Post-war planning and architecture were not always neatly packaged. Post-war plans, on the other hand, were often presented as sweeping and total solutions that promised new, modern cities, free from the grime and congestion of the industrial revolution. Some cities in the UK were reconstructed quickly – by 1955 most of Coventry’s city centre was rebuilt. Many other cities, especially those in the Midlands, North and Scotland, did not begin their central area renewal until the early 1960s, yet had substantial plans drawn up and published in the immediate post-war period – Manchester presented its plans to the public in 1945. This was a golden era for planning. Lavish publications with full-colour illustrations, maps and diagrams made convincing cases for redevelopment that was modern, forward looking and promised social, cultural and commercial remedy to the horrors of the recent past. This investigation, of Manchester’s post-war planning and architecture, began with its 1945 Plan – a document so comprehensive and convincing that when I first encountered it in the downturn of the mid-1990s, I found myself asking why this fantastic vision had not come to be. The simple answer was that it was down to economics, Manchester Corporation did not have the money to realise its own plan. The real answers are more complex and have to do with land ownership, land assembly, shifting policy governing the environment, changing structures of government and the rise of personal mobility, as well as the global meta-narratives of the Cold War, decolonisation and the growth of consumerism in the West. Throughout this book, through a series of interlinked chapters, I show how all of these factors and more influenced and impacted on the Manchester’s morphology in the messy assemblage that was the modern city.

Morphology looms large throughout this book. It is the shape of the city and the shape of its buildings with which I am concerned. This is a spatial account, a formal understanding of the forces acting on the making of urban space – an architectural view. However, this is not an architectural history in the conventional sense. I eschew notions of style in favour of an approach that accepts the agency of all sorts of actors, on plans and on construction. It is not always a biographical approach either – I accept that sometimes plans and policies had agency that was at least equivalent to that of people. Ideas involving the development of cities often run for decades and it can become the idea, not the author of the idea, that persists and prevails. This book is part urban history, part planning history and part architectural history. As such, I show how policy decisions, declared in Whitehall, were interpreted by the officials and officers of local government and, in turn, how architects were both informed by, and reacted to, policy and plan. In all of the empirical chapters I explore a perceptible set of relations from policy, to plan, to implementation. In so doing, I highlight the particular circumstances of a nationalised state with a burgeoning legislative landscape designed to control the development of town and country. The post-war period provided the policies, but it was the training of architect-planners that gave literal and metaphorical shape to statutory guidance.

Three-dimensional visions of entire cities were commonplace by the 1960s and, alongside certain powers vested in local authorities, planners were able to influence the shape of the city. Of course, existing topography, natural features and historic infrastructure had to be negotiated and the typical western European city was awash with layers of earlier development, also informed by mobility and exchange. Rivers, canals, railways, markets, warehouses and factories all left their own physical patterns on the city and Manchester was no exception. The first chapter explains Manchester’s growth to become a regional capital and its form according to the operations that sustained its expansion.

Manchester is a case study here. While much of the detail is specific, the post-war setting was similar for places like Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle, Glasgow and others – regional capitals of larger metropolitan areas, with strong traditions of local governance. These traditions met with the regional ministries of central government, making various tiers and hierarchies, within which types of political interplay had their own impact on urban form. Manchester, like many such cities, was a hub around which social, cultural, financial and technological forces coalesced and converged. Using a place-centred approach, each chapter addresses the variety and magnitude of forces acting upon a particular situation. What were the global circumstances that fostered certain industries and initiatives? In whose interest were decisions made? How was policy interpreted through the tiers of government into on-the-ground conditions? What impact did these complex associations between place, policy and personnel have on planning? And, in turn, how did planning affect construction? This book explores the nested, tiered and stacked networks at play in Manchester’s post-war renewal that were exclusive to its outcomes, but also typical of the types of discourse around development that happened in similar cities.

For the most part, this group of renewal cities were post-industrial. For most too, their decline began before the outbreak of war in 1939. The conflict of the Second World War was merely an interruption to a period of transition away from industrial economies and not necessarily the catalyst to reconstruction, as is popularly held. In this sense, I use renewal not just to refer to central area ‘urban renewal’, which followed a particular North American model of development, but the wholesale renewal of the lifeblood of a city – how new economies were built and how they changed the built environment.¹ I explore the demands for development in a large provincial city that moved towards a service economy, but was intrinsically bound to a culture of innovation and manufacturing. The renewal cities of post-war Britain are much less explored in literature than the recovery cities as the forces acting on their development were manifold and occurred over extended time periods. Their complex narratives, which were bound with a period of rapid progressive change in political, cultural, social and economic contexts, have much to reveal about the state and its influence on urban and architectural form. A significant amount of scholarship uses the welfare state as a lens through which to view the post-war period. Of course, such an approach is essential in grasping the lived experiences of millions of citizens who were relocated to new homes, educated in new schools and treated in new hospitals. However, here I reveal a state wider than simply ‘welfare’, or even ‘warfare’, as one that touched almost every aspect of development and construction.² The state control of development after 1947 was at its zenith, yet waned under the rising pressures of a free-market economy from the late 1950s. This makes architecture and planning both suitable subjects and vehicles with which to understand the post-war development of post-industrial cities.

In terms of periodisation, the most substantial parts of the book address two decades, from the mid-1950s until the mid-1970s. It was an exciting time in the development of European cities, when capital flowed, energy was cheap and abundant, citizens were more mobile than ever before and a new optimism was embodied in popular culture. The earlier date marks the point at which the first new buildings were completed in Manchester city centre as well as the relaxation of building licensing. The later date captures the oil crisis, the ensuing economic shock and the massive upheaval of local government that saw the creation of the metropolitan counties, Greater Manchester included, in 1974. Each chapter spans a slightly different time frame, according to its subject.

The opening chapter presents a long history of planning in the city, which began even before city’s incorporation in 1838, and attempts to map the spatial and organisational relationships between the city and the city region. Chapter 2 deals with computing technology, backgrounded by the Cold War. It addresses the urgent need for independent British research following their exclusion from the US nuclear programme in 1946. Manchester became one centre in a north-west cluster of technologies related to the nuclear programme and the chapter closes with an account of the design and construction of the National Computing Centre that opened in 1975. Chapter 3 examines the expansion of the universities, beginning with a technical college that was awarded its chartered status in 1956. The conclusion of the chapter is signalled by the publication of the planners’ review of their own proposals in 1974. In Chapter 4, decolonisation provides the financial context for the proposed development of Manchester’s Central Station. Its closure was announced in 1965. There followed a drawn-out period of acquisitions and development proposals that led to naught and withered amidst political scandal in 1977. The penultimate chapter looks at a part of the central city that was subject to speculation on its future in the immediate post-war years and received a lot of attention from as early as 1947. Market Place, its development, was finally completed in 1972. Finally, the ambitious and influential plans for a central ring road are explored from the earliest drawings in 1945, their partial realisation through the 1960s and their eventual abandonment in 1976. These various time frames, which do not precisely coincide, nonetheless overlap. In this temporal overlapping certain policies and personnel emerge periodically and within the distinct chronology and narrative of each we see the actions of a strong local government and effective officers, albeit without the independent financial might to enact all of their aims.

As this account is not told via a linear chronology, the book is organised by geography. The opening chapter is as wide as it is long, the extended history of the metropolitan centre is mirrored by its geographical reach, which addresses the regional role of the city. The buildings associated with militarisation and computation in Chapter 2 form a network that spans the city and connects to the wider region. Closing in on the centre, the expansive university development of Chapter 3 takes a linear form of approximately 1½ miles (2km) along Manchester’s Oxford Road. Central Station, in Chapter 4, is a contained site right on the edge of the central area and Market Place in Chapter 5 is, as its name suggests, in the heart of the city. The final chapter, on the central ring road, lassoes (some might say throttles) the city centre and connects its planning back to that of its region. Such ordering enables the various narratives to be punctuated by recurring decisions and to presence the voices of those who had interests wider than one particular site or building. Alongside the temporal overlaying, this geographical nesting also serves to illustrate the complex and interwoven nature of the forces at play in the shaping of a renewal city.

The architecture of renewal cities is largely under-explored as most of it falls under the umbrella term of ‘mainstream modernism’, is derided as ‘gimcrack’, or even ‘crap’, and, as such, has largely escaped the view of architectural historians to date.³ Mainstream modern architecture accounts for a considerable amount of the new construction realised across Europe in the post-war reconstruction process. This book offers a novel method for the examination of this type of development that understands the relationships between legislation, governance and the production of material space. Architectural history can be bound by notions of style, which is adequate when discussing the architectural firsts, elites, pioneers and avant-gardes, but can limit scholarship to these realms, which do not represent the majority of the built environment. This gap in representation is more acute when discussing the architectural cultures of cities outside the capital, where slender budgets impacted on construction quality. Of course, within this, architects used their ingenuity and skills as designers to help make the best possible outcomes. In Manchester, firms such as Cruickshank & Seward, H.S. Fairhurst & Sons, Building Design Partnership, Leach Rhodes Walker, Wilson & Womersley as well as the City Architect’s Department made significant contributions to the modernisation of the city. It is the situation of their practice, amidst planning legislation and subsequently within the city, and understanding the forces influencing their architecture and its association with place, that offers new readings.

Using a place-centred approach to unpicking the forces acting on urbanisation presents a novel way of thinking about mainstream architectural production, work that was not explicitly modernist, but was ostensibly modern. Modern architecture did not really take hold in Britain until after 1945, save for private houses and a few notable schemes by émigré architects escaping from Nazi Germany and mostly en route to North America, where they also had considerable impact on architectural culture. Most architecture in Britain was, however, modern by the mid-1950s; the neo-Georgian and neo-Classical styles favoured in the inter-war period had faded from fashion. It was this version of modern architecture that came to be popularly derided and was unfairly cast as an agent of society’s ills. Because of this, it has rarely been considered on its own merits, or as a subject with which to explore the wider contexts for its realisation. Throughout the following chapters, buildings are described and analysed in relation to their design and style – they have to be, it is inescapable – but I also want the reader to think of them as representative parts of much bigger stories, of the why and how they came to be commissioned and built. What was their role in the modernisation of Britain? How can mainstream modern architecture be used to narrate the development of the town and cities where it was realised? To answer these questions, I turn to architecture’s relationship with post-war planning.

Several of the chapters examine, in detail, the relationships between planners and architects. This was a very particular period in British history, when a high proportion of planners had undergraduate degrees in architecture, and the connections between public and private sector colleagues were often negotiated using visual tools of models and drawings. It is this sense of negotiated practice that was especially apparent in the 1960s, as planners used the mechanisms of the planning system to interpret government advice and guidelines and to inform the decisions of architects and their clients. Tools like the statutory Development Plan, the designation of Comprehensive Development Areas (CDA), the use of Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPO), and slum clearance policies, were used to create real or proposed clean slates – large parcels of land that could be planned in totality. The powers invested in local authorities to be able to control development in this manner, combined with years of decline and the actual damage wrought by war, enabled the bold visions that characterised inner urban planning of the period. Manchester was no different. The comprehensive replanning of the city in the 1960s was as ambitious, if not more so, than that of the 1945 Plan, but has received much less attention. In many ways it was this period of planning that left the biggest mark on the city, albeit informed by what had preceded it. In this book I trace these marks, starting with the analysis of the drawings and models of the planners and architects and following the parallel paths of decision making recorded in minutes and correspondence. Fully realised projects are presented with those only partially fulfilled and those that never came to be, in an attempt to show the influence of planning on architecture and the effects of both on the shape of the city.

This is not a full account of Manchester’s post-war development. There are glaring omissions. There is little focus on housing, no investigation of healthcare provision, cursory mention of religious buildings and scant discussion of the massive Arndale shopping centre. Manchester’s post-war housing was great in its scope and deserves a book of its own – its provision was equally wrapped up in the politics of the period. The hospitals closest to the city centre were the subject of a master plan by Fry & Drew (c.1965) that was on the edge of, and drawn into, that of the Education Precinct that encompassed the university and a number of colleges. Powell and Moya designed a new hospital (1965–73) on the southern edge of Manchester at Wythenshawe, a settlement founded on garden city principles and the subject of many existing studies. New churches were plentiful, but few were in the city centre. The most architecturally significant church, St Augustine’s (Desmond Williams & Associates, 1968), was subsumed by the planning of the Education Precinct. The Arndale Centre was one of Manchester’s largest developments and most symbolic of the rise of consumerism. Its monstruous qualities and considerable inward focus detached it from the city and allowed a suspension of reality for its occupants, the consumers. Its physical relationship with the city around it was muted, precious few of the shops it contained actually addressed the street. Instead, Market Place, the subject of Chapter 5, narrates the commercial change of the city and its drawn-out development reflects the diversity of interests negotiated in this period of transition.

Britain, on the threshold of the 1960s, was a very different place to Britain of 1945. This book is a deep study of a ‘renewal city’ and uses the planning and architecture of Manchester as a case through which to reveal shifts in politics, economics and culture in the post-war period. For the first time it uncovers the complex forces acting upon the production of space in the renewal cities of the 1960s and the close and direct relations between state legislation, planning policy definition and architectural production. I want the reader to take away this sense of architecture as a negotiated practice and to understand the array of influences acting on the decision making of design. As a regional capital, Manchester is typical of many other cities and here I attempt to argue for the productive qualities of such a spatial ordering. I view the city region as a productive unit around, within and across which rhizomatic networks of actors affect bounded space at a range of scales – the region, the city, the site, the built object, and the material details. In this book, each of these scales are used to reveal the interrelationships of actors and agents in the creation of buildings, public space and infrastructure. I seek to illustrate the palimpsestic qualities of our cities and to explain the physical traces of dreams, decisions, demolitions and developments that curiously linger and slowly fade.