The first new park in central Manchester for a hundred years, built on a derelict railway depot with a river dug back out of a culvert.
Manchester built no new park in its centre between the 1920s and 2022. This is that park.
The Mayfield site is 24 acres of former railway land immediately south-east of Piccadilly station — a passenger station that opened in 1910, closed to passengers in 1960, worked as a parcels depot until 1986, and then sat derelict for thirty-five years in the middle of a city with a housing crisis.
The park is the first phase of redeveloping it, and it opened in September 2022 at a cost of around £23 million.
The river
The best decision was to uncover the River Medlock.
The Medlock had been culverted, walled and generally treated as a drain for over a century — the standard Victorian solution to a river that flooded and stank. The park took the concrete off a 350-metre stretch, dropped the banks back down to the water, and planted them.
The result is that you can now stand on a bench in central Manchester with your feet a metre above a moving river, under trees, four minutes from a mainline platform. Given what the site was, that is a genuine transformation.
There is a play area built into the old railway retaining walls, an events lawn, a lot of new planting that is still filling in, and preserved fragments of the depot structure left standing as they were found.
The honest bit
It is small, it is young, and the towers going up around it will change how it feels. Trees planted in 2022 do not shade anything yet.
It is also surrounded by an active building site for the rest of the Mayfield masterplan, which means noise, hoardings and changing routes for years.
Come for forty-five minutes as part of a walk rather than as a destination in itself. In five years, when the planting has grown in, it will be one of the best things in Manchester. Right now it is a very promising start with cranes over it.
Nearby
Escape to Freight Island, in the old depot sheds next door, is a covered street-food and bar operation that runs year-round.
Ancoats is fifteen minutes north on foot along the canal.
