The Manchester / Peak District Dialectic




This ongoing project investigates the dialectic relationship between Manchester and the Peak District. With historic pressures for industrial development, they have colonised each other with resource generation and population, creating a nuanced, interwoven dependency. Lately, southern pressure for a Northern Powerhouse threatens to expand and homogenise the city, with little regard to the countryside. Such top down strategies threaten these numerous links and drown out the northern voice. This project speculates on creating a platform for exposing these integral ties and further room for highlighting local voices in all scales of decision making.


In response, this research speculates on a future for the Derbyshire Moors and its relationship to Manchester. Firstly, by researching the moors in depth, establishing new resource systems that are local and nuanced in respect to the landscape. Then the project projects a centre of exhibiton, debate and research in Manchester city centre, that acts as a gateway to the Peak District through a new entrance to Oxford Road Station. This “embassy” to the countryside is mirrored in the peak district, creating a twin, rural, visitor center and debate space. These two centers act as a new Northern Parliament, hosting government, trade unions and locals to raise a northern voice in conversation with southern decision making.


The buildings become symposiums of each other, constructed entirely out of materials collected on either site. This is performed most directly if you trace the public trajectory from first entering the sites through to entering the final debate chambers where local decision making takes place. The plans show entire journeys unfolded. At the same scale, both become similarly distanced walks.  Travelling along these journeys, the buildings become an archive representing their dual identity. Atmospheres and experiences are translated between the two. 


The final space is the debate chamber where the context falls away and your made aware that the decisions that are taken effect both sites equally, and as such the space is familiar in both locations. The process of manufacturing the chamber creates two spaces, the first, a ground cast iron vessel, made from the old structures of the hotspur press, as a series of panels that are joined together as a ship. The second, a rammed earth hole in the peaks that is created from the formworks of the cast iron panels.