STAGING TRANSFORMATION - Choreographing Mayfield
Mayfield: A Landscape in Flux
Mayfield, once the industrial heart of Manchester’s railway economy, is now a site of contested memory, transition, and occupation. In its latest chapter, it hosts The Warehouse Project, a temporary festival that brings music, light, and huge crowds to the Mayfield Depot, animating the space with ephemeral life.
Today, Mayfield exists in a state of flux: part-ruin, part-construction site, part-festival ground. During events, thousands of people gather inside the Depot and at its fringes; by day, the same spaces return to fragmented uses: taxi ranks, car parks, and storage zones, waiting for a more permanent identity.
The project responds to that tension: Rather than trying to erase the coexistence of intense occupation and vacant in-betweens, it seeks to embed festival into Mayfield’s everyday fabric. It proposes built interventions that expand and contract with use, that remembers its past, and that resists static permanence in favour of a choreography of spaces, designed to host both festival events and daily life, throughout Mayfield's transformation.
The project unfolds in 3 phases:
Phase 0 captures Mayfield as it exists today: a fragmented landscape of waiting, queuing, gathering, and festival. Informal uses define the site: taxi ranks, storage areas, and event spillover zones.
Phase 1 establishes a flexible, modular framework for festival occupation and public life, built from simple materials and designed for constant adaptation.
Phase 2 embraces Mayfields ongoing large-scale development transformation. As the Depot closes and is built upon, the original festival framework is deconstructed and reassembled elsewhere on the site - evolving into permanent performance infrastructure whilst retaining its memory of festival.
By reclaiming and reconfiguring materials, and by designing for change, the proposal is positioned not as a fixed object, but as a stage for the evolving landscape of Mayfield.
