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TIN PAN ALLEY
Issue 450
Phil Griffin strolls through Wythenshawe’s tin pan alley
What: ‘Tin Town’. Corrugated-steel-sheet roofed and half-clad council houses.
Where: Newall Green, Wythenshawe. East of Wythenshawe Hospital, along Hollyhedge, Firbank, Parkend and Greenbrow Roads.
When: 1950s, reflecting post-war austerity, and the clamour for new houses.
Now: Call me romantic but, for me, Tin Town ranks alongside the many splendours of Wythenshawe. Parkend Road on a spring-preview morning reflects both the hope and the disappointment from which this place is built.
Conceived by Barry Parker (creator of Letchworth and Welwyn Garden city) in the early 1930’s, this whole New Town of Wythenshawe would house 100,000 people. Rich and poor, old and young, dispersed around carefully retained woods and spinneys in a variety of flats and houses, in close and cul-de-sac, with generous gardens front and back and open green spaces in-between. And then there was a war. The story is taken up in the City of Manchester Plan’ of 1945, by R.Nicholas, City Surveyor and Engineer. There were already 8,000 houses in Wythenshawe by the time Nicholas took over the planning and reassessment, and the recession and the war had driven dark clouds across Parker’s vision.
Not only does Tin Town testify to the shortage of bricks and slate, but it also points to a willingness to adopt new materials, and to the very earliest notions of prefabrication. The rise in the land gives a real sense of space. The colours that these houses are painted in, light blue, pale green and yellow, brown and red, make the place feel a touch exotic, which is the atmosphere that is taken up by odd palms and pampas grass. There appear to be a lot of signs - ‘Beware of the Dog’, ‘Beware of the Dog’s Owner’ - and garden knick-knacks. This is a very particular place, different from any other before or since, and I guess that people want to take ownership of it.
Future Prospects: The City Council is just beginning the process of redeveloping the area of Ancoats called The Cardroom, which will eventually be known as New Islington. Whilst nothing will be built on the scale of Wythenshawe ever again, it is interesting to revisit Parker and Nicholas’s city in the suburbs. The cry has always been that Wythenshawe got its amenities far too late in the day, even though both its masterplanners had argued exactly the opposite course; that amenities should be in place before housing. The 1945 plan has single women’s dwellings, and sheltered housing for the elderly. Parker, in particular, wanted to mix private housing in with the council provision. Their pens were dipped in altruism, even if what they wrote wasn’t always joined up.
Wythenshawe is on a scale that is unimaginable today and, frankly, the extent to which it succeeds is amazing to me. There’s nothing squalid about Tin Town; on the contrary, it is distinctive in ways that most of, say, new Hulme isn’t.
A lot of people will be disappointed if New Islington ends up as another ribbon development of brick houses with pitched roofs. Except that is what most people seem to want to live in. So much of Wythenshawe, the very place itself, was cutting-edge 70 years ago. No amount of negative behaviour, skewed reporting and compromised housing policy can obscure the fact that Wythenshawe is mightily more success than failure. There’s not so much room in Ancoats for wide boulevards, not many spinneys and copse.
Those people, residents and planners, who are putting their heads together over New Islington, should bear in mind that what they come up with ought to look as startlingly modern today, and as fresh 50 years from now, as Wythenshawe does in the 1945 plan. And Tin Town might well have been an economy measure at the time, but it still looks pretty high-tech to me.
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