The city’s forgotten park

YOU would never know it was there.

Just yards from the multiplying cranes and the glistening new skyscrapers of Manchester’s booming city centre lies what was once billed as a leafy waterside oasis for the new millennium.

Tucked away on the back road to Collyhurst, a five-minute walk away from town, St Catherine’s was – in 2000 – meant to mark the gateway to a £1.7m new network of parkland trails stretching out along the river to Harpurhey.

Today little more than a plaque and some undergrowth remains, despite the council technically still classing it as a park.

Yet although even those right next door have no idea it exists, in St Catherine’s lies the ghost of the council’s original vision for a green parkland corridor across the former industrial north of the city one that now, in the housebuilding boom of 2018, it is intent on bringing back to life.

The inconspicuous entrance to this millennial legacy lies a short distance down Dantzic Street, at the point where it becomes Collyhurst Road, a stone’s throw from Angel Meadows.

Next to Theo’s Timber yard is a heavy blue barrier, on the fence next to which a small plaque reads: ‘Irk Valley Millennium Project. St Catherine’s. This project has been created with funds from the National Lottery through the Millennium Commission, and in partnership with local communities in the Irk Valley.’

Squeeze round the barrier – which is locked – and over the small bridge that crosses the Irk and a path takes you into a vague clearing, next to a faded board advertising a map of promised new countryside links down the river and throughout the north of the city.

“Working in partnership with local people and lots of different agencies, the Irk Valley project aims to provide safe, comfortable countryside links that will create long-term benefits for both people and wildlife,” it says, only just still readable.

There is no further signage. In one direction a small path strewn with broken glass leads through some undergrowth along the river, before stopping abruptly.

In the other lies a clearing, leading, in a roundabout fashion, to another semi-overgrown path along the river – past the bench, where an army of nettles have obscured any view of the water – to a small substation covered in danger signs, up some steps and onto an arid wasteland that has partly been reclaimed by nature and partly scattered with burnt car parts and deep open holes from which the metal covers appear to have been stolen.

In the near distance tower the cranes around the new Angel Gardens development, next to the Coop’s 21st Century headquarters. In the other direction lies a fairground storage yard on the edge of Cheetham Hill and a striking 19th Century footbridge once painted by Lowry, but now covered with graffiti and lined with discarded cans and scorched grass.

Getting any further out towards the rest of north Manchester down the Irk Valley from here is not really possible. Fences and brambles block the way.

Yet, in 2000, the pocket of woodland and green space that lines the river here was supposed to be the start of something big.

Nearly £2m of government and lottery funding was provided during the late 1990s towards the wider Irk Valley Project, a network of parks that was to stretch from St Catherine’s to Sandhills in Collyhurst, before splitting off in two directions, one to Queen’s Park and Harpurhey and the other towards Moston Vale and Broadhurst Clough.

That never really happened, although some of the resulting work has lasted the test of time. But even the council says it no longer has much in the way of records about how much was spent on St Catherine’s or what the exact plan for it was.

References to it are hard to find even on the town hall’s website, but various reports and strategies it has published over the past 20 years show the plan for the wider Irk river park scheme has lingered throughout.

In 2004 the council described a continued determination to ‘build linked trails along the River Irk and its tributaries.’

In 2007 it was still describing the same plan, although even before the crash and subsequent public sector austerity hit Manchester council in a big way, it was already pointing to a lack of maintenance funding for what effectively comprised a vast and awkward area of semi-derelict former industrial land.

While it was still talking about ‘all open space forming a regional park network, for the current and future community,’ it now qualified that a ‘substantial increase in maintenance resources’ would be necessary for that to get fully off the ground.

Referring to the availability of various further grant funding, it added: “Without revenue for ongoing maintenance the initial investment degrades over time.”

The author would, of course, be proved right.

That was more than a decade ago. Fast-forward to 2012, in the midst of austerity, and an update to council on the Irk Valley made no mention of St Catherine’s, but said of the wider corridor: “The size of the challenge in reclaiming areas of industrial land and creating an asset that will change perceptions of north Manchester and improve the quality of life for residents should not be underestimated.”

By that point, cuts to the neighbourhood services department had meant the various green spaces along the valley – from St Catherine’s up to Sandhills and beyond – were now being maintained to a ‘minimum standard.’

Some argue the council didn’t even do that.

In 2015, a blogger called Alan Rayner stumbled across St Catherine’s while following the paths of Manchester’s various rivers and tributaries. “I found myself in a strange area called St Catherine’s,” he wrote.

“I say strange, because allegedly it is part of the Irk Valley development program.

“Well, they have put a board up and also tarmaced a path that stretches about 50 yards and ends abruptly with no real meaning of why it’s there.

“The area is overgrown, strewn with litter, unmanaged coppices, burnt-out cars and everything in between.”

Noting that the faded board at the entrance promised ‘significant investment,’ he added sarcastically: “I think somebody ran off with the funds. This area is an absolute disgrace.”

Harpurhey councillor Pat Karney, who was brought up just down the road, admits neither St Catherine’s nor the wider plan lived up to its promises.

“The hype at the time was a linear park from the city centre to north Manchester, that all the residents in the tower blocks could enjoy it,” he says.

“They said ‘if you go up the CIS tower you’ll see what a lovely green corridor we’re creating up to Queen’s Park.’

“It never happened. It just looks a bit inhospitable and the hype never matched the reality.”