Room to Loiter
Mayfield is not a blank slate.It is a pause in the city, a wound where nature quietly rehearsed its return. As development closes in with offices and residences, this project proposes another future: to give Mayfield back its ground, its water, its weeds, and finally its people. Paths are not prescribed - they are discovered.
Loitering is central. To loiter is to resist productivity, to exist without transaction. It is an anti-capitalist act and a necessary one. A city that does not allow loitering does not allow thought, care, or collective life.Mayfield becomes a landscape of wandering, where nature and bodies reclaim time.
Room to Loiter operates on three levels:
MACRO - addressing Manchester’s lack of a central green space despite the city being surrounded by nature; by reactivating the underused Medlock Valley, it aims to establish an accessible ecological heart within the city centre.
MESO: challenging the current trajectory of Mayfield’s development, which is increasingly defined by office and residential skyscrapers. Inspired by the ideals of the Situationist International and the walking activism of Morag Rose, the scheme promotes a more human-scaled and socially inclusive urban environment centred around wandering, gathering, and everyday existence.
MICRO: establishing Mayfield’s future identity as a community-focused green space that resists commercialisation. Through a sequence of sensory landscapes, the project prioritises nature, interaction, and belonging over spectacle and high-density development.
Constructed primarily from site-sourced rammed earth, the proposal utilises the soils of Medlock Valley to create a low-carbon, environmentally responsive architecture rooted directly within its landscape. The construction celebrates the site’s latent geological identity. Organised along a continuous descending ramp toward the River Medlock, the building’s programme unfolds as a carefully choreographed sequence of sensorial spaces, including gathering areas, moments of rest, and a central pigment-making workshop using foraged rocks and minerals from the Medlock Valley itself.
