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.

 


1926 Report upon the  Regional Scheme 1945 City of Manchester Plan 1945 Abridged
City of Manchester Plan
1945 Manchester and District Regional Planning Proposal 1947 An Advisory Plan 1951/1961 Development Plan 1962 SELNEC A Highway Plan 1967 City Centre Map


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

= = = = = =





1926 Report coverReport 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.



___________________________________________________



1945 City of Manchester Plan coverCity 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).         

 

___________________________________________________


1961 Written Statement cover

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 Map1961 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).

 

___________________________________________________


1962 Highway Plan

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.


___________________________________________________


1967 City Centre MapManchester 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.


Creative Commons Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. 5 September  2013.