EPW041520 ENGLAND (1933). Wythenshawe Park and the Princess Parkway under construction, Wythenshawe, from the south, 1933

The river Mersey and its floodplain were always historically a barrier between Lancashire and Cheshire, and crossing places - for long often fords and ferryboats rather than bridges, especially on the middle and lower reaches of the river - were few and far between.



For centuries that had mattered more to merchants and soldiers passing through than it had to local people, who usually had neither the opportunity nor the incentive to travel far. Even in the early twentieth century, the inhabitants of the scattered farms, cottages and hamlets of Northen Etchells would look to Stockport as their market town, while those in Baguley looked to Altrincham. Perhaps only Northenden village, benefiting from the Palatine Road bridge and a tram link northward, gravitated to some extent to Manchester as a centre.



That of course wasn't how Manchester's city fathers viewed matters when, in the 1920s, they began to contemplate building new public housing in the adjacent Cheshire countryside to replace their inner-city slums. At that time there was only one bridge linking Manchester with the tract of countryside it coveted: the 19th century Palatine Road, which just over eighty years before had made redundant both the ford and the ferry still commemorated by the names of Northenden's Ford Lane and Boat Lane. Nor was it likely to fit the preferences of the folk who would eventually come to live in the new houses, who were overwhelmingly inner-city Manchester folk who long continued to gravitate back to Manchester for their shopping and their social life.



Hence Manchester City Council's decision to extend Princess Road, a straight modern "expressway" already built from Moss Side through residual open country between Cholton and Withington as far as West Didsbury. This new road would now, the councillors decided, be driven on southwards, bridging the Mersey and passing the western fringe of Northenden, to link up with the Stockport-Altrincham road - the one main road already running east to west through the Wythenshawe estate area - so providing the new estate with a quick and relatively uncongested route into the city centre. When completed it was classified as the A5103.



The Northenden section of Princess Parkway - south of Kenworthy Lane - was deliberately laid out on both sides with enormously wide grassy perimeters, abundantly planted with trees and large shrubs and criss-crossed by a choice of tarmac footways. This reflected the style of Barry Parker, the town planner entrusted to lead the Wythenshawe estate project, who was a devotee of the "garden city" principles of urban development which came to the fore in the early twentieth century; his estates were very varied in house and ground plan design, with generous provision of green space and trees. He even managed to preserve almost all of the woods, spinneys and copses which had speckled the open farmland and these still mostly survive today.



Unlike Princess Parkway's serene parkland surroundings, which have been much diminished by the A5103's integration into the later twentieth century motorway network, with space-devouring slip roads replacing the original road's use of large roundabouts at its major intersections. But given the modern preoccupation with crime - not to mention Wythenshawe's later reputation in that respect! - perhaps the hundreds of yards of secluded pathway, often diving behind dense shrubberies, have come to be less valued than they were in the early days back in the more innocent and less suspicious 1930s?!