Today we have had the opportunity to hear from Edward Fox, who worked as the head of the Landscape Team for the Broadway Malyan Architects. Edward’s presentation on the Irwell River Park was about the history of the area and the previous attempts at delivering the project. The presentation was meant to inspire the students and represent a starting point for the Brainstorming activity that they would continue doing for the rest of day 1.

In the first week we will be working to produce a package of design strategies that will define the theme and character of the Blue Line from start to finish at a masterplanning scale. The adoption of these strategies within the design will help the Manchester Blue Line to act as a coherent and recognisable orientation point. The team will work in smaller groups on their chosen/assigned strategy to produce the required information. The strategies will cover: signage and furnishing proposal, a general landscape strategy, transport connections and structure for typologies to use. By the end of the first week, we want to have produced a presentation of work for each strategy. Each strategy should have similar deliverables, depth of research and quality of design.

Week 2 is going to be an exciting time for our team! These are the main activities which are going to take place this week. We are starting with a Photoshop workshop on Monday, and after that we will divide the whole team in subgroups to work on different areas of River Irwell in order to develop them in more detail. On Thursday we are going to present our process and design ideas to Urban Splash and Eddy Fox, the guest speakers we had in Week 1.