Discovering the Medlock at Mayfield …….

I am back at Mayfield, watching the continued work to transform a shabby and neglected part of the city into something interesting and exciting.*

Opening up the Medlock, 2021

And in the process open up a forgotten stretch of the River Medlock.

Mayfield lies south of Piccadilly Railway Station and I guess would once have been a pleasant place of fields, intersected by the meandering River Medlock, but by the early 1790s it was already being developed.

So, by 1793, the first streets were beginning to nibble at the open land, and in the following year there were dye works on either side of the river. 

And within a quarter of a century rows of terraced houses competed with a variety of industrial buildings transforming the area into a place of smoky chimneys and residential sprawl.

Mayfield, 1819

All of which was pretty much how it stayed until the middle of the last century, when the decline in the industrial base of the city and the  bombs of the Luftwaffe during the last war, left great swathes of it empty land, filled by car parks and small industrial units.

But developers and city planners like nature abhor a vacuum, and the plans to a create a “new urban neighbourhood” are well under way.  

It is a “transformational mixed-use city centre regeneration project reviving a former industrial heartland into a modern innovation quarter.  

Mayfield is a 24-acre brownfield site packed with heritage and the River Medlock flowing through its core. The site has an industrial history of innovation spanning back to the 1700’s with previous lives as a parcel depot, relief railway station and textile mill. The site was left derelict for over 30 years before the next phase of its revival began. 

The river, 2021

The Mayfield Partnership – comprised of U+I, Manchester City Council, Transport for Greater Manchester and LCR – formed in 2016 with a shared vision to deliver a modern neighbourhood at the heart of Manchester. 

Overall, the brownfield site will provide over 2.3m sq ft GIA office space facilitating 16,000 new jobs, 1,500 homes, 56,000 sq ft of retail and leisure, a new 300-bed hotel and 13-acres of public realm, including Mayfield Park – the city’s first new park in over 100 years”**.

And my old friend Andy Robertson has made it one of his projects to record that transformation.

Diggers and trenches, 2021

Leaving me just to add some of his pictures showing the ongoing work

Pictures; developments at Mayfield, 2021, from the collection of Andy Robertson, and Mayfield, 1819, from Johnson’s map of Manchester, 1819, courtesy of Digital Archives Association,  http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*Mayfield,  https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Mayfield

**Mayfield Manchester, https://www.uandiplc.com/our-places/mayfield