Manchester Had Everything Except a Park
The new Mayfield development goes some way to addressing the city's lack of green space
“Manchester has everything except a beach.”
This quote is attributed to Ian Brown, the singer of the Stone Roses. He knows a thing or two about Manchester: the band made their name in the “Madchester” music scene in the late 1980s.
But when I lived there I begged to differ: something I felt the city lacked more than a beach was a decent park.
That’s not to say that Manchester is one gigantic urban sprawl. The city has several attractive green spaces, my favourite of which was Heaton Park to the north.
However these parks are on the outskirts of Manchester. I found there was very little green space in the city centre itself. The most prominent ‘green space’ was and still is Piccadilly Gardens.
The Gardens are right in the centre of Manchester, a few minutes’ walk from Piccadilly railway station in one direction and Market Street and the Arndale shopping centre in the other.
The location is perfect but for years now the Gardens have been plagued by crime and anti-social behaviour. A scroll through the Manchester Evening News (MEN) feed about the area reveals a possible knife fight that put a man in hospital in September of this year1. The area is notorious for drug dealing.
The Gardens are currently undergoing a redesign after the dreary concrete ‘Berlin Wall’ was demolished in 2020.
England’s cities and green spaces
Manchester grew rapidly in the nineteenth century as the Industrial Revolution drew migrants from the countryside looking for work.
Like other major cities, Victorian planners attempted to lay out parks amid the urban sprawl. But perhaps the sheer scale of the city’s expansion swallowed up these efforts. This Ordnance Survey map of Manchester from the 1840s shows a Strangeways Park, Victoria Park and Belle Vue Gardens. The names survive nowadays but the green spaces do not.
The Ordnance Survey designates green space in its Open Zoomstack data. I decided to choose 20 important cities in England and find out how much of them are given over to green space.
Here are the results:
Manchester doesn’t do too badly in this table, which uses boundaries for what are known as local authorities. Most of us know these as local councils.
But as I said earlier, most of this greenspace is on the outskirts of Manchester.
There are downsides to using local authority boundaries. One is that some local authority boundaries are drawn much more tightly than others.
Manchester is an example of a tightly drawn city boundary. Nearby Leeds has about 44 per cent more people but an enormous 377 per cent more land area.
Here are both cities to scale in their correct locations:
The obvious size differences in the boundaries of otherwise broadly similar cities make fair comparison difficult.
Another difficulty with local authority boundaries is that green space may just be on the other side of the boundary. This will be accessible to the city’s inhabitants but won’t show up in this data. A good example is the sprawling Ashton Court estate, just across the River Avon near Bristol but outside the city boundary.
An alternative method: a mile-wide circle around the town hall
Town halls are usually at the heart of a city, geographically, politically and culturally. Manchester Town Hall certainly is, facing Albert Square and backing on to St Peter’s Square and the Cenotaph.
To avoid the pitfalls of local authority boundaries, I drew circles with diameters of one mile around my cities’ town halls and measured the green space within.
Here are those results:
Examining Manchester’s green space
This table highlights the lack of greenery at the heart of Manchester Only 2.2 per cent of central Manchester (and bits of Salford) is green space. This is the lowest score of our twenty English cities! This map shows those green areas:
Manchester does not have much green space in which to breathe on this map. It has Piccadilly Gardens, which as we’ve discussed has its problems, while Hulme Park is not easily accessible from the city centre because it’s the other side of the Mancunian Way ring road.
Compare Manchester to Nottingham, which has almost four times as much green space:
Enter Mayfield
In September of this year Mayfield Park opened in Manchester.
Situated close to Piccadilly Station, its website bills it ‘Manchester city centre’s first public park’ and 6.5 acres of ‘[a] liberating urban escape for all’.
The MEN called it the city’s ‘first new park for more than a hundred years’. Its piece went into some detail about the competing desire for green space and development in the city centre, calling it: ‘one of the defining political battles the city will go through in the next decade.’
It quotes the council leader, Bev Craig, as saying:
Symbolically, it shows that we have 143 parks and green spaces in Manchester, and our tree coverage is [above average] but people don’t feel that in the city centre. That’s because of the nature of development in a post-industrial city.
The park features amusements that wouldn’t have crossed the minds of Victorian town planners such as slides and a climbing wall.
My Ordnance Survey data does not yet feature Mayfield in its green space. How would including it affect our table above? Would it be enough to move Manchester off the bottom of the league table?
Let’s assume that the 6.5 acres quoted on their website is entirely green space. That is 26304.6 square metres to add to the existing 178455.4 square metres, or a 14.7 per cent increase.
That increases Manchester’s green space from 2.2 per cent to 2.5 per cent overall, enough to move it above Hull and level with Birmingham.
That might not sound like much. Clearly Mayfield is not on the scale of New York City’s Central Park but it has delivered some much-needed green space in the heart of Manchester.
Ultimately each city has its own history and land use. Central Park was planned as New York City grew. Once built you can’t just turf people out of their homes and businesses to turn a block into a park. Realistically today’s planners can convert derelict brownfield land and add shops, homes and offices to sweeten the deal. You have to work with what you have and it looks like Mayfield has done that.
I hope to visit Manchester soon. If I do I will see if I can visit Mayfield to get a feel for it myself. Keep an eye out for any pictures!
Brief disclosure note: I used to work for Reach PLC, the owner of the Manchester Evening News