Landsec
Martyn Evans
Manchester
“Nothing that we do in our lives happens without property or the spaces around property.” Martyn tells us. “From the moment we wake to the moment we sleep, from the day we’re born to the day we die, everything is contingent on the quality of the places we live in.”
The way he explains this, instantly reframes property, not as bricks, land, or transactions, but as the places and spaces where life happens. So why in some of the most densely populated parts of the UK are many of our spaces badly designed, un-loved, or forgotten?
Mayfield, a 24-acre site in Manchester, was one of those forgotten places. Until 2016 it was a fenced-off wasteland in the heart of the city, its river buried, its history ignored, its future uncertain. Today, it is home to Manchesters first new city-centre public park in 100 years, Europe’s largest nightclub, and millions of visitors who now experience this area of Manchester as part of their lives.
As we walked through Mayfield Park, the sound of running water from the River Medlock, the gentle movement of wind through the established grasses and the laughter from the children’s playground combined to make you instantly forget you are in one of the UK’s major cities. “When we took over this site here at Mayfield, we could have just locked the gate and hired a security guard with a dog until we were ready to send the cranes in and start building. But we didn’t do that.”
Instead, the Mayfield Partnership opened the gates. They built a nightclub that drew thousands, a food and drink operation that brought life to the site, and now this city-centre park where families gather. Since then, between three and four million people have come here to spend time, connect, and enjoy themselves.
When finished, Mayfield will welcome 13,000 workers and 5,000 residents, alongside hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. But this transformation raises a fundamental question: how do you turn a place that has been neglected for generations into somewhere people want to live, work, and belong?
Martyn’s answer is simple: you start with stories. Stories don’t just appear, they must be found, told, and shared.
An early project we talked about was the Story Cards that were produced by Dan Dubowitz, Mayfield’s Cultural Masterplanner and Reader in Architecture at the Manchester School of Architecture. Working with historians, they uncovered 20 tales from Mayfield’s past: a lost library, a vanished mill, pubs that once held communities together. Each story was printed on a card and given to everyone on site, from security guards to bar staff. The point wasn’t nostalgia. It was to spark conversations, to give everyone working at Mayfield the ability to connect the public to the site’s history.
It was a strategic move. Storytelling here wasn’t decoration, it was infrastructure. It turned employees into narrators, the public into participants, and a building site into a living place.
One of those stories Martyn recalls, “Back in the 18th century, Thomas Hoyle ran a textile printing mill at Mayfield. His breakthrough was simple, he discovered a way to bleach cheap cloth white, which meant vibrant colours could be printed onto fabrics ordinary people could afford.”
It was business innovation, but it was also social innovation. A technical discovery that brightened the lives of thousands.
Martyn draws a direct line from Hoyle to today, “It’s a great example of how we can look to the past to influence what we do now. Hoyle’s legacy is ‘business innovation with social impact.’ That’s one of many focal points we can use to ask the question, what is the modern version of that here at Mayfield?”
These early stories helped to kickstart a new narrative, one that looked to the past to help shape a future. Since that project a huge amount of people have shaped what Mayfield has become, from the architects sketching visions, to the DJs who turned derelict warehouses into dance floors, to the groundskeepers tending a river once buried and forgotten. Each contribution builds Mayfield’s identity, one layer, one story at a time.
For Martyn, the task is clear, create places rooted in history yet alive to today’s challenges. Mayfield cannot be cookie-cutter; it cannot be Birmingham, Liverpool, or London. It has to be Manchester, its character, its continuity, its contradictions. “The challenge,” he says, “is not to replicate history but to build on it. You can tell a connected, linear story that takes you into the future, but it has to be of this city. That’s what will make it successful.”
Mayfield proves that regeneration isn’t just construction, it’s also considered narration. Bricks and cranes can deliver buildings, but only stories make places come alive. Without them, people pass through, but with them, people belong.
With that truth comes responsibility. Whose stories get told? Who gets to shape them? And how do we prevent storytelling from becoming branding, stripped of authenticity?
The challenge for Mayfield and for every place is not just to honour the past or build for the future. It’s to weave the two into a living story that people recognise as their own. Because only then does a place stop being a development, and start being part of a city’s soul.
