F E AT U R E By Simon Ward
Great Ancoats Street – proposals for a new park
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Simon Ward, who heads Atkins’ national landscape team along with colleagues Justyna Grabowska and Katy Cardwell, has designed a park which could offer many benefits to the local community and the wider city. 1. Visual looking into new park. © atkinsglobal.com
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ities like Manchester are busy reimaging their spaces and thinking hard about how they could be reshaped after COVID-19, when there might be fewer cars, fewer car parks, and more need for quality outdoor green space. Within the city centre area of Manchester, there are around 50 car park spaces or brownfield sites of varying sizes
that are currently used for parking or remain vacant. These are often located in the heart of the City’s burgeoning quarters, and would make ideal sites for city parks and informal play or recreational areas. As a society we must redress the balance between man and nature. One of the few silver linings of the COVID-19 pandemic is that it has provided the impetus to radically
rethink how our cities work, and how they might best serve a changing society which is crying out for more natural city spaces. The crisis has revealed a serious lack of large scale, quality, green space in Manchester, which is not alone in the UK in this, but with the rapid expansion of the city’s residential offer, that needs to change and quickly. A city of Manchester’s international standing and ambition 35
