Of town plans and visions of a future that never quite happened, Eltham in the 1970s and Manchester in 1945.

Cover of A Future for Eltham Town Centre, 1975

Nothing dates as much as those planning booklets issued by the Council as part of a brave new consultation process.

Of course at the time they look bold innovative and exciting, but go back to them 30 or 40 years later and many of them frankly just look embarrassing.

In most cases the plans never came to anything, or they didn’t work or worse still they did but time has over taken them and a new plan is called for.

But in their way they are as much a history book and a comment on past times as any learned piece of original research.

All of which was prompted by A Future for Eltham Town Centre, which fell through dad’s door sometime in 1975.  It was produced by Greenwich Borough Council and invited residents to “make your views known to the Council.”

Back of A Future for Eltham Town Centre

Like all such documents it rehearsed the problems, speculated on how these might develop and offered possible solutions.

As ever “increased trade has brought pedestrian/ traffic conflict and parking pressures and a growing interest by multiple chain stores accompanied by a reduction in the smaller family business.”*

Added to this were issues of parking, demand for more office space, a need to accommodate more community services, while recognising that it was desirable "to promote the provision of residential development, some small service industry and some open space within Eltham town centre.”

It is a litany of concerns which could apply to many urban areas and no doubt our own planners in the town hall wrestled with similar issues here in Chorlton.

And like everywhere many of the opportunities for change were constrained by the amount of space, lack of money and other priorities.

But the planners did their best offering ideas to retain and plant more trees and improve the green spaces on the north side of Eltham High Street and suggesting a multi story car park down Orangery Lane as well as developing the reservoir.

Plan for the top of wel Hall Road

My own favourite was the idea of a small Town Park “on the disused part of Eltham Cemetery and a community centre beside the parish church, which would involve moving the public lavatories “when an opportunity occurs.”

Like so many planning ideas it would seem that the opportunity never did occur.

But I think I may be a little unfair on the planners given the constraints they faced.

So how much more of a problem was it for the town planners here in Manchester in the closing stages of the last world war?  They too were well aware of what they could do, but at the same time were galvanised by the issues of a tired looking city where many of the inner city  residential areas were no longer fit for purpose and some of the commercial areas showed the effect of haphazard development during the past century.

Trinty a new station for Manchester,  1945, from the Manchester Plan

Of course what they had in their favour was the wide open spaces which had been made by enemy action and a will shared by both politicians and planners to do something decent for the city.

Theirs was a bold plan which envisaged broad new avenues, People’s Places and rationalization of work, traffic and leisure along with new social housing.

The 1945 Plan for Manchester fitted an optimistic age fired by that post war belief that this time things had to be made to better.

Each time I go back to it I still get excited but do have to admit that I am pleased that not all of it came to pass, for while the slums would have been banished, new pleasant public places would have replaced the twisting dark courts and alleys, we would also have lost many fine Victorian buildings.

The People's Place, All Saints, 1945, from the Manchester Plan

Some still went under the commercial projects of the late 1950s and 60s but many more have survived.

The 1945 plan no less than the consultation document for Eltham in 1975 may not have gone the wayt he planners wanted but they do take me back to another time.




*A Future for Eltham Town Centre
** The 1945 Plan for Manchester, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%201945%20Plan%20for%20Manchester

Pictures; from A Future for Eltham Town Centre, Greenwich Borough Council, Planning Department, 1975, The 1945 plan for Manchester, Manchester Corporation, 1945

“I have seen the future and it works”* ....... The 1945 plan for Manchester

Now we are all used to those grand plans which are aimed at transforming where we live and in doing so how we live.

I arrived in the city just as the area which was to become the Arndale was being cleared of all its old 19th properties and I watched as many finer buildings were also brought down in the name of progress and commerce.

The unplanned city

And so with this in mind I want to look at Manchester Corporation’s plan for the city which was published in 1945.

It was a bold if not monumental vision of the future, aiming to wipe away the ramshackle collection of streets and buildings some of which were no longer fit for purpose and replace them with wide roads encircling the centre and bold modernist architecture all worked out to a logical plan.

Along with this would be new social housing to replace the slums.

Today we might feel a little uneasy at a lot of what was on offer, but planners are not idiots and the vision was based on a detailed analysis of where things weren’t working.

In particular the degree to which the rapid growth of the city combined with profit seeking entrepreneurs had created great swathes of housing which had been unsuitable when put up and now seventy to a hundred years later were unfit.  “To sum up, the first half of the nineteenth century was an era of unprecedented change, of ruthless and uncontrolled energy and conflict, of crude materialism and blind, unreasoning confidence in the beneficence of the new industrial forces.”  And much of that legacy still existed despite attempts to introduce better planning regulations and new housing estates.

Of course the destruction of some parts of the city during the war helped the planners, as did the growing sense that as the plans were being drawn up victory over Germany was at hand and having won the war it was “time to win the peace.”

Looking up to the new Town Hall

But despite the grand vision I have to say that I am glad much of it never happened.

The creation of a massive processional way from a new railway and bus complex called Trinity Station up into Albert Square and the destruction of the Waterhouse Town Hall would have been an act of vandalism.

Nor does the creation of a massive Peoples' Place at All Saints on Oxford Road  housings a Civic Hall, Concert Hall and Civic Assembly Hall with the “the records of the history and achievements of Manchester and its leading citizens” strike me as any better.

The Peoples' Place

The charm of the city, of any city is the small interesting streets and buildings which let out onto something bigger and more impressive, but always with the scale of the passerby.

Location; Manchester

*Lincoln Steffens in a letter dated April 3 1919 to Marie Howe after his visit to the Soviet Union

Pictures; from the 1945 Plan for Manchester, published by Manchester Corporation, 1945, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

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/

More on the plans for Manchester in 1945

Not long ago I wrote about the ambitious plan to transform the city. The 1945 pan for Manchester a bold vision of where we live could be. It is fascinating document going into detail on every aspect of how the city worked. But above all it is the fine paintings of what the planners wanted to do.

So here are some more. The grounds around the cathedral were to be opened up, and something of this has happened.

Trinity Station was to be a brand new railway station.

But the plan included much that was what the city looked like in 1945, like the panorama of the city showing the bomb damage.


Pictures; from the 1945 Plan for Manchester, Manchester Corporation, 1945, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council