In which I look at what makes a town work and why Stretford has waterfront opportunities that it shouldn’t waste.
I don’t want to lie on a beach. I don’t want to swim. Give me a town or small city that I can potter around in, and I’ll happily spend a few days getting to know the place. It’s become my holiday of choice.
The UK has taken a hit since Covid, but there’s still plenty of life in our towns. Tourism plays a part, but being towns means they have to appeal primarily to a local audience. You don’t have to visit many before you see that there are constant markers of what makes a town worth venturing out into.
A town has to have more value than its component parts. Otherwise, it’s effectively a retail park. Tellingly, the most successful towns feel worthwhile visiting whether or not you spend any money at all. They are places to stroll around.
So there has to be a certain scale to a place. If the entire centre can be walked in 10 minutes, the town is not going to have a pull of its own.
The more inherent visual cues a place has, the better. These can be geographic or architectural. We generally agree on whether a town has beauty and interest or whether it’s lacking.
Water often works well.
We are beginning to learn that our brains are hardwired to react positively to water and that being near it can calm and connect us, increase innovation and insight, and even heal what’s broken. Healthy water is crucial to our physiological and psychological well-being, as well as our ecology and economy. We have a “blue mind”.
Céline Cousteau (intro to Blue Mind)
It doesn’t matter whether it’s the sea, a lake, a river, a canal, even a fountain. Water adds to a place.
Trafford is almost defined by its rivers and canals. They provide our boundaries and in the Bridgewater Canal, a spine stretching down from Barton in the north stretching through Stretford, Sale and Altrincham in the south all the way round to Lymm and Warrington in the West.
The canal works well. Sale has made it a vital feature of its town centre. The pubs along the canal are generally surviving against an economic backdrop that is closing so many of our neighbourhood pubs. It might have an industrial heritage but where we’ve opened it out, it works.
However, the planners of Stretford have pulled away from utilising the canalside. They argue that it lacks sufficient frontage, that a retail/leisure development would detract from the revived King Street on the mall site. I think they’re wrong.
The café at the viaduct in Altrincham and from the barge at Brookland do well without the benefit of a town centre to support them. These are small scale operations. The developers have much more space on the canal at Stretford based on just the old sorting office.
I worry that the risk isn’t so much overscaling Stretford as denying it that important critical mass that gives you a stroll around the town centre and gentle walk home.
At some point too, the Essoldo will return to being part of the Stretford offer in one form or another and that might extend the canal frontage on the other side of the bridge.
I don’t want to lose the opportunity to do something exciting with Stretford.
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