Category - good, standard, or ugly? Bloody marvellous.
What, when and who?
Let’s talk about the glorious remodelling of Deansgate-Castlefield Metrolink Station. The architects are SimpsonHaugh and the landscaping consultancy are Landscape Projects led by Neil Swanson. The scheme is just about finished.
What’s so glorious about it?
It makes public transport a thing of joy. It allows a dreary 1980s’ footbridge to Deansgate rail station to shed its grubby, translucent, perspex carapace. It delivers two separate station platforms, two elegant staircases and a soaring lift shaft and then wraps them in green walls and sedum trackways adding birch trees for good measure. There are even two blocks of COR-TEN steel with various kit in them that fit the ensemble perfectly. Over an incredibly complex site Manchester has gained a thing of robust beauty combined with a friendly viewing platform.
Sedum beautyWhat do the architects say?
Dave Green of SimpsonHaugh proudly makes the same point to Confidential. “There’s a promenade feel about the new station. There are views south and along the canal to Castlefield. We’re really pleased with how its turned out, how even the COR-TEN has weathered and created a relationship with the railway arch brick - a good tonal relationship.”
He continued: “We wanted to create a great introduction to the city centre. The stations in the centre should be showier than those in the suburbs and we hope we’ve achieved this. At the same time we wanted to take away the clutter and bring in better design while improving access. We’re overjoyed as well by the work from Landscape Projects which works in tandem with the design."
The new promenade part one
The new promenade and Manchester CentralIs there any other recent work like this in the city?
If there is a relationship to be found it’s perhaps with MUMA’s award-winning extension of the Whitworth Art Gallery. The restaurant area and the new galleries of that scheme seem to float in the trees of the adjacent park. It has a lightness of being that is uplifting. Deansgate-Castlefield station with the bridge, the platforms, the stairs, the lift area, carry the same quality. Both the Whitworth and this station also feel superbly ‘modern’, state-of-the-art, as good as design can get. There’s something else too.
Modern and elegant
Elegant and modern
Whitworth airiness 
The Whitworth in nature Go on
Both projects are considered, intelligent, thoughtful. Architects often tell porky pies about responding to the location of their designs. This station and the Whitworth feel the opposite of that and at the same time hit all the right notes in melding their work with imaginative planting. Man and nature joined together.
Of course given the needless insertion of the Library Walk link building between Central Library and the Town Hall Extension, SimpsonHaugh as a practice, have not always got it right over location-sensitivity. But credit where credit’s due, Deansgate-Castlefield station is a beauty.
Now let’s talk about Take That.
Deansgate-Castlefield greening
View from the east of the station Could it be magic?
It could. The Greater Manchester County Council (GMC) was created under the Tory government of Edward Heath and came into existence in 1974 along with Merseyside, West Midlands and others. For 11 years the region had a two-tier government, ten councils looking after the nitty-gritty of their areas and GMC. It was during these years that services such as police and fire were sensibly re-constituted to cover the metropolitan area and public transport was also brought under GMC’s control.
Then another Tory, Margaret Thatcher, decided the left bias of the metropolitan county councils made her sick (colleague Edward Heath also made her nauseous). She abolished them and also, stupidly, de-regulated public transport.
The only major physical reminders of GMC in the city centre are Manchester Central (originally G-MEX, Greater Manchester Exhibition Centre) and the dowdy now made good footbridge that linked it with Deansgate Station.
This brings us to the nineties when the debased perspex of the structure was attacked by Take That fans after several gigs at G-MEX. It was plastered by graffiti carrying messages such as ‘I love you Robbie’, ‘Mark is the best’, ‘Lose some weight Gary’ and ‘Who the hell is Jason Orange and that other one?’ The graffiti was eventually cleaned off but for a while an ugly bridge was a place of pilgrimage. It was sweet. Some German girls once asked me the way to the bridge so they could add a few words.
And now Time has gone into reverse.
Everything changes..including you
Getting things in perspective or even without perspex-tiveWhat do you mean?
The Conservatives, who for philosophical reasons abolished Greater Manchester County Council in the 1980s, now want the Combined Authority of Greater Manchester to lead the country forward in city region devolution. The key government proponent of this, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, during this week’s Tory Party Conference, could have taken the train from his Tatton Constituency, changed at Altrincham for the tram, got off and admired Deansgate-Castlefield station and then walked to the Tory conference at the ex-GMEX, created by an institution he now wants to bring back - albeit in a different form.
What goes around comes around.
Beetham Tower (also by SimpsonHaugh), the new lift and the nineteenth century railway pier, jockey for attention
Flowers by the track
