Cycling around Manchester

The National Cycling Centre was Britain's first indoor Olympic cycling track; VisitManchester says it’s ‘a bike-friendly city with many marked cycle lanes and dedicated routes throughout the city centre and beyond’. Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) aims to make cycling ‘a mainstream, every day and aspirational form of transport’. I hired a bike from Oxford Road station, headed into the University area to see the excellent new Elizabeth Gaskell House museum, then across to Salford Quays for some ‘iconic’ architecture at Media City to test it out.

For those used to brutal concrete, Oxford Road is easily the best 1960s station in the country. A beautiful and recently sympathetically restored laminated wood structure was needed to keep the weight down. Now it has a ‘Cycle Hub’, which contains Northern Rail’s ‘Bike and Go’ operation. Register and for the day you can hire a beautiful red Dutch bike (the trains were run by Dutch Railways until early 2016) for about the price of a pint.

Immediately outside the station the first junction is an intimidating mess dominated by buses, white vans and taxis, but at least the weight of the bike helps with the potholes. Down Oxford Road a lot of money has been spent on new cycle lanes but these aren’t continuous. A lot better than nothing, but I feel safer in the main carriageway.  At one corner roadworks have exposed 1960s tram lines, while I count no less than 13 buses waiting in line at the traffic lights. Perhaps this is a clue. Maybe instead of trying to make buses and other road vehicles happy, we should remove the vehicles along the busiest bus route in Europe and have a tram, or even an underground Metro with the space given over to people in what is one of the largest concentrations of students in Europe?

Having paid my respects to Elizabeth Gaskell I head west. You would expect the University area to have good links to Salford Quays with BBC, MediaCity and other cultural attractions. But you would be wrong. Stretford Road is wide, straight and was supposed to be the New Naples: the arch and some of the architecture is nice. Few of the intended ground-floor shop units materialised, and the Naples street buzz is missing. It should be ideal for cycling, but the road is totally dominated by moving and parked cars. Nearer Salford Quays it gets worse as getting to the Bridgwater or Ship Canals requires braving an intimidating gyratory and then the towpaths are unnecessarily blocked by minor works.

Salford Quays itself is a negation of planning. That so much money has created something so ugly, poorly connected and cut off in its gated enclaves is dispiriting. The mean square outside the Lowry is little more than a turning circle, the tram stop is pig ugly, and the bland commercial buildings of MediaCity enclose a dank and draughty open space. Behind is neglected landscaping, a vast amount of car parking and an underused cycle hub (shed).

After more intimidating junctions on the way back it’s a relief to hand the bike back. We have a way to go before we have a Netherlands cycling experience. TfGM aims to increase the total number of journeys made by bike across the city region from 2% today to 10% by 2025, but the scale of the challenge and the tiny amounts of money spent so far (almost all from central Government grant-aid) make even this modest target seem faintly ridiculous. Cycling has an incredible list of benefits. It improves health, cuts pollution and noise, improves quality of life and creates jobs and other economic benefits too. All the best places in Europe to live and the most prosperous have a lot of cyclists. But all this is lost on the Councils of Greater Manchester as they designate land near Motorways for business, Green Belt for housing and build more and more roads for cars and scratch their heads and wonder why nobody wants to live in town centres anymore and why wealth creators give a wide berth. WAKE UP MANCHESTER!

Death of Stockport Announced by GMSF

The poverty of thought that passes for planning today was underlined with the recent Greater Manchester Strategic Framework (GMSF) launch. Having bizarrely invited landowners and developers to suggest sites (how is this ‘planning’? - I never got taught this at planning school), they simply put a red line around four bits of Green Belt to the south of Stockport, a town with a proud history, excellent transport links and plenty of spare urban land, but in desperate need of regeneration (see ‘Jones the Planner’ for a great description) and consigned Stockport itself to the dustbin.

High Lane is a typical Green Belt site, now earmarked for 4,000 houses. It is pleasant farmland that stops High Lane, Marple and Hazel Grove merging. The area relies on the A6 which is already congested all day with average speeds of 5-10mph. GMSF suggests that the much-loved Middlewood Way could be sacrificed to provide a tram-train link to Manchester, but this form of transport doesn’t currently exist anywhere in Britain. In any case, it would require a Transport and Works Act Order, cost over £400 million, and would take 15-20 years to build based on the experience of Metrolink (tram) schemes. By this time the volume house builders will be long gone.

Yes, we do need more, quality, well located and affordable housing. But we should look where there is already land or underused buildings next to good public transport services with spare capacity. The obvious place is Stockport centre which has a surprisingly interesting urban landscape but a centre like a swiss cheese. I wouldn’t live there now, but I probably would if we could create sustainable development based on European models.

Of course, GMSF did assume that some housing would be developed in town centres (1,500 in the case of Stockport). But the business model of volume house builders revolves around large new greenfield developments. If Green Belt sites like High Lane are released, these will be developed first, and the opportunity for real regeneration in Stockport (and other satellite towns that desperately need development like Ashton, Hyde, Oldham, etc., etc.,) will be lost for a generation. Forget about the 1,500, Stockport will be lucky to build 150.

​So what to do? First we need a proper, objective urban capacity and design study, together with an assessment of what is needed to make towns liveable again. And then we need to do it, rather than take the lazy way out with the red pen by building on the Green Belt.
Britain used to lead the world in town planning, and people came from all over the world to see our garden cities, new towns and other wonders. But no more. Our leaders in Greater Manchester need to get on a cheap Ryanair flight to The Netherlands or Germany to see how it should be done. In the meantime it is left to local people to do the planning for the planners.

Birmingham reborn

New Street, New Start they say. The big city saddled with the black hole of New Street station has spent £750 million on New Street and another £128 million to return trams to the streets for the first time in 62 years. So what does Brum look like now, and how does the transport function?

The standard image of Birmingham is big but boring; motorways, urban sprawl, industry, sixties concrete. Not in the top twenty UK places to visit, and that hurts particularly as there is a lot of great museums, architecture and spaces to visit. But Birmingham is changing. Concrete is crumbling, cars tamed, the permanent city-centre bus jam has been banished and several billion pounds on urban regeneration.


New Street is the main arrival point and was the weakest link with dingy platforms and a bare concrete concourse stuffed under an insipid shopping centre. So what does £750m buy you?  The new soaring curvy atrium is definitely second-city, with plenty of space, and a ginormous Pret-a-Manger. But nothing has been spent on the platforms, still hidden in their hole and accessed through colour coded lounges that are neither coloured nor lounges. I don’t know about you, but I have some seats and a sofa in my lounge. And some colours too. And I can find my toilet, a task that was beyond me at New Street. And don’t even ask about left luggage – perhaps they could find some space under the stairs - that's where I store mine. On arrival at New Street there's no street maps, no local public transport information, and generally no-one around to help. I’m not sure which way to go, and only find the exit I want at the second attempt.

Finding the station on the way back is almost as difficult, unless you follow signs for the shopping centre. The old station was buried under a shopping centre but is now promoted to be part of the ‘new’ Grand Central shopping centre. Time to rename New Street as ‘Grand Central’?

What about the services? Pick a German city at random and find a unified suburban train network, probably an underground Metro and overground trams too. But Birmingham has unaccountably split their transport by diverting trains to Snow Hill, a decent walk away. The single new tram line links the stations, but meanders at walking pace through precious city space and arrivesup apologetically at the side entrance to New Street. Plans for a new HS2 station will fragment the train network further. Surely a priority must be a proper cross city tunnel for trains and trams?

Of course every German city has integrated fares for all public transport too, but English expectations are so low I’m not surprised New Street has no sign of where to catch a bus or how I buy a ticket, or if I can buy one that allows me to use trams and trains too. To emphasise the lack of integration, I enter a ‘Travel Shop’ near New Street and ask for a public transport map. The staff look confused. Apparently they work for a bus company and send me back to the station.

So we’ve made it outside, what to see? Birmingham has an impressive Town Hall, Art Gallery, etc., together with some opulent pubs, banks and shops which show how rich and important Victorian Birmingham was. But sixties carmageddon and concretopia (also the name of a surprisingly readable book) has eliminated most other evidence. Some nice old buildings survived around Gas Basin on the Worcester and Birmingham canal: the remnants have been used as a backdrop for regeneration and I head off there. The walk from New Street takes you through the bland, lumpen Mailbox (a former sorting office converted into upmarket shops) to the Cube (ditto). Gas Street Basin itself is actually quite small. And the quality of the new stuff is shocking. The Premier Inn is awful beyond belief, blank brick walls, privatised space, clumsy fire escape, looming like Mordor in Lord of the Rings. Even worse is the lumpen Crowne Plaza behind. Between this and the canal there are plans to squeeze another 1.2 million square feet of mixed office, flats, leisure, retail etc. The artists’ impressions look ominous and desperate. All around are weeds, litter, random car parking and underused buildings. It's clear that Birmingham still doesn’t really understand people.

Out in the Jewellery Quarter things look up. Despite a general air of decay, many of the buildings have character. At the centre is the slightly shabby neoclassical St Paul's church in a square of interesting buildings housing independent businesses. Organic growth has produced real regeneration and real local jobs. Walking back past Snow Hill, a solitary baroque terracotta archway with a Great Western Railway Crest stands defiant against the monstrous blank wall of a car park.
So what did I learn? New New Street looks nice, but the result of £1 billion is disappointing. How can you spend this much without touching the platforms or providing space for HS2? Or somewhere to sit? Big cities desperately need to think bigger and integrate their trains. And maybe integrate fares too. There are some good regeneration projects, but still too much reliance on ‘icons’. But the spirit of enterprise is there, pushing Birmingham to tear itself down and build itself up again. I just hope it lasts longer than the 1960s.