Forty Years of Planning the Future of Manchester: The Key Plans from 1926-1967

City of Manchester Plan, 1945

Now here is a little piece of our history that you can’t afford to miss.

Most of us at some time have moaned at the loss of so much of Victorian Manchester, swept away by a combination of municipal plans and commercial considerations.

And if you have been minded to dig deeper into the reasons why then this site offers up some interesting answers.

Here can be found the famous 1945 plan for Manchester, along with an earlier one for 1926,  a summary of what was planned in 1967 and a highway plan from five years earlier.

"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.

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. 

SELNEC: A Highway Plan 1962

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.  

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.

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."

*Forty Years of Planning the Future of Manchester: The Key Plans from 1926-1967, http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/mappingmanchester//plans/