Take an audio walk through a park in the sky above Manchester. We’ll walk a route that spans 130 years of history; where once there were trains now there are plants and pedestrians.

The photos above show Kate Picker beside the pond, her favourite feature on the Viaduct plus the planters on phase one and a look along the proposed phase 2 of the Castlefield Viaduct.

Some FAQ’s about the Castlefield Viaduct

What is the future of the Viaduct? The National Trust have worked with partners to make this Sky Park happen and have just submitted plans for Phase 2 . They say:

“This planning application is a major step towards the National Trust and our partners finding a future for Castlefield Viaduct. We’ve been blown away by the passion, creativity and local pride expressed towards the viaduct since it opened three years ago. It’s clear that Manchester wants the viaduct to remain open and reach its full potential to bring nature to more people in this urban setting, share its story in the city’s history, and connect other parts of the city through active travel routes.”

How long is the viaduct? Currently the walkway is 150 metres long but the plans for Phase 2 would extend the walkway to over 350 metres. There would also be a second entry and exit point.

Do you have to pay to walk on the Viaduct? No the viaduct is free but it is worth checking the opening hours on the Castlefield Viaduct site. Urban parks such as this and the Highline in New York are not open 24 hours.

What to listen out for in the podcast episode

I confess that when I think of the National Trust my mind immediately goes to Stately homes, large gardens, swathes of the Lake District and coastal walks. It doesn’t go to a disused viaduct, closed in 1969, overgrown with buddleia and glimpsed only by those like Kate Picker who we hear in the interview, who passed it on her train journey from South Manchester into the city centre. I have written before on the blog about the challenges of greening brownfield sites in urban areas.

The National Trust was founded in 1895, just two years after the Castlefield Viaduct was opened. As Kate reminds us in the interview,the Trust’s founders believed that their new organisation had a duty to preserve green spaces and buildings of historic interest for the benefit of the nation. I can’t imagine they would have foreseen that 130 years later that the Viaduct would be fulfilling both of those purposes.

I love the views that you get when you are high-up in a city, even with the passing trams it is just a bit calmer. But don’t overlook the structure of the viaduct which is also beautiful and listen out for Kate’s explanation of who designed it, there is a link to another iconic British structure, not quite the Eiffel Tower but…

For the plant lovers amongst us it is interesting to hear the challenges of planting in the sky. How heavy is heavy when it comes to putting in pots? You may think that your Spring bulbs are safe from squirrels but there are other challenges. What is clear is that the community aspect of this project is very important and groups such as; Castlefield Forum, Sow the City, Manchester City of Trees, Urban Wilderness and 42nd Street, Hulme Community Garden Centre and the Science & Industry Museum are all listed as community Garden Plot Partners. I also love that there is a space that any community group could book for a bit of planting therapy - which of us does not feel better for having planted some seeds or taken some cuttings?

It is also very exciting that Phase 2 would also see the relocation of WaterAid’s Gold medal winning RHS Chelsea Flower show garden to the Viaduct. The National Trust says: “The WaterAid Garden, which celebrates water as our most precious resource, was a collaboration between architect Je Ahn and landscape designer Tom Massey and features a rainwater harvesting pavilion inspired by WaterAid’s work alongside communities around the world. Both the garden and its relocation were made possible thanks to funding from the grant-making charity Project Giving Back.”

Further reading about Urban Parks in the Sky

The Plantée Promenade - the planted walk or Coulée Verte (the Green Stream) in Paris.

This is talked of as the original urban park in the sky or highline. It was begun in the late 1980s on an obsolete trainline above the city of Paris. The section along the viaduct (the whole walk extends further) is beautiful with a rectangular pool and established plants and views down over the Paris streets. I visited it in Spring of 2024, when you could look down on the blossom lined streets below.

The New York Highline

The Highline in New York opened in 2009 and it runs along a disused elevated railway in Manhattan’s Lower West Side. Piet Oudolf was responsible for the zoned plantings. He has said: “My biggest inspiration is nature. I do not want to copy it, but to recreate the emotion.”  

The Camden Highline

Piet Oudolf has also said he will do the planting plans for the proposed Camden Highline. When Camden Highline CEO Simon Pitkeathley put that on his Instagram account, he admits he hadn’t realised just how excited everyone would be by that news! To be fair to Simon his head is firmly in what he calls ‘the treacle’ of making the Camden Highline a reality. Recently, I recorded a podcast episode with Simon as he gave me ‘a tour’ of the route from street level. That episode is coming soon.

Gallery of photographs of both existing and proposed

I realise I have been lucky enough to visit 3 Highlines and one proposed Highline. Since my first visit to the one in New York I have been fascinated by these parks in the sky.

The top row or photos 1 - 3 are from the Promenade Plantée in Spring 2024

The second row or photos 4 - 6 are from the New York Highline in Summer 2017

The third row or photos 7 - 9 are from walking the route of the proposed Camden Highline with Simon Pitkeathley in October 2024. Simon is standing at the proposed entry point where you will go onto the Highline.

I’d love to know your thoughts on any of these Highlines and also if there are others that I don’t know about that exist or are being planned.

Transcript of this podcast episode

00:00

Welcome to our plant stories. I wanted to share with you that we were a finalist in the 2024 Independent Podcast Awards, which was great fun and I met so many creative podcasters. You can find out more on the blog. As we draw towards the end of series two, I have a couple of offshoot episodes for you. I live in a city and over the past few years I've become increasingly interested in how people plant gardens in tiny pockets within urban spaces and the impact that those spaces can have on us. So you won't be surprised that I'm a fan of parks in the sky, Highlines. Perhaps the most famous is the New York Highline opened in 2009. It was apparently inspired by another elevated urban park built in the late 1980s on an obsolete train track above the city of Paris, the Promenade Plantée and I've been lucky enough to visit both. But what about in the UK?

“Despite the trams, despite being in the city centre, it does feel really calm and peaceful up here and it feels like you do come up out of the hustle and the hustle, hustle and bustle, sorry, of the city and you can actually have some kind of calm time up here.”

01:25

That's Kate Picker, who is an experience and programming manager for the National Trust, and the Castlefield Viaduct in Manchester is one of her sites. Originally opened in 1893, the part we are standing on is now a garden, which was installed in 2022.

01:45

Okay, we're here on a slightly grey day. It has actually been raining and we waited till it stopped, didn't we? But you are clutching an umbrella. And we are beside a very busy tram line. There we go. There's a tram just going past us now. Yeah. Bury via Market Street and there's another one going the other way as well. But I'm standing in this beautiful green space. I'm on a viaduct, I'm high up, I'm looking out over Manchester, I'm standing beside a pond. Tell me a little bit about the history of this viaduct and how it came to be what it is now. Yeah, so this is actually the Relief Viaduct, the viaduct that the trams are running on next to, which is slightly older than this one, and the train lines coming through on these bridges were going into Manchester Central Station and into the Great Northern Goods Warehouse, which both of which are still active, but as other things, and they were both built in the 1890s and it was just the height of industrialisation and Manchester was full of people and goods coming in and out, particularly between Manchester and Liverpool, Manchester and London, but all over the place. And this was one of the key main lines into the city. And they shut in 1969 when the central station shut part of the Beeching enclosures. And when the Metrolink came in, that bridge went back into use again, but this bridge had been just left ever since, up until we arrived in 2022.

03:19

So describe what it looked like in 2022. Essentially there is some, there were some plants on it, you know, nature finds a way, doesn't it? A little Buddleia and things like that that you quite often find. And it was fenced off at both ends. I think, I mean, people did get onto it. We've got graffiti that we can see. So people did get on and they did kind of access it, but not officially. And every now and again they would come and clear some of the larger trees if they thought it was going to have impact on the structure. So I think they did clear it occasionally. There's not very much soil depth on the viaduct itself so nothing too big but kind of a lot of sort of common plants that you'd find like with Buddleia and things like that. So if I were to come up here on a sunny day, not that I mind the rain, but what might I see going on?

04:06

We’ve got like a hedge that kind of creates a reveal for the viaduct as you come on and you'll see what we call the naked viaducts which is where we've left the sides of the viaducts. What's grown there is what grew naturally from after we'd done the work to construct the site so it would have been the natural kinds of seed and things that were in there so you can still get a feel for what was here before we put this garden on and it also lets you see a more open structure so it really lets you get the feel for it because it's actually a really beautiful structure with lots of overheads and it's very interesting to look at in and of itself, the viaduct.

04:36

And then as you come up, you come to, we've got a kind of sound area where we've got a kind of track that plays and we've got our new workshop space. You come to those first and then you come to our four partner plots. And then we've got some planters that we've sort of planted as national trust, kind of more high horticultural planters at the back. And then we have our building space at the end where you can kind of give us, tell us how you feel. You can have a chat to the team if you've not had chance to speak to someone already, and you can see beyond, you can see what the rest of the viaduct looks like, so we're only about halfway down and it gives you an idea of where hopefully we would like to go in the future. So how did the National Trust, who we don't associate with an urban space like this, in my mind I've got very large parks and houses and gardens and open space, come to choose to do this? So the National Trust does have an urban strategy and actually when you look right back to its founding in 1895 , of industrialisation, so it was around the urbanisation, the move from living rurally to living in industrial cities and that both removing of green spaces and also moving people from from the countryside and Octavia Hill and the other founders really believed that people should have access to green spaces and in particular working class people should have access to green spaces and that's somewhat of the principle on which the Trust was founded to protect and conserve those green spaces and give people access to them and that's still the core remit of the charity to protect, conserve and give access to, now we also look at the heritage buildings and so now it's sort of both green spaces and heritage. So although we're not really associated with urban areas it's actually to deliver access to green space and we know that green space access is only getting worse and worse. And we also know that people are increasingly, again, we're still urbanising, so I think some of the statistics I've seen are something like 80-85% of people live in urban areas now and that could be going up to 90% by 2030. And green space in urban areas is a very precious commodity, so we still see it as part of our remit to step in, whether that's to deliver something like the Viaduct or to work in partnership, that there are things that we can do as an organisation to support that access to green space in urban areas. And that's why we're here.

07:02

When I first came here, this is my second visit, I love it, I really love it, it was very obvious that this was not something where you kind of walked in and said right we're going to plant the whole thing. There were various signs that different community groups had been involved so how did, tell me how that worked? So one of our key community partners is Castlefield Forum and Castlefield Forum worked huge amounts in the local area and they've wanted something up here for a long time so they've been with us since the beginning, a member of the forum sits on our project board. So we've worked with them, I think, pretty much since this was kind of being thought about. And then the other community groups have kind of come along the way, so we started with a partner plot from Castlefield Forum and City of Trees who aim to plant I think it's three million trees, one for every person in Greater Manchester I believe and then they've been with us since we opened and then Sow the City's Garden that we're standing in with this lovely pond and Hulme Community Garden Centre's plot opposite, they've been here since December of 22 /January 23, they kind of came around then and then we do a lot of other partnership working as well but its and what our partners bring that’s really important so Sow the City for example, they run their social prescribing sessions from the viaduct from this plot. Some of them, they do stuff all over Manchester, but they've also worked with us off-site. So we have off-site partners too. We've done a lot of work in with partnership with 42nd Street, with MASH - Manchester Action for Sex Health Workers, with Guidance Hub, which is a multi-faith allotment in Cheetham Hill. So we're sort of working both on the viaduct with community partners, but also off-site as well, around some sort of supporting people to green their spaces across Manchester. And we have a new community workshop, which I must mention, which we put on, opened in February, and that's available for any community group to come and use for up to eight to 10 people. It's got a workshop bench space. It's got some equipment and things where people can bring equipment with them too. And they just need to get in touch with us if they want to hold a workshop there. And that could be for their group, or it could be if they want to have a workshop with the public, the visiting public. But we're keen to welcome people to use that space. So just go on the website and email us. If you would like to use our community space, if you're a community group, we can offer you for free.

09:26

If you enjoy our plant stories, I'm going to ask you to rate and review it on your podcast app. Think algorithms, because the more people who rate and review it, the more likely is that the episodes will be suggested to other people who like plant podcasts.

09:44

Do you have a favourite spot on the Viaduct? We're had it in it. I do really like the pond. It's just, I think, because it's a bit unexpected, even more so than everything else. It's like a pond, you've got a pond. And so the City's pond, definitely. And then I also, I always really like, the grasses in the centre as you come up, sort of designed to look a bit like steam. I always really like just running my hand through those as I walk past. Every time I might just give them a little brush. I always enjoy doing that. But I, you know, the whole thing's lovely. Shall we take a walk down it? Because it's stopped kind of raining. I know, which is amazing. That's because we had your umbrella. Yes. Wow. So we're looking up at skyscrapers really, aren't we, as well? Yeah. And you were saying when this started there was just one skyscraper and we're now looking at two. We're now looking at two, yes. Yeah, there was just the Hilton and now the apartment block behind it's gone in. So these are the grasses that you're pointing out. They are very tactile, aren't they? I like to do that as I go past. They're beautiful, aren't they? Just to wave your hand through. Yeah, well, I think anything that you can touch or you know, getting close to. And I mean, you've got silver birch trees. I'm slightly obsessed by having made a program about them and I'm now seeing them everywhere. But you really see bird life in them, don't you? Yes, yeah, we do. Yeah, we see quite a bit, yeah. In fact Ted who’s up here today has been doing quite a lot of work photographing all the different types of birds that we've got and things like that. So yeah, we are tracking what we've got up here. And we do, I mean we get a lot of what you'd expect, we do get the pigeons. But we also get a lot of smaller birds, songbirds as well. So we do get quite a bit of wildlife and we have ecology surveys which is sort of indicating that we've not, you know, we've only enhanced the kind of what's available for wildlife and what species are up here, which is great. And we have bats as well as underneath there's a roost. We don't get loads, we only get a few. It's not a full family roost, but we do get some bats up here in the evening as well. And we survey them. And this is your sound scape? Yes, this is our soundscape. Its very peaceful. Yes, it really is. And then I love this, this is the workshop area so you can come and garden with people, it's got everything you need to grow seeds. Yes, to grow some and do some sort of plant gardening based workshops, so if that's something that an organisation wants to do as a community offer, so it needs to be free community offer, they're very welcome to get in touch with us about using the space. That's wonderful, I love that. Yeah, holds about eight to ten people.

12:49

I was talking to someone the other day on an interview, someone who was just saying it doesn't matter how old you are, seeds, it's just planting seeds is just magic. Yeah, always. Whether you're three or whether you're 93, that kind of magic of when they emerge is just incredible. Yeah, and then nurturing it as it grows. And then we're now walking into the part where really it's as it was when you took it on.

13:13

There’s a Blackbird, yep, lovely. Yes, yeah, most of this, it's interesting we think because we turned the seeds, you can see its different between what's here and then what's in the bit of the viaduct beyond, we've got a bit more going on here possibly because we turned the soil, but yeah everything in here came up from what was already, we didn't add planting in this area. That blackbirds having a nice little time. It's lovely isn't it, completely unbothered by the trams or anything else, or us. And then you've got the kind of buddleias that you always associate with train tracks, don't you? Yes. You always think of those, you see them from trains. Yeah, not surprising. Yeah, they get blown, don't they, the seeds? Yeah, we do get those.

13:52

It's amazing how the girders really are quite beautiful aren't they? Yeah they are and we believe that it's probably got more than it needs as well so as well as some of them are structural there's also maybe a bit of aesthetic. This is one of the entrances into Manchester, you know you want it to look good and the crisscross might look a bit familiar because it was made by the same company that built Blackpool Tower. Oh amazing! Wow! So they didn't actually need this number of girders, it was more about kind of slightly... Apparently not, yeah, apparently it is probably a slightly higher number than you would need, so yeah, we do believe there might have been some aesthetic in it as well, as practical structural. Are there challenges with planting up here this high? Yes, yeah, my gardener could tell you more than I can, but one we did find was, we we're in our first year here and we planted some bulbs for spring and we discovered that the bulbs that we'd planted, the rats really enjoyed them so they got eaten by the rats. So we planted different bulbs this year and it's all been fine and so there've been little surprises like that and there have been our gardener's been kind of monitoring what's done well and what hasn't but we've got a little bit of a microclimate I believe up here. Apparently our air quality is a little bit better and she's been tracking some of that and where things are cooler than you might expect or warmer than you might expect. And we weren't sure how much the wind was going to impact us and things like that. So it's definitely been a learning experience for our garden team. How big is your garden team? So we have one gardener, Nancy, our senior gardener. Our team help out, our on-site team. And we have some really, really brilliant volunteers as well who come up and they've really, really worked hard and done a lot. And then our partners also come up and look after their plots and keep their plots looking nice too.

15:42

What surprised you most about the viaduct? How peaceful it is. Despite the trams, despite being in the city centre, it does feel really calm and peaceful up here. And it feels like you do come up out of the bustle and the hustle, hustle bustle, sorry, of the city. And you can actually have some kind of calm time up here. The extent of how that feels always surprises me. And how much you tune the trams out and actually just it feels quite, it does feel restorative I think. That's really interesting because I came here last year, end of last year and if you were to ask me about it I was like, oh yeah, let's think about the trams when we're recording because there's quite a lot of trams but I hadn't thought about it in my head, I don't hear them. No. And they're quite, they're not loud engine based, they're electric, you know, they kind of whoosh past rather than doing anything too noisy. So I think, yeah, you do, we have offices just in the city centre and when you're walking across the city and it's great, it's a lot of energy to Manchester, it's a lot going on but sometimes it's good to get a little breather from that and I think this really really offers that opportunity. Do you see that in people's behaviour up here? Yeah people do seem pretty calm up here, everyone's very, you know, having a nice stroll, they like looking at the plants. Yeah, I think we do and we certainly see it. We have a board in the building that you can write on the wall and say what you think and a lot of people will say calm, quiet, peaceful, restored. That's when we ask them how they feel, that's generally the response that we get. And where do they come from to visit? I mean, are they mainly people in Manchester? Are they coming from further afield? What do you think? They're both. So we do see most of about 60 percent, 70 percent, so 60 percent of our visitors come from Manchester or Greater Manchester because we do track all of this and then we get about 11, 12 percent of international visitors as well and then the rest from the rest of the UK so we do see tourists visiting Manchester seeing us as one of the spaces to come and see while you're here which is great as well but yeah the majority of our visitors have come from Manchester and Greater Manchester which is great because that was the voice that we wanted but it's lovely that people are coming from further afield and I hope that continues.

18:05

Have you been to any other Viaducts? I haven't. I would love to go to the High Line, love to go to the High Line in New York. But yeah, I haven't. And the one in Paris as well sounds really interesting, so I would very much like to. I think it's a specialism, isn't it? You really need to go and visit all the other High Lines just to kind of, you know, really, really embed that. I definitely would love to go to New York. The process of bringing all these planters up here must have been incredible, building here. It was quite a process, yeah. We were very well supported by Manchester Central, because that's their car park out there, and Transport for Greater Manchester, who own the car park, Manchester Central, who lease it from them, were both really, really supportive in helping us. The planters are actually quite light, they're core 10, because we do have to be careful of weight up here. So they look heavy, because they're metal, but they're not as heavy as they look. I think the really interesting one was when, and I wasn't here when they did this, but they craned the building in from the bowl down underneath us. They had to get a crane, crane it over the viaduct between the girders and sections and then put the sections together. So I believe that was that was quite a feat.

19:19

We have a lot of people who come because they've seen it from the tram. I mean, I did. I lived in South Manchester most of my whole life. And when you came in, you would see this space and think, oh, I wonder what that could be, and you could see bits growing on it. And I think quite a lot of people had always wondered if there was something that could be done with it. And seeing it over the years, well, since 1969, this has been this empty space. So, yeah, we do. We do get a lot of people who pop on. And they can just walk down from Deansgate Castlefield tram station and come in for free. So yeah, they're like, oh, I've seen it from the tram, I'm gonna come and have a look. Does it make you look at other disused urban spaces in a different way now? Yeah, it does a bit, yeah. And I think we have had visits from people within the UK and we talked about the Camden High Line, places like that, where there's still, there's potential. We've come and had a look at what we've done. So I think we do have this old architecture and these sort of really interesting spaces that are created in cities. And I think, yeah, it's nice to not just pull them down and get rid of them. They're part of the heritage and the fabric of the city. And I think if we can repurpose them. And also, that's better from an environmental perspective as well, to use something that's already here rather than building something from scratch. I think there's, you know, it's a valuable thing to do.

20:42

You can check the opening hours of the Viaduct on the National Trust website. A planning application for Phase 2 has been submitted. I'll put some links on our plantstories.com, but this would extend the walk from 150 metres to over 350 metres. Under the plans, the gold medal-winning WaterAid Garden from this year's RHS Chelsea Flower Show would also be relocated to this new section. One thing that strikes me about gardens like this, or the proposed Camden Highline, is the tenacity and determination of those who make them happen. I've written several times on the blog about the Camden Highline and recently I got to walk the route with the CEO of the Highline, Simon Pitkeathley. That episode will be coming soon. And I'm currently starting to record series three of the podcast, so if you have a plant story that you'd like to share, I'd love to hear from you. You can email me, sally at ourplantstories.com.

21:37

This is an independent podcast presented and produced by me, Sally Flatman.