GEOGRAPHERS at the University of Manchester have mapped twentieth century attempts to get to grips with Manchester’s transport woes.
The late 1960s saw the most viable proposal, the 'Picc-Vic Tunnel', with plans to construct an underground railway
Information from old transport reports and newspaper articles revealed six proposed schemes between 1903 and 1983, all of which failed.
University cartographer Graham Bowden has plotted each of these proposals on a single map (below), alongside the Manchester Airport Metrolink expansion.
The schemes occur approximately every ten years and feature both monorail and tube systems.
Guardian article from 1966 discussing the Manchester MonorailDr Martin Dodge said: “For me, what is fascinating is the sense of deja-vu as seemingly every decade or so a 'new' proposal comes forward to solve the problem by a grand engineering endeavour. This utopian quote from a newspaper correspondent, in 1936, echoes down the years: ‘A judicious policy of suburban railway electrification, coupled with a well-designed tube railway system, would go a long way towards making the population in and around Manchester happier and healthier.’
“And yet all the schemes would have been expensive and crucially uneconomic given the shape of the city, the small size of the central zone and the scale of daily passengers. The desire for tube travel for status of a serious city simply could not be afforded through the 20th Century.”
The late 1960s saw the most viable proposal, the 'Picc-Vic Tunnel', with plans to construct an underground railway. The line would have swept round the city centre with underground stations at Piccadilly, Whitworth Street, Central Station (with underground links to the Town Hall and Central Library), The Royal Exchange and Victoria.
Huge amounts of money were spent publicising the scheme including a big jukebox-like affair with buttons that lit coloured bulbs on a display map.
But despite all the effort, even despite Parliamentary powers being granted, the money could not be found due to the national economic decline of the 1970s and the plan lapsed. Only with the Metrolink in 1991 did Victoria and Piccadilly finally become linked by rail.
Dr Dodge argues that some of these schemes were far more ambitious than current expansions: “The dinky tram out to the airport now certainly does not match the ambitious prospect for a monorail investigated in the mid-1960s. Interestingly this scheme would have come along Cambridge Street and provided a station for the University.”
