Manchester-based wayfinding company, Placemarque, has been working with the Oxford Road Corridor partnership to set out a high level new placemaking strategy for the city’s Oxford Road Corridor connecting Manchester’s key knowledge, business and cultural assets on the city’s iconic corridor.
Manchester’s Oxford Road Corridor stretches from St Peter’s Square in the city centre to Whitworth Park and encompasses a one-square-mile knowledge quarter. The area includes Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Manchester, two of the UK’s largest universities, a university NHS foundation trust, leading cultural institutions, and a large cluster of digital, technology and life-science businesses.
Home to 42,000 residents, 7,100 businesses, 81,000 students and 86,000 employees, the area accounts for 20% of Manchester’s economic output and is accessible to over three million people via public transport.
Placemarque founder, Sue Manley said:
“The Oxford Road Corridor encapsulates everything that is great and unique about Manchester and we wanted to celebrate this. With an area so vast and incorporating so many different uses and characters, we have devised a placemaking strategy that seeks to reinforce a distinctive identity of the Corridor as a whole and sets out a plan which can be developed over time to reinforce and define key character areas to help users connect with and navigate the Corridor.”
The strategy aims to celebrate and embrace the Corridor’s different characteristics, such as its innovation, culture and creativity to tell its distinctive story and enhance user experience.
Future stages, it is hoped, will involve delivering physical interventions that will highlight the important touch points across the Corridor and create ease of movement between these destinations.
