The Green Reform of Manchester -- A Future History

This project plans to forecast the future of the 10,000 urban settings across the world as though they have survived climate change and social discord and gone on to flourish anew. Today, we highlight the future of the British city of Manchester -- and how it started its long road of Green reform...

If you ask anyone in Manchester in 2050 when it all started, it's history, they’ll say it was that daft February in 2026, when half of Gorton and Denton turned up in the rain, held their noses, and voted Green just to see what would happen. No one expected it. Least of all the Greens. One minute it were a bog-standard by-election, the next thing you know they’d pinched the seat and the telly pundits were blinking like pigeons in headlights.

Back then, Manchester were already full of cranes and glass towers that looked like someone had stacked up phone chargers and called it “luxury living.” Rents were daft, buses were late, and every time it rained hard the Irwell tried to move back into town. So when the Greens banged on about warm homes, clean air, and not building skyscrapers that doubled as wind tunnels, people thought, well… couldn’t be worse.

Then came the 2026 general election. And instead of going back in their compost heap, the Greens only went and got into government for five years. Proper government. Ministers and everything. The look on the faces down in Westminster — priceless. Suddenly, that by-election in Gorton and Denton didn’t look like a fluke. It looked like the start of summat.

Now, folk said Manchester would grind to a halt. “They’ll ban cars, ban meat pies, and make us all live in sheds made of mushrooms,” said the usual suspects. What actually happened were a bit more practical. They started with houses. Turns out if you insulate Victorian terraces instead of knocking them down, they’re warm. Who knew? Whole streets got retrofitted — new windows, heat pumps, solar panels stuck on roofs like sensible hats. Energy bills dropped. People stopped sleeping in coats. Funny how popular that is.

Planning rules changed too. Developers couldn’t just lob up another glass monolith and call it “The Cube” or “The Hive” or whatever insect they were keen on that week. Buildings had to meet proper carbon standards. More brick, more timber, more mid-rise stuff you could actually look at without getting vertigo. Roofs sprouted gardens. Not fancy Chelsea Flower Show nonsense — actual tomatoes, beehives, the odd lad up there pretending he knows about courgettes.

Parks stopped being an afterthought and became the pride of the place. The city planted trees like it were going out of fashion — which, given the weather, it nearly was. The Irwell got cleaned up and allowed to behave like a river instead of a drainage ditch. Little pocket parks popped up where there’d been miserable car parks. You could walk ten minutes anywhere and trip over a patch of green. Even the grumpiest old blokes admitted it were nice, though they’d mutter about “bloody nettles” while enjoying it.

Transport caused the loudest moaning. Congestion charge? In Manchester? There were headlines predicting riots. What happened instead were quieter streets, more trams, buses that actually turned up, and cycle lanes that didn’t vanish at the first tricky junction. Once people realised they could breathe without tasting diesel, they stopped shouting quite so much.

Education changed in a way no one saw coming. Schools started teaching eco-stuff as normal, not just as a token assembly about polar bears. Kids learned about energy bills, insulation, biodiversity — and how not to pave over everything that doesn’t move. By the 2030s, you couldn’t find a Mancunian under 25 who didn’t know what a carbon budget was. Annoying at dinner parties, but useful.

Business didn’t collapse either, despite what the doom-mongers predicted. Manchester became known for retrofit firms, green tech, circular economy start-ups. Warehouses in Ancoats filled up with engineers instead of influencers. Turns out there’s money in fixing things properly and not wasting half of it.

The Greens lost power after their five-year stint — as all governments do once people get bored of them. But here’s the punchline: no one undid much of it. Other parties had spent years calling it unrealistic, then quietly nicked the policies. You’d get speeches about “common-sense urban resilience” from politicians who’d once laughed at composting bins. That’s politics for you.

By 2050, New Green Manchester — as the marketing types insist on calling it, though most of us just say “town” — is cleaner, leafier, and a fair bit calmer than the glass-and-traffic circus of the early 2020s. The skyline’s still there, but it’s softened with trees and terraces and roofs that do more than leak. Houses are warmer. Air’s clearer. The river behaves itself most days.

And it all traces back to that soggy by-election in 2026, when a load of fed-up northerners thought, “Ah, go on then.”

Turns out that were the moment Manchester decided it fancied a different future — and, grumbling all the way, went and built it.

Green Manchester

The skyline’s still there. The rain’s still horizontal half the year. But the air’s cleaner, the houses warmer, the trams quieter, and the parks fuller. Not a utopia — but kinda on its way!