5 minute read
Great Ancoats Street – proposals for a new park
Simon Ward is Professional Head of Discipline for landscape architecture at Atkins
Cities 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 deserves a ring of parks around its core city spaces and far more quality green space in its centre, with its lively new quarters.
Site masterplan.
© atkinsglobal
The speculative design for this site was inspired by local demand, where residents wanted to transform a 10-acre (4 hectares) space – recently cleared for a mixed-use development – into one with an emphasis on green space provision for the local community. Our design endeavoured to showcase what a site like this, which is typical of many of our cities fringe and brownfield spaces, is capable of delivering.
View across existing site.
© atkinsglobal
An urban park here could help to transform the area, linking into the adjacent and popular Cotton Field Park and Islington Marina, bringing nature into the heart of the city. It could create an oasis of wellbeing, with modern, multifarious facilities aimed at all sectors of the local community; helping them to relax, play, exercise and enjoy peaceful spaces and gardens, from up-close or via the numerous longer range window and balcony views which surround the site. The design contains a feast of amenity space, with expansive lawns laced with bee and rain gardens, a water cascade and pool, adventure and mixed-age play areas, allotments, growing places and community events spaces. It also includes a range of facilities promoting healthy pursuits, with wide boulevards for COVID-safe walking and cycling; elements all driven by the local communities’ aspirations.
Overhead perspective of speculative Park design.
© atkinsglobal
A park here would be overlooked by thousands of local residents including the in-construction multistorey Oxygen Tower, which sits close to the corner of this site, creating wide green vistas and contact with “wilderness”, including grasslands, large spreading trees and mixed plant life, which is everything the nearby tightly grained Georgian mills and streets are not. In fact, the layout was inspired by the history and origins of development in the area. An early 19th century map reveals a site which lies on a natural divide between the organised Georgian industrial landscape of mills laid out on a rectilinear grid to the north and open fields to the south, perfectly symbolising the transition between the classical and romantic periods which overlapped at this time. A clash of geometry, order, proportion and precision, versus semi-tamed nature, is the rationale which underpins this design, but with a modern aesthetic.
Part of the site could also be given over to residential development and a park cafe to help fund its creation and generate long term income for the park’s upkeep, but cities like Manchester have to be more ambitious and generous in their green space provision. There is a wealth of evidence now emerging, through natural capital studies, to suggest these kinds of places pay themselves back many times over in the benefits they bring for people’s health and well-being, and that for “every £1 invested in public parks around £27 is returned in value.” (1)
Large brownfield site off Ancoats street in Manchester.
© google earth
Green spaces are simply the natural antidote to daily life. Fields in Trust calculated that, in the UK, they provide £34bn of value in terms of mental and physical wellbeing, and that Parks in particular save the NHS £111m alone in preventing GP appointments, the equivalent cost of 3,500 nurses. With many doctors now actively prescribing a course of walks or allotment time over a course of pills, and with a third of the UK’s children aged between 2 and 15 overweight (with 75% of them spending less time outdoors than our prison population), there has surely never been a better time to create more green space.
Comparisons with rates to erect new buildings are also staggering, with square metre costs to create a public park a fraction of their architectural equivalents. They also benefit a far greater section of society, as our most democratic of urban spaces, proving they are worth every penny we can spend on them.
The multiple benefits a carefully designed public park can bring, if it reflects the local community’s needs, is indisputable, but they can also bring other benefits: reducing urban heat island effects; releasing oxygen and absorbing carbon; contributing to more sustainable drainage systems; improving biodiversity and property values; and cleaning the air of harmful particles. In short, these spaces work very hard for their communities, and their true value is inestimable.
City centre sites.
© atkinsglobal and googleearth
References
1 Natural capital accounts for Green space in London 2017 – Greater London Authority, National Trust Heritage lottery fund.
