There’s a corner of the city centre, hemmed in by Manchester’s busiest roads, which only has one dedicated shop. That’s despite the neighbourhood having a 500-place primary school, and rapidly-improving housing estate.
Often confused with its neighbour, Ardwick, Brunswick was built out in the early 1970s to house thousands of Mancunians in newer homes, designed to replace ageing Victorian stock demolished under the slum clearance programme. Now, however, there are fresh efforts to revive the area — from within its own borders.
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It’s easy to miss Brunswick, but it’s also easy to know where it starts and ends. At the north end, the Mancunian Way flyover butts up against flats on Lamport Court. On its western side, Upper Brook Street — dominated by Manchester Royal Infirmary and the University — delineates its edge.
To the west is the A6, where cars queue for roundabouts and gig fans queue for the Apollo. The southern tip is made up of Plymouth Grove and Devonshire Street South. It’s an area of just 0.23 square miles.
And, within this network of roads, there a big effort being made to breathe new life into Brunswick. S4B began its 25-year, £100 million transformation of the area in 2014 — but now, there’s a new movement to make Brunswick a bit less grey and a bit more green.
Ardwick Climate Action (ACA) has gathered £20,000 from various public sector funds to ‘re-wild’ pockets of the area. Daniell Musaheb and Gordon Flear hope that by making improvements here and there, they can build a greater sense of community in a neighbourhood that most people will only ever glance at from a Mancunian Way traffic jam.
“The area gets lost because of the arterial routes. If you say ‘Brunswick’, people do not know it because it's so close to the city centre,” Gordon told the Manchester Evening News. “I lived here from 1979 and now I live inside Rusholme, but I feel part of it here.
“The church is 50 years old this year. People are all very local. Loads are TAs at the school, or work at the hospital or university.”
Gordon was speaking inside the Brunswick Parish Church, which was created in 1974 after three other congregations merged. Modernist on the outside, it is unusual in having a semi-circular seating arrangement.
It also is one of the few hubs and meeting places in the vicinity. The area has plenty of housing, and a primary school, plus a good deal of greenery — but only one shop.
“Apart from the Tesco, there’s one convenience store on a parade of shops behind the Apollo,” Daniell explains. “That incentivises food poverty because their prices are higher.”
Gordon adds: “There’s nothing else. People either have to go into town or Asda in Longsight.
“There’s the Chinese Centre and Salvation Army but you get lost with the University being there. There are groups around and it would be good to bring those together.”
The plan for the ACA is to bring more plants and wildlife to ten locations in Brunswick. Some projects are small, such as planting wildflowers next to the wall of park Gartside Gardens, but other schemes include building a trail in the cemetery of the former St Saviour’s Church.
‘Mini orchards’ are also on the cards on small patches of grass by Craigmore Walk — but most ambitious of all is a proposed world record attempt — to plant more than 47,000 bulbs in one day.
That is earmarked for October 2, a year after the group managed to close a section of the A6 down to motor traffic. “Pollution, on the day we closed it last year, started well above WHO guidelines,” Daniell recalls. “After an hour it dropped below the recommended levels.”
There are also moves to plant a wildflower meadow outside Lamport Court, right next to an A57(M) slip road. Past planting of lavender saw bees come back ‘within 30 minutes’.
“When the PFI was done [and S4B started work], they told us to use the Church as a community centre so we are now the community centre — but there is not much of a community," Gordon said.
"I think everyone has been so forgotten and over-promised to and under-delivered to, it means we are close — as the ACA and the Church — [to showing] that if we do stuff, change does happen.”
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