Master Plan Wythenshawe Manchester

Influenced by American practice, Parker’s innovative master plan incorporated parkways and defined neighbourhood units, which Parker had seen in New York in 1925. Although building was not begun until Wythenshawe was brought within the Manchester city boundary, by 1934 its population of 25,000 was greater than Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City combined.  In 1925 Parker (with Unwin and Ebenezer Howard) was a delegate at the second conference of International Garden Cities and Town Planning Federation, held that year in New York.  During his stay he visited the great parks and the parkway roads of Westchester County, on the northern suburban fringe of New York and was greatly impressed. Parkways were introduced in his Wythenshawe plan, and in the early 1930s Letchworth Gate was laid out as a parkway connection from the first Garden City to the Great North Road.  Parker also incorporated a variant on the neighbourhood superblock, recently designed by Henry Wright  and Clarence Stein at Radburn, New Jersey in 1929.  Described as “a town for the motor age” Radburn featured a nested hierarchy of the street network structure. Separate pedestrian paths run through the green spaces between the culs-de-sac and through the central green.

Parker’s 1928 report specified a highway hierarchy of traffic streets and residential neighbourhood units with community facilities, a town centre, industrial zones, open spaces and a peripheral green belt. The layout retained Wythenshawe Park as a public amenity, with housing development to the north and south. Parker’s influence was to be found in the short culs-de-sac and articulated housing groups, similar to his designs in the western neighbourhood at New Earswick.

The most intensive pre-war building occurred in the Royal Oak, Benchill and Sharston neighbourhoods, with an estimated population of 21,000 out of 37,700 total by 1945.