few decent jobs and rising anger in a population that feels left behind, said Rose Marley, a mayoral adviser in Manchester and now a co-chair on the Middleton Mayoral Development Corporation, launched last year.

The regeneration project is considering the construction of up to 1,200 new homes, commercial opportunities and investment in green spaces to restore pride to the town, Marley said of a project very much at the beginning of its multi-year life span.

It is this renewal of towns such as Middleton that will be a key political test for the Labour Party. The populist Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, leads opinion polls and has gained ground in such places on the back of a loss of faith in the main political parties' ability to improve living standards.

'PLACE FIRST'