From the Canal to Sevenways

Category: local shops

  • Focus on Derbyshire Lane West

    Focus on Derbyshire Lane West

    We’ve been out and about in Derbyshire Lane West, asking how it’s going. As you can see below, you’ve been saying lots of good things about the area.

    But there are things you’d like to see improved…

    You don’t feel as safe as you deserve to feel.

    This has been raised a few times. The police figures are not too bad, but they don’t tell the whole story. You’ve told us about drug dealing in alleys and instances of self-injecting in the open. The area is not far from well-publicised tragic events involving knives and there has been a lot of worry about an incident in Moss Park about a year ago.

    I want to bring the police into this. I’d like to see some community engagement. I’m not sure police surgeries are the answer, but there are actions we need to consider.

    It’s not good for anyone if we don’t feel safe enough to engage fully in community activity, particularly if that means children are denied the freedom granted to older generations.

    Flytipping and graffiti

    We need to do better at clearing flytipping. There’s graffiti on the back of the flats above the shops. People have told me it adds to the general sense of a neighbourhood that’s not looking after itself.

    Decline of the road

    The state of the speed-humps in particular has been raised. They’re by no means the worst, but I get that people expect better.

    Subway under railway

    The subway has received some attention lately but it needs major investment. Andy Burnham wants all Greater Manchester stations to be accessible. The condition of the Humphrey Park subway means it can not be said to be wheelchair accessible.

    Actions

    I’m going to talk to the police over the general perception of personal safety in the neighbourhood. I’m already talking to Trafford over graffiti.

    Ideally, I’d like to improve general engagement with the area. The Friends of Moss Park is not currently active because people have left the area.

    I almost live too close to the area, because it’s easy to take things for granted and I’d like us to improve our channels of communication with the area.

    I’d really love for people to engage with the comments below and tell me how we need to respond. Should we be doing more in terms of litter picking for instance? I’d suggest public meetings but is there an appetite?

    I’m intending to update the site on how we’re getting on. But please do comment below!

  • Latest Stretford Consultation: heights, greenspace and parking

    Latest Stretford Consultation: heights, greenspace and parking

    I suppose I ought to make a full disclosure: l am on the record as preferring the demolition of the Mall and pretty much most of King Street apart from the former Post Office.

    I felt the old town centre was turned in on itself and didn’t even attempt to capture passing walking trade coming from the Metrolink or bus connections. I overwhelmingly lost that argument. The majority wanted to retain and improve salvageable assets in the then-existing layout. I get that and I’m happy to support the regeneration of the town centre via the retention of parts of the Mall that have had the roof removed.

    Generally, I think there’s a consensus that the centre should be smaller and that the night-time economy; restaurants, entertainment and bars should play an increasing role. There’s a general acceptance the space created in reducing the Mall can be used for housing. Nevertheless, it’s vital that the town centre continues its day job of performing as a place for routine shopping and services. I sense that the scale of retail is still not settled.

    We know that King Street is the retail heart of the centre and that links via King St Square to Quality Save and Little King Street next to the multi-storey car park.

    Known retail arteries of redeveloped town centre

    What I don’t know is what is going on around that new ‘central park’ just below the multi-storey. If those blocks are purely residential I think we have a problem. On the other hand, if the ground floors are taken up by prime retail like Marks and Spencer, or similar then that changes everything.

    This image below hints at shop fronts surrounding the central park. I wish they were more explicit as it makes all the difference to my thoughts on the Central Park in the consultation below.

    Consultation

    The latest consultation covers three aspects. It covers:

    • the maximum heights of apartment blocks,
    • the realignment of the central park strip of green space.
    • a revision in car-parking to retain surface parking for Aldi,

    Maximum Heights

    The architecture is important. The consultation is on a desire to increase the height of blocks close to the centre to 12 storeys. This is still 3 storeys shy of Circle Court at Lostock Circle, so it’s hardly massive. And while Circle Court became hard to update, it was never the scale that was the problem. It was a very popular block with tenants.

    Judging by public submissions, however, not to mention social media, these medium-sized towers do seem incredibly unpopular with Stretford residents. My problem is that they’re hidden away. I really want Stretford to have active frontages facing on Kingsway and Chester Road. The interior elements of the centre should be peeping out and enticing me to shop. The apartments should work with the retail elements to put people and movement in at ground level.

    It doesn’t look at this stage that the residential is integrated with the retail elements very much at all. As a whole, the development looks to be zoned. I don’t mind the heights so much as the fact residential elements are not working with the retail elements as much as I had anticipated.

    I’m hoping the computer-generated images are just illustrative. There are many examples of really good integration between retail and residential. It’s nothing new, Paris managed this more than 100 years ago.

    Reorientation of Central Park

    We were discussing this on Facebook. I think we came to the conclusion that it would work better as a paved square area. I wonder if the aspiration for green space is working against good design. It does deserve to be the prime area in the whole development with the best retail units.

    Aldi retail surface car park

    I hate this proposal. It cuts Aldi off leaving no interplay with the town centre. The ‘left-turn in, left-turn out’ proposal is awful, putting more traffic onto the roads, looking for somewhere to do a U-turn. Lastly, the car park itself works as barrier for those walking from the Sevenways direction.

    Summing Up

    On the whole, this is still exciting. I’m not sure the consultation has helped. It’s not easy to consult on heights of buildings without understanding how the buildings interact with the centre. All the focus has been on King Street and Little King Street. The town centre is so much more than this. I can’t pretend to like the arrangement with Aldi but there are hints there are contractual obligations that have to be met. I’d love to see Central Park become a town square with good quality retail on four sides. I’m still hopeful.

  • Stretford gets a new look Kingsway

    Stretford gets a new look Kingsway

    The team working on a new configuration for Kingsway alongside Stretford Mall put their ideas on show at the weekend. The headlines are more trees, a reduced carriageway to one lane and new crossings.

    It’s a pretty brave decision to reduce the traffic capacity, but Edge Lane and Urmston Lane are single-carriageways and so there’s a consistency to the traffic flow. Nevertheless, there was quite a lot of scepticism on display at the presentation event. I just hope their modelling is right.

    My view is that it’s worth pursuing. For most of the day, the two-carriageway Kingsway acts as a race track and is totally inappropriate for a town centre.

    However, making it a single-carriageway carries risks. There needs to be enough room for buses to stop without blocking traffic. The bus lay-bys on these designs don’t look big enough, especially if we’re hoping to get more people on buses.

    I’m also concerned that the entrance to Kingsway from Barton Road is widened to allow for two lanes, then quickly narrows to one. To me, that’s a bottleneck for no good reason. It should be one lane throughout the distance except at the exit to allow for right turns.

    It looks like the crossings are without pedestrian controls. I’d like to be reassured that these are totally accessible to all users including vision-impaired users and others.

    I hope they’ve ticked all the boxes. The new design looks good but it only needs a slight miscalculation for it to be calamitous. Those bus stops need to be bigger.

  • Exciting New Quayside Destination

    Exciting New Quayside Destination

    This looks tremendous. Plans have been approved to bring a new food and beverage destination utilising shipping containers and focusing on independents. It’ll be facing us, so just over the footbridge and no cars.

    The first traders to be based in the unique, waterfront setting next to the Lowry Theatre, will be ready to serve customers by Christmas with the line-up featuring start-up brands and operators across six units.

    Along the waterside and overlooking the iconic view of Manchester United, The Millennium Bridge and the Imperial War Museum, there will be new terraces for outdoor dining balanced with attractive landscaping.

    As well as the new outdoor space there will be an independent food hall and community space which will provide a platform for start-ups as well as nurture and support new, homegrown talent.

    As part of the plans, the food court is being upgraded and given a fresh new overhaul and will be complete by early summer.

    Media City Press Release
  • Stretford Town Centre – Consultation

    Stretford Town Centre – Consultation

    Currently, Chester Road and Kingsway sever the Mall from the rest of Stretford and create dangerous, uncomfortable crossings for residents and high levels of pollution and noise.

    Stretford Town Centre Consultation – Accessibility

    My thoughts on the Accessibility of the Town Centre

    Too limited in scale. The plan assumes that people only walk to the town centre from an area not much further out than Victoria Park. In making this assumption, it confines its consideration of severance to the A56 and Kingsway.

    Stretford Foodhall and other venues that have started up in recent years are already successfully exploiting the walkability of the nearest neighbourhoods. The new homes planned for the centre will add further to this ultra-local market. However, the best potential increase in the town centre’s market share lies beyond the immediate area.

    A walkable journey of fifteen minutes could reasonably define the catchment that Stretford needs to exploit. Applying this extends the area out towards:

    • Lostock/Sevenways/Derbyshire Estate,
    • Moss Road,
    • Gorse Hill,
    • The Quadrant,
    • Longford,
    • The Meadows,
    • Urmston Lane,
    • Moss Park.

    The routes serving these neighbourhoods from Stretford are typically busy fast roads with narrow pavements, often in poor condition and subject to aggressive pavement parking. Certain junctions are already notoriously unsafe.

    The council could work with Living Streets – Stretford to engage with the community in identifying further severance and improving walkability.

    The risk of not addressing this is that Stretford loses walking market penetration, putting people in a taxi to Manchester rather than taking an unpleasant 10-minute walk to their local town centre.

    Edit

    As a consequence of this post, my twitter friend Owler Nook has posted an isochrone map of Stretford showing increments of walking areas. This is a live calculation available here

    Isochrone from Open Route Service

    What really underlines the importance of attracting these potential customers for Stretford all living within 15 minutes is the scale. The plan is focusing all its accessibility improvements on the inner ‘red’ area currently accommodating 1500 residents. Take it out to the 15 minute range and you’re targeting fifteen thousand people.

  • Stretford Library move gets approval from Trafford’s leadership

    Stretford Library move gets approval from Trafford’s leadership

    In what seems to have been a very rushed process, the council’s Executive voted tonight for Stretford Library to vacate its home for the past 80 years to allow Trafford Music Service to take over the building. It’s just over a week since the report was first published to almost no fanfare.

    Whilst the speed of the decision has taken the breath away, it has to be acknowledged that there has been a lot of public support expressed into a succession of Stretford Town Centre consultations for the library to form part of the eventual town centre revival. I think a lot of us saw the transfer as being into a bespoke hub, rather than a unit in the mall. However, importantly, and I think this accounts for much of the haste, the addition of the Music Service to the town centre has to be welcomed.

    It’s the space allocated in the Mall that is most troubling. The units 37-38 that used to house Bonmarché just don’t provide sufficient space to provide the popular internet service, book shelves and children’s play area that make up a modern library, not to mention the Access Trafford service that’s so important in these difficult times. I raised this at the Executive meeting. I think the choice of Bonmarché has been simplified as the old Tesco’s units are too big, therefore it has to be a Bonmarché sized unit and that seems to have become the settled position.

    My problem with this choice is that being in the Mall is likely to improve footfall – a good thing, but the computers will (hopefully) be more popular than the unit can cope with, and the library as a place to read will be overwhelmed. I argued that it may be necessary to separate functions over more than shop unit.

    I’m certainly not won over by the argument that this is a temporary solution. The current time-frame is 2-5 years and I don’t believe children should lose out on Rhyme Time (edit I’ve been assured that Rhyme time will continue) and that vital nurtured skill of choosing books. We’re going to need more space. I hope the Executive were listening to me. We’ll see.

    Further edit: Response from the Executive Member, Liz Patel

    Can’t pretend I’m happy to leave this at this point but not likely to get any further in my remaining 6 weeks as councillor.