The A57 Mancunian Way A56 underpass Hulme
Manchester is not a village. It’s a teeming bustling, seemingly endless expanse of buildings, roads, canals railways, rivers and other geographical features. It can be difficult to make sense of it all especially if you’re new to the city.
If only it were like a small town in Ireland, with two or maybe three roads, a couple of pubs and a post office. Then it would be easy to get your bearings.
But whichever map you look at, the road network around Manchester looks like a tangled mass of spaghetti, all intertwined and seeming to make no sense. Whether it’s a standard route planner map, or the Google map, roads, road numbers, intersections, junction numbers, district names all seem to be piled up on top of one another. There’s often far more detail than you need. And some map makers don’t appear to know the local area very well.
So in this article I’ve decided to strip away the mass of information overlaid onto the city, and get back to the essential routes which define the layout of the city, often going back to ancient times.
I’ve picked out what I consider to be Manchester’s three key ancient routes. Later I’ll add in the handful of other main routes, making some interesting discoveries along the way.
The A56 at Old Trafford with Manchester cityscape
OK, let’s begin. First of all, let’s observe how Manchester city centre is a triangle or fan shape.
The fan shape is defined by the three most important roads in Manchester, which are:
- The A56 which runs from south west to north: Deansgate is part of the A56
- The A6 which runs from north west to south east: Market St and Piccadilly, now pedestrianised, are part of the A6 in its original route
- The A57 which runs from east to west: The Mancunian Way now carries the A57, and prior to that, Whitworth St.
These three roads, like a cats cradle, enclose the central part of Manchester city centre, which spills over and beyond them.
All three roads have ancient significance. And they are the only A-roads which cross the city. All the others begin or end there.
The A56 follows the line of the Roman Road from Chester via Mamucium – Roman name for Manchester – and north to Ribchester in mid-Lancashire.
Once upon a time Roman soldiers walked up and down what’s now Deansgate, Chester Rd and Bury New Rd. You may not find any chariot covers among the discarded roadside wheel trim and drinks cans nowadays, but the route was chosen by the Romans and we still follow it today. It’s no co-inidence that the A56 often goes in a straight line, like other Roman roads in Britain.
The A6 is one of the longest and most ancient roads in England. It runs from Carlisle to Luton. The final leg into London is along the A5. The A6 passes along many famous towns and streets. Gently curving, rising and falling with the terrain, it often seems to have a similar width and character, whether passing through Lancaster, Little Hulton, Hazel Grove, Leicester or Luton.
The A6 is the post-1974 City of Salford’s main street, linking Walkden, Swinton, Pendlebury and the old city of Salford, before crossing the Irwell into Manchester. In modern times its route has been diverted and obscured due to city centre pedestrianisation and the construction of by-pass routes, including the so-called Inner Relief Route.
Piccadilly A6 road sign next to Mena Suvari Ad
But we need to get back to the realisation that Market St is the A6, part of the Carlisle to London Road, one of the ‘big 6′ routes through England. Perhaps there should be blue signs by Deansgate pointing to Carlisle and Scotland, and on the corner of Market St, a sign pointing to Birmingham and London, though not that many people walk from Manchester to London nowadays.
The continuation of Market St is Piccadilly – a name copied from London in the mid-19th century. It continues as London Road, next to Piccadilly, formerly London Rd station – still the main station for the capital. The A6 is London Rd as far as the River Medlock, then turns into Downing St – another name with London connections, then Ardwick Green, then Stockport Rd. Now we’re back on the A6 proper – people often refer to it as such. London is another 185 miles, though this has ceased to be the main route to London since the coming of the M6 in the 1960s.
The other key road through Manchester runs from east to west and it’s the A57, the Liverpool to Lincoln road. This route is unique in that it is the only one in the central area that has been upgraded to motorway standard. In the west, the M62 and M602 have long since taken over the function of the A57 as main route to and from Liverpool. After Eccles it runs directly parallel with the M602 and meets it at the Trafford Rd roundabout, next to the old church steeple. Then after crossing the Irwell, it becomes the Mancunian Way, also a motorway, though it’s the A57(M), which means the A57 has here been upgraded to motorway standard.
The A57 leaves the Mancunian Way at the Ardwick flyover and joins the A6 before splitting away from it at Ardwick Green. Then it continues in a dead straight line to the motorway which takes over its function, M67, but only as far as Mottram, where the M67 turns abruptly back into the A57. It narrows down to one lane, branches off to Glossop and becomes the Snake Pass, which runs through Sheffield, and then on to Lincoln, where it ends by Lincoln Cathedral, a journey of around 120 miles from Liverpool’s two cathedrals.
Up till the construction of the Mancunian Way in 1967, the A57 ran along Whitworth Street.
Originally road planners had intended to link up the M602, Mancunian Way and M57 to form a continuous east west cross-town freeway, as in an American city, but like many ambitious plans for Manchester, it never happened.
I find it interesting that the southern fringe of Manchester city centre, the curved side of the ‘fan’ is marked by four parallel routes: Late Victorian Whitworth St, the mid-Victorian railway line and viaduct through Oxford Rd, the ancient and meandering River Medlock, and the relatively new Mancunian Way. It’s also fascinating how the Beetham Tower, built next to the Roman fort, looms up at the end of many roads into Manchester (see picture right), suggesting perhaps they were built on the line of a Roman road.
So there they are, the A56, A6 and A57, three routes, three geographical lines, three sets of traffic jams. Nevertheless, these highways define the location of Manchester and help to explain why Manchester is, and has been for centuries, a city at the crossroads, a place where highways, railways, trade routes, and peoples’ lives intersect and interact with each other.
In the follow-up article to this one I’ll be looking at the remaining major routes, including the A34, the road to Birmingham and Oxford, the A62, route to Oldham and Yorkshire, and the A5103 until not so long ago, road to nowhere, now Manchester’s main route to the airport and all points south.
Accompanying maps are in preparation and will be added subsequently.