Category: grand plans
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Suspended spaces
Last month I contributed a post to the cities@manchester blog which explored the ‘suspended spaces’ that exist amidst the urban bustle of Manchester city centre. During my four years living in Manchester I became increasingly interested in – and often frustrated by – the temporary car parks, abandoned buildings, stalled construction projects and boarded-up voids…
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The Arndale’s hidden secrets
When Manchester’s Arndale Centre was completed in 1979 its massive scale and lurid skin of yellow tiles earned it the nickname The Giant’s Urinal. For a building with such a presence, and such a reputation, the Arndale has nonetheless managed to keep two remarkable secrets from Manchester’s shoppers. First up is one of the only…
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The making of a garden city
[portfolio_slideshow] My research is based in Wythenshawe, just south of Manchester. Today Wythenshawe is home to over 70,000 people, but at the start of the 20th century it was open countryside and farmland. What is now one of Europe’s largest areas of social housing was built entirely from scratch, mostly between the 1920s and 60s, to rehouse tens of thousands of…
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County Hall Island Block
John Bancroft’s 1970s extension to the former Greater London Council’s headquarters lay empty for exactly twenty years before being demolished in 2006 to make way for a hotel. Sitting in the middle of a busy roundabout at the southern end of Westminster Bridge, the County Hall Island Block was an early example of open-plan office space…
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Mancunian Way
The Mancunian Way opened in 1967, putting a highway on stilts round the southern half of Manchester city centre. Two years later the road gained an award from The Concrete Society, but the most famous feature of the A57(M) is its slip road to nowhere. This would have sent eastbound traffic north into town along Upper…
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West Cross Route
The West Cross Route was one of the few short sections of the London Motorway Box to make it off the page. First conceived after the war, the Motorway Box was part of the London Ringways scheme, which mirrored plans in other cities up and down the country to build new, fast, orbital and radial…