Forty Years of Planning the
Future of Manchester: The Key Plans from 1926-1967
A series of key public
planning documents and maps relating to the city of Manchester and its regional context
have been digitised and made freely available for the first time. These eight historic Plans span the
central decades of the twentieth century with the first published in 1926 and
the last in 1967.
The various Plan documents and maps have been digitised by Joe Blakey
and Martin Dodge from the Department of Geography, University of Manchester,
with the advice and material support of Richard Brook, Manchester School of
Architecture.
Background
This
set of documents represents the genesis and evolution of British town planning
in relation to the city of Manchester over forty years. Whilst the documents
themselves were researched, analysed and authored locally, they were
consistently enacted in response to national statute in the regulation of
building and urban development that began with the Housing Act of 1909. The Plans
evolve from early survey type reports into detailed formal proposals and
guidelines for development. They contain many zoning schemes to logically
reorganise land-use, proposals for new and improved housing, and insistent calls for
investment in bigger roads and better transport services across the Manchester
area. The overarching goal was to bring order to the
city of Manchester and its satellite towns in Cheshire and Lancashire and to
overcome the perceived problems caused by unplanned and ‘chaotic’ urban growth
during the phase of rapid industrialisation in the first half of the nineteenth
century.
A
major
narrative thread running throughout most of these Plans is the
‘population
problem’. One significant hangover of the first industrial city
was that there
were too many people crowded into the core of Manchester, a situation
that did
not escape the attentions of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Over the
decades
these Plans proffered a range of ‘solutions’ through
planned population decentralisation,
programmes of slum clearance, re-housing and the construction of
‘garden’
suburbs and then large overspill estates. This was tied to a logic of
the reordering of
land-use and activities to create more homogeneous zones for
residential,
commercial and industrial activities for the efficiency of production
and the
well-being of the people. However, many of Manchester’s problems,
as perceived
by the planners, were intractable and often stretched across official
boundaries and
natural dividing lines (including rivers Mersey and Irwell). These
obstacles, predominantly political, were often significant barriers to
common solutions, though the structure of certain quasi-official
regional committees sought to overcome these. By 1920, the Town
Planning Act had made statutory the
process of planning by all local authorities with a population of over
twenty
thousand inhabitants. The Manchester and District Joint Town Planning Advisory Committee was formed in 1921 and
composed of representatives from the
County Boroughs of Bolton, Bucklow, Glossop, Hyde, Manchester,
Rochdale,
Salford and Stretford. Several decades later the SELNEC Committee was
brought
into being 1959 and was charged with the examination of regional
transportation issues and, in many respects, anticipated the necessity
for regional
governance of the metropolitan area.
The
Plans were statements of officialdom and municipal power, but they principally
espoused the views of a small group of planners and allied engineering and
construction professionals. They were forward looking, reporting optimistically
what changes should be made. It was planning that promised to make Manchester a
better place. Yet so much of what was so positively advanced in the Plans was
never realised, or not at least in the forms envisaged and often not in the
timescales set out. Some schemes, including the new housing estates and large
transport infrastructures, actually took decades longer than planned to finance
and physically enact.
The
Plans purported to be neutral, factual audits of how things were and to forward
the most sensible proposals on what should happen next. In striving for
objective presentation they often obscured the political conflicts involved and
the considerable controversy attached to many of the proposals and how real
people may actually be impacted by changes imposed on them. A significant
undercurrent of social class thus persisted in the background of these
documents. They were authored and influenced by an elite cadre of politicians
and planning officers who regarded themselves as able, and in some senses obligated, to
solve the problems afflicting their city and particularly the ‘uneducated’
masses. While there were genuine egalitarian desires in the eyes of some
planners seeking to do the best for the citizens, it is important to recognise
that they served sectional interests. Paternalist concern for betterment could
easily become patronising notions and schemes were frequently enacted in
‘top-down’ processes with little feeling for the lives of those directly
affected.
The
Plans were wide ranging in the aspects of landscape, infrastructures,
social
spaces and economic activities they were seeking to shape. Through most
of this
period the municipal authorities also had much wider responsibilities
than they do today, including utilities like water supply and sewage,
and basic health provision. The Plans tended
to overplay the capacity of local government to direct the course of
events,
never really acknowledging the other competing forces at play from
powerful
local interests, such as major private land owners and big business, as
well as
different public constituencies and distinct communities. Whilst
Manchester
Corporation was the most powerful institution in the region, its Plans
always had
to bow to edicts of central government and the flow of funds from the
Treasury and Whitehall
ministries, as well as recognising the wider fiscal climate and broader
socio-cultural changes from the depths of 1930s depression, war time
constraints on resources, through to the economic optimism of the
‘permissive’ 1960s.
The
period in which these eight reports were published also saw the advancement of
Planning as a professional activity and the development of an armoury of
scientific techniques and quantitative models. A distinct textual and graphic
vocabulary for explaining how space could and should be changed emerged. This
included a range of visual inscriptions such as zoning maps, network
schematics, architectural sketches and statistical charts. These were liberally
deployed in most of the Manchester-centric Plans and make the documents attractive to
browse. Some of the maps are compelling visual summation of all the necessary
schemes being advocated in the text. Others are deliberately more ‘engineering’
in appearance, exuding an aura of scientific exactitude and technical skills
needed to enact the complex schemes proposed. All the tables, charts, maps and
diagrams need to be interrogated with a sceptical eye as they all too often
advance a selective arguments whilst pretending to be objective descriptions of
space.
Looking
at the maps and drawings presented in these reports also very directly highlights
the artificial nature of municipal boundaries, particularly the oddities around
what constituted ‘Manchester’, the relation of the city proper to its
hinterland and how these morphed over decades of expansion and the
reorganisation of responsibilities.
Reading
this series of published Plan is one important way to understand the
history of Manchester and how the contemporary city was made and also a
means to consider what might have been if all the proposals had been
enacted.
Martin Dodge and Richard Brook
= = = = = =
Report
upon the Regional Scheme
Original publication date: 1926
Authorship: Reginald Bruce and
the Manchester and District Joint Town Planning Advisory Committee
Objective: “to prepare an advisory
plan in broad outline which will facilitate the progressive development of
every part of this important Region, so that the most may be made of its vast
resources, the enterprise of its citizens, and to bring about the best possible
conditions of life.”
Document: 170 pages with 74
illustrations, supported by 12 sheet regional land-use map
Browse the full report
Download pdf copy of the report (warning this is a large file size and may take a while)
This report was a pioneering
attempt at a comprehensive strategic review of the wider Manchester region,
covering a large area and over 100 different local authorities. The Manchester
Guardian newspaper noted on the occasion of the publication of the Report that
it “makes an exhaustive survey of the area ...and is of first importance to
anyone who is at all interested in the past, present, or future of that portion
of Lancashire and Cheshire” (6 March 1926, p. 13). The tone of analysis built
upon the experience of early civic surveys following the First World War. In 1922 Manchester hosted a town
planning exhibition and conference at the Town Hall and produced a
comprehensive set of plans in twelve parts that when assembled showed the
entire region’s land-use patterns (these eventually accompanied this published report).
This Report
focused attention on communications and transport in particular, pointing to
the need for major new roads and more bridges crossing the Ship Canal.
Transportation,
communication, industry, agriculture and recreation, commerce and housing were
all within the remit of the Committee and development models based
on zoning were already under discussion. Whilst these themes were discussed in the
Report, it did not make many firm proposals as the powers to develop such were
not in the hands of the planners. (The joint committees formed in
Manchester and elsewhere, had no executive power and could not ensure
implementation unless all of the participant authorities delegated their powers
to the committee.)
The
MDJTPAC did, however, begin to address and formalise the pressing regional
planning issues of the day, which have not fundamentally changed. Whilst
without the assigned powers to necessarily design the future patterns, delegate
planners and councillors were happy to ruminate over the possibilities attached
to this new discipline and new modes of representation. The publication of the Report upon the Regional Scheme in 1926 is acknowledged as having
provided
‘an outline framework to improve communications and infrastructure and the
zoning of future development,’ but also to have been without sufficient
analytical insight to really inform or direct. This lack of analytical
projection combined with
the constrained powers available to local authorities at the time meant that
most of the early work was speculative, but nonetheless provided the background
for later discussions and decisions as the inter-war years passed.
Survey land-use maps: download sheet no. 5
covering the northern part of Manchester and sheet no. 8 covering southern
portion of the city. See the key map and reference legend
to aid understanding of the maps.
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City
of Manchester Plan 1945
Original publication date:
[October] 1945
Authorship: Rowland Nicholas,
Manchester City Engineer and Surveyor, and his staff
Objective: “Our need to plan now is
dictated by our pressing and unavoidable obligation to provide a new for the
tens of thousands of our citizens who are living and working in unsafe,
unhealthy, outworn and overcrowded buildings.”
Document: 274 pages and 261
illustrations
Browse the full report
Download pdf copy of the report (warning this is a large file size and may take a while)
This was the most significant
Plan put forward by the Corporation for the future of Manchester. It was part
of a slew of future-orientated reconstruction plans published by British cities
after the Second World War which encompassed utopianist tone. Read together
with The Regional Plan and
1947 South Lancashire North Cheshire, An Advisory Plan this suite of reports was amongst the most
comprehensive in the country. The 1945 Plan was a substantial document, based on an impressive
amount of technical research and surveys conducted under wartime conditions. It
was published with a striking dust jacket that shows, in a diagrammatic form,
the city core and the guiding notion of ring and radial roads that were the
principal organising devices for the morphology of the ‘new’ city. Drawings at
the start and end of the Plan show the city in 1650 and 2045 respectively,
there are a good number of detailed maps and formal proposals are shown in
attractive architectural sketches. Included amongst these is a completely new
train station over the River Irwell (called ‘Trinity’) and a bold suggestion
for replacing Alfred Waterhouse’s splendid neo-gothic Town Hall with something
more modern! It is the central areas that have attracted the attention of
historians, however, the major concern of the Nicholas report was around the
problem of rehousing large swath of Manchester’s population in better
conditions. The publication of the Plan was accompanied by a major public
exhibition at the City Art Gallery and a Corporation-commissioned ‘information’
film released in 1946, A City Speaks,
that reflected on many
planning themes. The Plan was reported in the press,
with
Manchester Guardian publishing a lengthy letter from the influential
urbanist Lewis Mumford who wrote with fulsome praise for Rowland
Nicholas' work, noting the "thing that strikes me about this report is
the high quality of thought it exhibits." (12 January 1946, p. 4).
___________________________________________________
City
of Manchester Plan 1945: Abridged Edition
Original publication date: 1945
Authorship: Prepared by Derek
Senior from main report authored by Rowland Nicholas, Manchester City Engineer
and Surveyor, and his staff
Objective: if the “process of
reconstruction is made to conform with a master pattern of the kind suggested
in this book, the Manchester of 50 years hence will be a city transformed; if
not, it will still be as ugly, dirty and congested as it is to-day.”
Document: 51 pages and numerous illustrations
Browse the full report
Download pdf copy of the report (warning this is a large file size and may take a while)
This was the ‘baby brother’ of
the main City
of Manchester Plan, the cut down and
affordable Abridged
Edition chose to focus on the results of
the social survey, residential zoning and housing standards, and the prospects
for several overspill ‘garden’ estates. The attractive perspective sketch on
front cover shows the new courts of law complex planned as the centrepiece of
an impressive civic square opposite the new train station. (The crown courts
were opened in 1962, the single station serving Manchester remained an
unrealised dream.) The Abridged report sold for 3s compared to 10s 6d of the
full Plan but its paperback format means that relatively few copies seem to
have survived. The Abridged Edition concludes with clarion call for rational
control of the city and concerted effort for change after the sacrifices made
in the Second World War: “We are entering upon a new age: it is for us to
choose whether it shall be an age of self-indulgent drift along the pre-war
road towards depopulation, economic decline, cultural apathy and social
dissolution, or whether we shall make it a nobler, braver age in which the
human race will be master of its fate.”
It is interesting to reflect upon
the various foci of the published documents of this period in relation to their
target audience. This edition, aimed at the public, really honed in on the
civic setting and the social provisions that were intended and contained a
“minimum of technical discussion”. The Regional Plan was aimed squarely at politicians and the City
of Manchester Plan was a coverall that could
be consumed by business people and informed professionals as well as the
interested general reader.
___________________________________________________
Manchester
and District: Report on the Tentative Regional Planning Proposals
Original publication date: 1945
Authorship: Rowland Nicholas and
input from members of the Manchester and District Regional Planning Committee
Objective: “the Report may contribute
in no small measure to the future prosperity of the region and to the
well-being of its residents.”
Document: 125 pages with 56
illustrations and plates
Browse the full report
Download pdf copy of the report (warning this is a large file size and may take a while)
This report was published a few
months before the City of Manchester Plan but was the poor relation
in many respects. It is half the size and much less bold in terms of the
schemes being advanced. It is more of a backward looking review than a future
vision, and the focus is on physical infrastructure and industrial structure.
The Plan covers the areas of the fourteen constituent authorities of the
Regional Planning Committee, including Manchester’s sizable neighbours Salford
and Stretford. The grouping went west as far as Irlam, north to Middleton and
east to Denton, but excluded the large satellite towns of Stockport, Oldham,
Bury and Bolton. It was a consensual document, reflecting the need to reconcile
viewpoints of different authorities across the region. The powers and political
structures required to affect implementation at a regional scale did not then
exist and so it is understandably more restrained than the City of Manchester Plan. The sober, technical tone of this Plan reflect
that it was primarily seen as report speaking to local officials and
bureaucrats in Whitehall ministries rather than to inspire the general public.
Interestingly in its concluding pages the financing and the central government
policies for compensation and betterment are highlighted as paramount to the
success and realisation of any greater regional scheme. These forces would have
significant impact on the shape of cities as they recovered from the War.
___________________________________________________
An
Advisory Plan
Original publication date: 1947
Authorship: Rowland Nicholas and
M.J. Hellier working as part of the South Lancashire and North Cheshire
Advisory Planning Committee
Objective: “provide the background
against which the several statutory joint planning schemes and the
reconstruction works to be put in hand by local authorities, public utilities
and private enterprise can be seen in the proper perspective and guided to the
best advantage of the region as a whole.”
Document: 170 pages with 58
illustrations. 1 foldout map of The Outline Plan
Browse the full report
Download pdf copy of the report (warning this is a large file size and may take a while)
This report was presented as an
accompaniment to the two plans published in 1945 covering the City of Manchester and its immediate regional context. The Advisory
Plan plotted the nature of problems
and prospects for development over a much wider geographic canvas of over 1,000
square miles around Manchester encompassing all the major subcentres including
Oldham, Bolton, Bury and Wigan, and overlapping with responsibilities held by
Lancashire and Cheshire county councils. (In many respects this Plan prefigures
for the formation of Greater Manchester County Council in the 1970s.) Given its
extensive spatial coverage, this Plan had few specific schemes and was focused
on land-use, agriculture, industry and economic patterns and the need for green
space and smoke control. The notion of planning for the region had been around
since the inter-war period and the Manchester Guardian regarded the 1947 Plan at the time as “conclusive
evidence” that “if ever there was a case for a unified planning board… this is
it”. (26 November 1947, p.4).
___________________________________________________
Development Plan for the County Borough of Manchester
Original publication date: draft
published in 1951 and an approved version released in 1961
Authorship: Rowland Nicholas,
City Surveyor
Objective: “The purpose of the
Development Plan is to give a broad indication of the Council’s intentions
relating to the future use of land in the City, and to provide a general
framework within which the Council may carry out their duties of both
controlling and promoting development.”
Documents: Various parts, several accompanying
large overview maps
Browse:
1951 (draft) Written Analysis forming part of the Report of the Survey;
1951 (draft) Written Statement accompanying Town and Programme
Maps; 1951 Town Map; 1961 Written Statement; 1961 Town Map; 1961
Programme Map
Download pdf copies: 1951 (draft)
Written Analysis forming part of the Report of the Survey; 1951 (draft)
Written Statement accompanying Town and Programme Maps; 1951 Town Map; 1961 Written
Statement; 1961 Town Map; 1961 Programme Map (warning these are large file sizes and may take a while)
The 1951 / 1961 Plan was not single bound report, unlike the others
presented here, instead it comprised several parts, including a short
written statement that described the two maps of the city, a land-use
Town Map and a zoning Programme Map. (To complicate matters further,
these two maps were physically printed on three separate sheets.) The
Plan also had a more substantial descriptive account of the city given
in a ‘report of the survey’, providing overviews of
industry, housing and communication, and some demographic statistics.
(This report was supported by seven summary maps, again printed over
three sheet.)
The Plan feels tightly constrained in geographic scale, and thematic
coverage and conservative in intellectual scope. It was primarily about
zoning land-use in a more logical way, to try to steer private sector
development in a coherent fashion rather than advancing more idealistic
schemes for the Council to enact itself. The agenda was set out in the introduction to the Written Statement: "The
Development Plan outlines development expected to take place during the
next 20 years, and also includes information on the long term policy
intended for certain broad land uses where such information is
considered necessary to give proper guidance to prospective developers."
The tone is formalistic, descriptive and rather dull. The documents
themselves were quite closely prescribed in terms of their structure,
content and analytical approach by the 1947 Town and Country Planning
Act and subsequent Whitehall guidance. The draft plan, produced by
Rowland Nicholas and his team in 1951, was also subject to scrutiny and
ministerial ratification, which ended up taking a decade. The result of
such ‘top-down’ approach is that the Plan lacks a sense of
local voice or distinctive agenda (the 1950s era plans for other cities
similar in format and tone). The documents issued in 1951 were drafts
and were released during the time of deep post-war austerity, and
consequently they feel cheaply produced, lacking in quality
illustrations or photographs, and without any application of colour
printing. As such they are in stark contrast to the reports published
just after the war, which were much bolder in both ideas and how they
were illustrated.
When the draft Development Plan was released in 1951 it was met with a
mixed response. For example the in an article, titled "Solving
Manchester's main planning problems” in the Manchester Guardian,
it was reviewed as follows: "In general it may be said that whereas the
1945 plan quite properly set out to show what might be done with
Manchester in the most favourable conditions that could reasonably be
hoped for at the time, the present scheme is strictly confined to a
realistic appraisal of what can be done in the far less favourable
economic circumstances of to-day. To that extent it is a commendable
effort. But it also condemns the future citizens of Manchester to a
deplorable degree of overcrowding that is not in any way enforced by
economic or physical conditions, but results entirely from the city's
failure to make adequate provision for the housing of its overspill
population. To that extent it is a poor advertisement for the county
borough as a planning unit." (30 November 1951, p.4)
Putting aside these weaknesses, the 1951/1961 Plan is important as a
steppingstone in the post-war development of the city because it had
statutory authority (it had legal power when ratified in the 1961)
unlike the earlier planning reports which issued by the City
Corporation or regional committees as only ‘tentative’ or
‘advisory’. The zoning programme in the ratified 1961 maps
was thus significant in shaping what kind of activities could take
place where across the city and held sway for the next couple of
decades, until the GMC was able to complete the County Structure Plan
at the end of the 1970s.
Survey maps: 1951: Land Use (sheet 1, sheet 2, sheet 3); Age of
Buildings (sheet 1, sheet 2, sheet 3); Net Population Density
(sheet 1, sheet 2, sheet 3); Communications (sheet 1, sheet 2, sheet 3);
Road and Rail Traffic (sheet 1, sheet 2, sheet 3); Water Supply and
Sewerage (sheet 1, sheet 2, sheet 3); Gas and Electricity
Services (sheet 1, sheet 2, sheet 3).
___________________________________________________
SELNEC:
A Highway Plan 1962
Original publication date: 1962
Authorship: Anonymous. Approved by
members of South-East Lancashire and North-East Cheshire Area Highway
Engineering Committee, which was chaired by Rowland Nicholas
Objective: “a list of improvements to
existing roads and of new roads should be produced”
Document: 95 pages and 42
illustrations. Plus foldout map setting out The Highway Plan
Browse the full report
Download pdf copy of the report (warning this is a large file size and may take a while)
Upon release of this report, the
newspapers focused on the headline of a “£300m programme” of road improvement
and new building. The 1962 Highway Plan looked across a wide region, with Manchester as the
congested heart, and drew upon analytical studies of traffic based on a large
vehicle survey and novel computer modelling techniques that had been pioneered
in the US. The report effectively consolidated the proposals of 1945 era and
added some essential new elements including the inner and outer ring roads –
wide dual carriageway roads - for Manchester, along with motorway links between
Liverpool, Manchester and over the Pennines to Yorkshire. The early 1960s
marked the start of the motorway building boom – the Stretford-Eccles bypass opened
in 1961 and was originally branded as the M62, before becoming the M63 and
subsequently the M60. The wider socio-cultural context for this expansion was
the consumer boom and the rapid rise in car ownership – planners believed they
could respond to this and meet growing demand by building new roads to reduce
congestion. The report was also designed to deal with failures of the past, as
the Highway Plan
stated: “[s]ome of the main roads are relics of the old turnpikes or earlier
systems, but the majority were created during the industrial revolution. By
motor age standards many of them are narrow and badly aligned, while in the
built up areas they are interrupted repeatedly by side streets and cross roads.
…. They now have to cope with enormous volumes of traffic which are
ever-increasing.” In a manner which more explicitly dealt with Manchester as
the regional hub and took no account of the obstructive political boundaries,
the SELNEC report pre-empted the creation of the Greater Manchester County in
the 1970s and was the first regional study to include all of the constituent
authorities that would be absorbed by this metropolitan body. A Highway Plan dealt specifically with each satellite centre and
their road proposals in a remarkably clear series of diagrams and thoroughly
costed these preliminary schemes. Based on a number of assumptions concerning
the funding and finance streams for the road building programme it was
estimated that the entire proposal would take between 45 and 72 years to
implement! And a good deal is still unimplemented today.
___________________________________________________
Manchester
City Centre Map
Original publication date: 1967
Authorship: John Millar, Chief
Planner
Objective: “bringing together many
separate but inter-related policies and proposals, to form the basis for
further consultations with those interested in the planning of the Central Area
of Manchester.”
Document: 95 pages and 42
illustrations
Browse the full report
Download pdf copy of the report (warning this is a large file size and may take a while)
The City Centre Map, unlike the previous plans discussed had a narrow
geographic remit to consider only the city centre and as a consequence was able
to present more concrete proposals for change. This plan was the culmination of
four years work of the newly inaugurated City Planning Department that was
formed in 1963. John Millar was the first Chief Planner of Manchester and had
been educated at Liverpool University and replaced the long standing influence
of the City Engineer and Surveyor Rowland Nicholas over the shape of
Manchester. This document reviewed and restated the major aims of the
Corporation with regard development and transport. It dealt primarily with the
commercials areas around the urban core and the delineation of a number of
Comprehensive Development Areas. These large parcels of land allocated under
powers awarded in the various revisions to the Town and Country Planning Act
were designed to attract major private sector investment and would come to
shape the city well into the twenty-first century. Amongst them were the Market
Street Area, which became the Arndale Centre, the Central Station Area, which
became GMex and Beetham Tower, and the Cathedral Area, which eventually emerged
as Manchester’s ‘Medieval Quarter’. The proposals contained in the City Centre Map
were intended as design guides for developers
rather than blueprints for physical buildings, they were three-dimensional
frameworks
to promote discussion about the evolution of the city. The need to
encourage new residential development in the city centre was also
noteworthy and caught the interest of press, with one report saying
“It has been a dead core for many years, but these proposals will
bring it to life” (‘Plan to house 10,000 in centre of
Manchester’, The Guardian, 5 January 1968, p. 18.) .
One can also see the beginnings of an
approach to conservation of historic buildings to taking shape in this 1967 City Centre Map. During this period of planning a wholesale reassessment of the routes
of the ring roads inherited from the 1945 Plan and analysed in the SELNEC
report of 1962 took place. The City Engineer John Hayes authored a separate report, Manchester City Centre Road
in 1968
that further examined the ring roads in detail and their relationship
to the morphology of the future city. The nature of new large-scale
public housing provision in various districts was examined Urban Renewal Manchester,
a future-orientated report by Housing Department of the Council. The
City Planning Officer also produced a review entitled Manchester Sub-Regional Context that was published at the end of 1969. These were the final published reports
concerning wide-scale urban planning prior to the creation of the county of Greater Manchester
and the Greater Manchester Council in 1974.
___________________________________________________
Further Information
You can consult copies of all the
original Plans at the local studies department, Manchester Central
Library. Many other local libraries will hold some of the better known
reports. It is possible also to buy second-hand copies of the reports in
online bookshops like AbeBooks, but beware they can be quite expensive.
If you would like a high-resolution
version of any of the reports for private study or research please send an
email to Martin Dodge and we can send you a PDF file on a CD.
Some relevant background reading on town
planning in Manchester across the post-war period:
- Green, L.P.
(1959) Provincial Metropolis: The Future of Local Government in
South-East Lancashire
(Allen & Unwin)
- Carter,
C.F. (1962) Manchester and Its Region (Manchester University Press)
- White, H.P.
(1980) The Continuing Conurbation: Change and Development in
Greater Manchester
(Gower Publishing Company)
- Manchester
City Council Planning Department (1995) Manchester: 50 Years of
Change. Post-War Planning in Manchester (HMSO)
- Parkinson-Bailey,
J.J. (2000) Manchester: An Architectural History (Manchester University Press)
- Peck, J., Ward K. (2002) City of Revolution: Restructuring Manchester (Manchester University Press)
On the post Second World War town reconstruction plans as a
broader genre see:
- Larkham,
P.J., Lilley, K.D. (2001) Planning the ‘City of Tomorrow’: British
Reconstruction Planning, 1939–1952: An Annotated Bibliography (Inch’s Books) [Updated 2010 version available from here]
For the pre-war era, see two intriguing
interventionist books on how to better plan the city:
- Simon,
A.P., Redford, L. (1936) Manchester Made Over (P.S. King & Son)
- Simon,
E.D., Inman J. (1935) The Rebuilding of Manchester (Longmans, Green and Co.)
Acknowledgements
The
digitisation work was supported by the Manchester Statistical Society’s Campion
Fund. We also acknowledge the help and encouragement of David Govier
(archivist for Manchester City Council) and Donna Sherman (map librarian,
Rylands University of Manchester Library).
Permission
to digitise and release these Plans under Creative Commons license was kindly
granted by Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City
Council.
This work is licensed under
a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. 5 September 2013.
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