Would Manchester be better off without the M60?

In 1945, Rowland Nicholas looked out from across Manchester (or so, at least, we can imagine) and saw slums. These neighbourhoods were rich in community but poor in just about every other way. Planners of Nicholas’s era didn’t see these areas as something to cherish, or improve. They were messy, confused but alive. He would restore order. He would propose a road.

A quick Google of Nicholas’ name brings up very little. In fact, much of what you’ll find is about Ruth Rowland Nicholas — an American aviation pioneer, the only woman yet to hold simultaneous world records for speed, altitude, and distance for a female pilot. Sadly, being a 1940s planning officer at Manchester City Council isn’t as a sure-fire way to write yourself into the history books. 

But Nicholas was in a position to leave an even bigger, more tangible legacy; he would leave his mark on the landscape itself. And as town planners go, he was something of a pioneer. He was the author of 1945’s City of Manchester Plan, which proposed to essentially level Manchester City Centre and rebuild it from scratch (to free it from its “perpetual smoke pall”). That plan never got the greenlight, but another of Nicholas’ bold ideas eventually did: to construct an outer ring road going round the entire city —  a Mancunian halo.

Nicholas, of course, wasn’t alone among post-war town planners in his love of all things tarmac. Many cities, chief among them Birmingham, Sheffield and Newcastle now find themselves burdened by so-called “relic infrastructure” — those who have attempted to navigate Birmingham’s inner-city ring road will know only too well the frustration it is capable of inducing. 

In Manchester, you probably think we got off lightly. Nicholas’ ring-road, the M60, as it became, is our main ‘relic’ from the heady days when a car utopia seemed imminent. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a Mancunian of a certain age who thinks life was better before the M60 came along. Constructed over the course of 40 years, it’s the only orbital motorway in Britain apart from London’s M25. When the motorway’s 36-mile circle was finally completed in 2000, it connected parts of the city that were previously difficult to reach. “Before it was built, you had to wait for the old Barton Bridge to swing round before you could cross the Ship Canal,” David, a lifelong Stockport resident, tells us.

The M60 was built in an era of supreme confidence in the car. The 1990s saw huge investment in the out-of-town shopping centre and the big box store. IKEA in Ashton, Costco in Oldham and the Trafford Centre — Manchester’s “stately pleasure dome” — have thrived because the ring road makes them easy to get to. 

But things are different nowadays. The elusive dream of a very accessible Costco has ceded to other concerns: Greater Manchester has stated that it wants to become carbon neutral by 2038 — road traffic remains the biggest contributor to greenhouse gases. And that’s not to mention the expense: National Highways spend around £11.9 billion a year on maintenance and repair costs. 

The problem with motorways is that once they’re built, they’re difficult to avoid using. When they were planned in the mid-twentieth century, planners thought that public transport would eventually be totally replaced by cars. Many UK motorways severed old railways and tram lines, which has made suburban rail networks fiendishly difficult to reconstruct. Cities around the world are grappling with these issues. But Manchester, which has never been a not-in-my-backyard type of place, hasn’t yet fully reckoned with how the M60 changed the urban landscape. So it’s worth asking: might we have even been better off without it?

Take Stockport. Roads and railways have long defined Stockport. In the North’s industrial heyday, the town was known for two things– its hats and the brick-built viaduct which has been carrying trains to London for almost 200 years. Friedrich Engels, never one to mince words, described the place as “excessively repellent” in 1844. Like many other towns in the North West, Stockport has struggled to reinvent itself since the decline of its hat making industry. The Merseyway Shopping Centre, one of the first of its kind in the country, opened in 1970. It was intended to transform the town into a leisure destination. Now the council has a £1 billion regeneration scheme in the works, including a recently completed £140 million bus terminal.

But the M60, running right through the centre of town, poses a challenge to these plans. Stopfordians have got so used to this state of affairs that it’s hard to imagine a world where the town was connected. 

“It’s funny, it seems like it’s always been there,” says the librarian at Stockport Central library. The hum of traffic from Wellington Road is audible as we look at old maps of the town. One from 1910 shows how the ring road has cut off the possibility of rebuilding older public transport links. Parts of the South Manchester District Railway, which from the 1880s to the 1950s ran all the way from Chorlton to Stockport, run along the current ring road’s route. 

You can’t see the Outer Ring Road from Castle Street, but its influence is keenly felt. Less than a mile from the town centre, it’s a local high street with 74 shops, the vast majority of them independent businesses. 

The area sprung up in the early nineteenth century around local industrialist William Sykes’ bleachworks. His former pile, now Alexandra Park, is at the south end of these streets. At the north end, Hollywood Park boasts a grand set of steps down to the bottom of the hill, with a view of the Stockport Pyramid (where, as Mill readers will be aware, the world’s largest Pakistani curry house now sits) and the ring road at the bottom of the hill. The motorway is like a river, with just a few small footbridges making it easier to cross. Looking out from here, it feels like Decathlon and B&Q, just visible on the other side of the valley, could be in another town altogether. 

Last year residents called it a “neglected street”. “There’s not much reason to come here other than food,” Paul Sivori, a local business owner, told the BBC. “It needs different types of shops and outlets. It’s all takeaways and nails here.” 

Up until the 1960s, local pockets of economic diversity like Castle Street were better connected to the city as a whole through a network of pedestrian streets. This network was reinforced by the Stockport Tramway, which ran through Castle Street until 1951. 

It was Rowland Nicholas and his belief that the future of cities in straight lines, ordered geometry and cars, who set the idea of a ring-road in motion. The idea was in reaction to the intense poverty and poor urban living conditions which were widespread during the industrial revolution. Inner city neighbourhoods were dismissed as slums and demolished to make way for roads that would allow workers to commute by car into work from modern housing developments in the suburbs. In the 1950s, about 27% of the city’s total housing stock had been earmarked for demolition. 22,000 homes were “cleared” in Salford, Manchester and Stockport between 1955-1960 alone. 

By the 1970s, both Manchester and Stockport’s local tram network had also been destroyed and the suburban train network vastly reduced. The buses were privatised in 1987, fuelling the ‘bus wars’. And by the year 2000, the building of the M63, M66 and M60 motorways meant that Manchester had firmly given itself over to the car. 

Yet in other parts of the world, urban planners and environmentalists had been questioning the wisdom of adapting cities so completely to the needs of motorists for a long while – Jane Jacobs was doing battle with Robert Moses in New York City way back in the 1960s.

At risk of sounding a touch academic, how a city’s streets fit together into a network, its “space syntax”, creates an underlying grammar of how things connect and in what order. And just as when you cut someone off mid-sentence, they might struggle to regain their train of thought, the imposition of the M60 cut off Stockport’s walkers from this network. It’s what urban designers call ‘severance’, and it's why pedestrians find it hard to get to places like Castle Street.

Outside the Co-op on Castle Street we meet David and his wife Bernadette. Now retired, they live a couple of miles away but visit the street almost daily. “There’s just more going on here,” says Bernadette. “A couple of years ago, in the town centre you had a Marks and Spencer, you had BHS. But now there’s nothing there.” They sold their car a couple years ago, hoping to rely on their free bus passes. But getting the bus every day to Castle Street is a “sore point” says David. “If the big men knew what it was like to stand in the rain for an hour waiting for a bus that never comes, then we’d have a much better bus network.” 

It’s less than a mile from Castle Street to Stockport Town centre, but the walk takes half an hour. Rachel and Vic recently took over Augury and Alchemy, a spiritual wellbeing shop, from Rachel’s dad. Business depends on the carparks round the back of the street. “If you see them empty, you know it’s going to be dead,” Vic says.

Talking to local businesses, it's unclear how much difference the council’s regeneration work is making. Although Stockport station is just a few minutes walk away, and the shiny new multi-million pound interchange less than a mile off, the car still seems to be the main driver of visitors. “The motorway is very important,” says Karen in Tweedies, a family-run furniture shop that’s been operating on Castle Street for over a century. “We get customers from Alderley Edge, Cheshire, Yorkshire — the fact they can park here makes a big difference.”

The clientele at this end of town skews older. The kind of customer who might visit the Underbanks or Stockport Market, the trendier parts of town getting national press attention tend not to find their way over to Castle Street. “You might get the odd lost person, but you don’t get much crossover really,” says Rachel. 

Despite the hundreds of millions being poured into Stockport’s regeneration, the roads and railways that criss-cross the town mean that it remains stubbornly difficult to reconnect places like Castle Street. Across Greater Manchester, there are other such places that the M60 has split, like Sale and Chorlton, Northenden and Cheadle and Bredbury and Brinnington, not to many the green spaces it splits in two: Heaton Park, Sale Water Park, Reddish Vale Country Park, Littlemoss. 

Manchester’s devotion to motorways might be linked to its sense of itself as a second city. A place that needs to stay competitive with London; a place with such a strong sense of self-confidence that it bid for the Olympics — twice. Certainly, to most, the idea that we’d be better off without the M60 might sound sacrilegious. But if you consider the case of Castle Street, and many other places dotted around the loop of Manchester’s halo, the city seems to be better linked to the rest of the country than it is to itself. 

Our weekend to do list

Friday

🚲 Europe’s largest handmade bike show is coming to Manchester this weekend, starting today. Tickets are £15, and free for kids.

🤼 And ‘The King of Salford’ will be facing off with ‘The Vigilante’ at Pendlebury Social Club’s pro-wrestling event tonight.

Saturday

🪩 Day Fever, Vicky McClure’s very-own daytime disco, is returning to the New Century Hall this Saturday — and you can request your favourite song online before you arrive.

📚 And the Northern Publishers’ Fair arrives in Manchester Central Library. Expect many publishers from the city, such as Fly On The Wall, and Manchester University Press.

Sunday

👑 Love Hamlet? Love Radiohead? Always wanted to see the two combined? Neither have we, but you can at Factory International on Sunday.

⚡ And The Stockport Music Story are unveiling a plaque commemorating 55 years since David Bowie spent the night at Stockport Station. Bit weird, but we’d probably go if we lived nearby.

Has David Bowie spent the night near you? Have you got a To-Do for The Mill? Tell us all about it here.