The Making of Post-war Manchester symposium and a new presentation on airports and heliports

On the 8th May I co-organised a successful one-day symposium looking at urban change in post-war Manchester, with a focus on infrastructure projects and major government plans in the three decades from 1945. Well over a hundred people attended the event and heard a fascinating sets of presentations from a range of geographers, historians, planners, architects and archaeologists, with well known professors, established scholars and new researchers speaking.

The intellectual objectives and the programme of the symposium are given on the introductory slides and other details for the day were laid out for participants in a nice little printed booklet which Richard Brook and myself put together. You can also look through the slides for many of the talks given on the PostwarMcr blog. The symposium was made possible with financial support from Cities@Manchester initiative and the Campion Fund of the Manchester Statistical Society. We plan to develop a edited book following the themes of the symposium and many speakers have committed to contributing chapters.

I also gave a new paper on the significance of aviation during the post-war period focused on the large scale development of airport infrastructure in Manchester up to the mid 1970s. This was examined in contrast to the failure of the helicopter to become a routine form of transport during this period and the unbuilt schemes for a centrally located heliport for the city. Now I have to write the talk into a formal paper, as well as undertake some more in depth research on the different phases of building at Manchester Airport.