Trafford Park is a limbo of warehouses, sheds and roundabouts. What could it be instead?

In a city nobody could accuse of being underdeveloped, Trafford Park feels like an anomaly. It’s reasonably close to the city centre, but is neither populated by offices, flats nor entertainment complexes. It’s Europe’s largest industrial estate, within one of the cities hit hardest by deindustrialisation on the continent. But how did an area once synonymous with modernity and cutting-edge technology become the fragmented, overlooked patchwork of warehouses and sheds it is today? And could it become a world-famous manufacturing hub again, or should we be entirely rethinking the future of Trafford Park?

If you live in the city centre or enjoy a walk around town, you’re probably pretty familiar with the city’s canal network. Taking a route out of the city centre along the Bridgewater Canal, you pass the busy and rising new apartment blocks of Castlefield, the scrubland of Pomona, and the curiously grey offices of the Salford Quays. It’s at this point that the footpaths of the city come to an abrupt halt, replaced by a vast, seemingly endless landscape of white sheds, slipways and industrial units. You’ve arrived at Trafford Park. 

The Park as a Park

The “Park” moniker might seem like something of a cruel irony today, but wind the clock back 150 years and you’d see a very different landscape: rolling green fields, free-roaming deer and a beautiful manor. Trafford Park was the ancestral seat of the de Traffords, local aristocrats who had controlled the territory since the reign of King Cnut, and an ocean of green space against the smog and mills of the Victorian-era city centre.

But it was already under threat from the familiar rapid growth and industrialisation of the city centre. The 1887 creation of the Manchester Ship Canal combined with the much older Bridgewater Canal to sever the park from its surroundings, making it an island. The de Traffords had attempted to live with the disruption, building a three-metre wall to hide the construction of the canal from sight, but its completion was the final straw and the entire package of land was put up for sale.

In one of the great what-ifs of local history, Manchester’s council attempted to club together for a purchase with the neighbouring Salford, Eccles and Stretford to maintain the park under public ownership (something Jonathan Schofield recounts in his book Illusion and Change). But delays in scheduling the required council meetings saw the park sold to the highest bidder, who had other designs for the park. 

So instead of a public park, Trafford Park allegedly became the world’s first industrial estate (Manchester: Mapping the City co-author Martin Dodge is sceptical about this claim when I put it to him, speculating it was just marketing boosterism). Up until that point, factories had tended to be haphazardly mixed in with workers’ housing — think of the dense mills and terraces of Ancoats — but at least theoretically, Trafford Park was the first to set out a clear, planned space for industrial production. This was bad news for the local deer, but in a strange twist, good news for green space in broader Greater Manchester. 

After experiencing public outcry over the fate of Trafford Park, the council were determined not to repeat their error. When Heaton Park was put up for sale by the Earl of Wilton in 1902, the council beat property developers to the punch and snapped up the land for public use, to become Europe’s largest municipal park.

The rise and fall of Trafford Park

Trafford Park gave turn-of-the-century Manchester something it desperately needed: a chance to reinvent itself for the modern economy. The original industrial revolution — the steam engines, coal and textiles that had powered Manchester’s original explosive growth — was petering out. A second industrial revolution, of electricity, chemicals and steel, was turning the Victorian world upside down, with cities like Chicago, Berlin and Detroit on the rise. Closer to home, Birmingham was rapidly surpassing its old rival in size, with migrants drawn from far and wide by the city’s metalworking, engineering and the city’s nascent car industry. Not for the last time, Manchester was facing down economic irrelevance.

The second industrial revolution demanded large, modern factories; cheap and plentiful electricity, and the logistics (especially rail and water access) to whisk finished goods away. Unlike the increasingly cramped mills of the city centre, Trafford Park could provide this in abundance. And that pitch worked, at least for the major, modern American firms it attracted; some are still household names today like Ford and Kellogg’s. Alongside this infrastructure, Manchester offered access to a large and skilled manufacturing workforce, highly attractive to firms looking to expand their European operations (alternatives were much more limited than today, with much of the rest of Europe still dominated by agricultural work).

But the largest of all the Trafford Park firms was the British engineering giant Metropolitan Vickers (better known today, after a wave of consolidations, mergers and corporate divisions, as BAE Systems). Metrovick bought up 11% of the Park in one go, and created a “village” of 400 homes within the Park itself for workers who fancied cutting down on their commute.

In updating and diversifying Manchester’s economy, Trafford Park was an unqualified success. When international competition pummelled the cotton industry, Trafford Park provided an alternative base of economic resilience. And with the Park’s concentration of engineering and advanced manufacturing capacity, the Park became a vital production asset in the second World War, and a regular target for bombing raids. At the peak of surging demand, 75,000 workers were employed at Trafford Park, and an astonishing 26,000 worked in the Metropolitan Vickers plant alone (for comparison today, one of the larger private employers in Greater Manchester today, Bolton’s Warburtons, employs a total of 5,000).

But once the war was over, the gradual decline of the park set in. The once-modern park lost its lustre as road overtook rail, and as container ships grew far too big for the Manchester Ship Canal. Continual pressure from the growth of the road network and the industrialisation of the developing world was accelerated when the turbulent ’70s and the deindustrialisation of the ’80s stripped the park of many of its major employers, with large swathes of the park lying vacant. Something had to be done.

The solution for the Trafford Park Development Corporation was to go small. In the modern world, there weren’t really any buyers for the large plots that had attracted the American firms of the 1930s, so they were divided up and sold off. The resulting patchwork of smaller warehouses, low-rise offices and light industry might seem like a far cry from the vast engineering hubs of the Park’s early days, but they did turn around the seemingly intractable decline; Trafford Park achieved a partial revival, and continues to provide jobs for tens of thousands of residents across Greater Manchester today.

Do we still need Trafford Park?

The story of Trafford Park isn’t unique; most British cities have  similar stories to tell of economic boom, deindustrialisation, fragmentation and partial revival. But what is genuinely unique about Trafford Park is how big it is, and quite how much space is devoted to it, in a city-region where land is in short supply, and where developers compete to build ever taller towers on tiny parcels only a couple of miles eastwards. 

More and more of the wealth of Manchester now comes from the media hubs, the research labs and the offices of the city centre. According to ONS small area figures, in 1998, the Park generated almost half as much economic value as the territory within the inner ring road, but by 2021 that figure had fallen to around a quarter. So does Trafford Park still make sense in 2025?

Local leaders and planners seem to think so: Places For Everyone, the development plan agreed by nine Greater Manchester boroughs, makes no provisions for radical change to Trafford Park. The plan, which is intended to shape how Greater Manchester will develop over the next two decades, argues that the diversity of uses and employment options, the relative cheapness of space and the Park’s brand recognition make it an asset to maintain for the city-region.

Despite this, change is happening anyway.

The gradually shrinking park

Reflecting the wider shifts in Manchester’s economy, the Park as an industrial hub is gradually being eaten from the outside in. In large part, this shift has come through a series of land-intensive leisure and entertainment uses. The Trafford Centre retail hub, opened in 1998, was joined in 2012 by Sealife Manchester, and is set to neighbour the £250m swimming pool complex by Romanian Therme. In the North East of the park, the Imperial War Museum North joins the Coronation Street Live Experience.

This momentum will be super charged by the mega-project currently taking shape around Old Trafford. With vocal backing from the Mayor and from the UK Government, it seems likely that a new stadium will be built, accompanied by vast investment in high density apartments and offices. This will mean shifting Manchester United westward — further into the Park — at the expense of the rail and logistics depots that once powered the flow of materials and finished goods in and out of the Park so attractive to industries. 

But given how big Trafford Park is, even this multi-billion pound investment, on a scale large enough to merit flagship billing in the Chancellor’s economic growth narrative, will only make a very minor dent in the park.

Bringing back manufacturing

This probably isn’t a bad thing; it would be a mistake to completely write off the original industrial rationale for the Park. Manufacturing jobs are relatively well paid and economically vital. Potentially just as importantly, Greater Manchester’s economy needs to offer much more to its residents than just the city centre professional services firms that are overwhelmingly dominated by graduates, many of which (including this author) aren’t actually from the city-region in the first place. 

But how can Trafford Park stay ahead of the game facing pressures from automation, rising costs, and the pressures of international competition as nations like China continue to move up the value chain of industrial production? 

Across the UK, the Net Zero transition in particular is widely seen as a major opportunity to bring back high value manufacturing jobs. In the West Midlands, local leaders have put forward plans for a large scale electric car “Gigafactory” at the site of Coventry airport; in Tees Valley, the vast regeneration of the former Redcar steelworks aims to secure swathes of the nascent carbon capture and hydrogen industries. Just as with Trafford Park in its heyday, large, consolidated plots of land with good access to energy, logistics and prospective workers remain highly attractive to major international investors.

But the fragmentation of the Park, necessary at the time, would make this challenging. Reconsolidation of the Park’s fragmented fiefdoms into the large packages it was originally sold in would be difficult; the acquisitions and compulsory purchases required would be slow, expensive and potentially legally challenging. That’s probably one reason why Andy Burnham’s flagship project for industrial growth, Atom Valley, has earmarked largely greenfield space in the North of Greater Manchester rather than pitching for a revival of the park.

Thinking bigger

So most of the Park as we know it probably isn’t going anywhere. Unpicking fragmentation would be hard and disruptive, there’s no appetite to do so from local leaders, and the Park continues to serve a very valuable role for the businesses it hosts, small and large, many of whom have now been there for decades. 

At some point however, the Park may face the same situation it faced in the ’70s and ’80s, especially if UK industry continues to be hit by high energy prices. Eventually it might be time to think bigger and bolder with Europe’s largest industrial estate.

Of course, the easiest option is that we could simply build a lot of houses, as the original purchaser of the Park had in mind before the potential of industrial growth became clear. Manchester could do with more, and somewhat uniquely for a British city outside of the M25, the infrastructure is already there; the £350m Trafford Park Metrolink extension opened in 2020, and remains one of the less heavily used lines on the network according to TfGM’s ridership data.

But let’s think a little more creatively. What can we learn from elsewhere?

London, some distance ahead of Manchester on the cycle of deindustrialisation, the rise of the service-based economy and overheating property markets, might have some pointers. The capital’s Queen Elizabeth Park saw the conversion of a vast network of former industrial space into the sports arenas, green space and massed apartment blocks of today’s Stratford. Even then, it took the Olympics and decades of investment to pull this off, for a place half the size of Trafford Park. It’s worth noting too that this is a game Manchester has played once before, although with less flats. It was the bids for a Manchester Olympics (failed) and Manchester Commonwealth Games (successful) that saw East Manchester’s Bradford Colliery turned into the complex of sports centres and playing fields centered around the Etihad. 

Or maybe we can look further afield. When the East German city of Leipzig was reintegrated into the Federal Republic, 90,000 of the city’s 100,000 industrial jobs simply disappeared overnight in the face of gruelling competition from West German factories. In response, the city authorities took a bold approach of embracing the shrinking as an opportunity through an approach known as the “perforated city”, gradually and unevenly greening dense urban and industrial areas as the land became free.

So just maybe, at some point, the time will be right for Trafford Park to return, plot by plot, to its namesake. Manchester is still massively short of green space, and the scope for freeing up lots of valuable land in the city centre seems limited, as the wrangling over the fate of the former Central Retail Park site showed. 

During the early years of the park, as the industrial spaces gradually filled in from East to West, the Park remained a park in reality as well as name. The original, antlered inhabitants of the park wandered freely through the growing web of industrial corridors; the last Trafford Park deer was shot only in 1900. Hoping for their return feels like the very edge of credibility. But the vivid thought of a deer padding past an Adidas warehouse and back into the greenery feels like as good as a place to leave this piece as any.