Wythenshawe Pride 2025: A Protest to Include Queers in City Regenerations
A rainbow pride that asks serious questions about redevelopment of town squares and what makes a good community-led regeneration.
Wythenshawe Pride 2025.
Me and Alyx decided to break new ground and defeat social norms by showing queer joy in Wythenshawe. Wythenshawe Pride, is now a new event inspired by Trans Pride MCR. It announced publicly just five minutes before it happened.
We took two homemade placards and paraded through Wythenshawe, from Shadowmoss to Civic, and all the way to Benchill. We’ve also created a website and social media pages with more detail about what we did – check it out here.
The vast majority of people didn’t see two trans people when they saw us. They saw two people partaking in the community spirit. And I think that community is everything in Wythenshawe.
That’s what I want to talk about today. Community.
Wythenshawe is an interesting place in my opinion. On the surface, if you go to Wythenshawe, you’ll be forgiven for thinking that some of the suburbs are still exactly how they were in the 1960s.
It has a reputation as it is the biggest post-war housing estate that was built in Europe at the time, as well as it gaining a reputation through media fearmongering over the years. As a result, it has mostly escaped the inevitable gentrification of the entirety of Greater Manchester by poor central planning decisions. Until now.
I have a larger piece coming about the seemingly inevitable gentrification of Greater Manchester by the way, as I interview local public sector organisations and local people about how funding decisions impact them. Subscribe now to read the article when it comes out.
I read the Wythenshawe redevelopment plans.
I don’t oppose them in principle. I think the paving in Civic could absolutely do with an aesthetic upgrade. The buildings definitely need repainting. And don’t get me started on the number of dead, empty shops. We’ve still got Wilkos, but we also have an even worse crime… Brighthouse!
But just by looking at the document, I can see it is a boring, bland, deeply, deeply uninspired take on what Wythenshawe really is. It’s a place that has a fragile social fabric. You have people from all walks of life in Wythenshawe. It’s the part of Manchester where we still have affordable council housing for working class families, albeit there’s a huge shortage.
There’s going to be a culture centre! And a new food hub with a bunch of high-density buildings! And other various crap!
But the problem is they didn’t consult the community with an open mind. It was a consultation with a predefined certain outcome. It really does feel like it was designed via top-down planning by developers, rather than a bespoke solution to the community’s needs.
I have lived in Wythenshawe for the last year, and quite frankly, even as a newcomer, I do not see the need for these things. It’s fine as it is. It just needs modernising, not razing it to the ground.
All this is going to do is make the existing horrendous traffic worse as people try to get to these things. It’s going to price out private rented tenants completely, as this now becomes the new area of wealth, which goes completely against the spirit of Wythenshawe. And it’s going to lose that nimble, industrial feel in favour of generic, bland buildings.
One thing one glossy brochure states is that there is a ‘lack of food offer’.
I’m sorry? Have you actually been to the place?
There’s a tasty Jamaican food truck. There’s a Greggs and a Poundbakery. There’s an Asda. And who could forget about Rabbi’s which has absolutely lovely, cheap Asian food. And a cheap, easy, independent fast food place. There’s also a wonderful independent cafe called Marie’s. And there’s so many chippies and other food places scattered about.
It’s so strange. I think what we need are more independent cafes to move in, not to create a Food Hub with ‘ready to eat items’.
We have family homes in Wythenshawe. We don’t need even more convenience food. I would safely say we have an above-average amount of corner shops in Wythenshawe that do convenience just fine, and they’re usually local independent businesses that have been there for decades. And we don’t need ‘ready to eat’ food because we aren’t the city centre, and commuters aren’t going to Wythenshawe in preparation for their businesses that they run in Civic. The whole premise seems really silly.
There’s a Makers’ Market that runs every first Saturday of the month, that is extremely popular with the locals, and it has a bunch of independent businesses that sell things they make. Just make it a permanent outdoor market, like in Manchester we have the Street Food Market. Problem solved. And it’s better than an indoor market, I believe, as it feels more real.
And then they talk about a co-working space, in Wythenshawe. Because, of course we need one, it’s obviously it’s the cool, fashionable thing to support tech businesses that will come to Wythenshawe.
Yeah no. I don’t see this happening at all, and it will just die once it’s built. Wythenshawe is a place for families and children.
It looks so tight and suffocating. It’s like they’re trying to squeeze all these buildings into every centimetre of space available.
Why? Can the space even support as many people as proposed?
I don’t know, it looks pretty busy to me right now. Leave a comment if you live in Wythenshawe and you agree it’s a lively place.


They are proposing a lot of apartment buildings in one place. I agree that Civic needs to be expanded with more residential buildings, but this is a lot. There’s plenty of space in Wythenshawe to build more family homes.
There are sites in Shadowmoss next to the airport, for example, that could be used. There’s generous provision for cycling there, it’s well-connected (as it’s the airport), and close to employment. There is no need to create an employment hub if homes are built in sensible places, next to where people work, rather than forcing all future employees to commute from Civic.
There are also potential sites to explore next to Peel Hall. I used to work in those office blocks and it is not currently possible to get even a sandwich during your lunch hour without getting a car or a tram. Not everything in Peel Hall needs to be an office.
I don’t get the obsession with trying to make perfectly functional, human-scale town squares into high-density monstrosities. Do you know what happens when you try to turn the whole area into one big shopping centre? Stretford Mall. That place gives me absolute nightmares. It’s just dead.
But anyway, I think everyone knows what Wythenshawe really needs, which is some shops that are open and not just dead shops everywhere. I’d bet it’s not the state of the high street that’s deterring businesses, but rather the complex and expensive business lets, as well as the economy causing business running costs to spiral.
At the right price, I imagine business owners would just do up the shops themselves. Maybe what’s needed is a scheme in the Manchester Credit Union for business owners to invest in Wythenshawe through some kind of government subsidy, such as government-backed loans on preferential terms for local businesses.
If only the town square was helped financially to function properly as it was designed, for example maintaining the indoor market that already exists, there would be no need for gentrification.
The gentrification is also not in keeping with the area at all. Here’s what Manchester City Centre Council says it’ll look like:
I like the greenery. The trees and the extra seats are good. But what the heck is that design?
Someone took a course in modern design and just decided to make it all a flat surface. It turns a relatively quiet, sleepy area of Manchester into this weird flat object land. Why?
Go jazz up these council tower blocks instead.
I can imagine it already - the investors coming in to Wythenshawe on the tram, they’re excited, they’re about to make a multi-million deal, AAAAAAND it’s a council estate that hasn’t seen itself change since 1978.
I just don’t get it. Do these governmental planners not come to Wythenshawe when they make these, as they describe themselves, ‘masterplans’? Do they speak to local people at all?
I get it. My view may be unpopular in some circles. I have spoken to someone with strong local family connections to Wythenshawe, and I cannot fault them for having the view of ‘it’s Wythenshawe, they’re all inbreds, it all needs razing to the ground’ because there are a lot of problems with Wythenshawe as it is at the moment.
The community is still there, though.
I wouldn’t have been able to do something like Wythenshawe Pride, wearing a trans flag as a cape, holding placards such as Only Queer Love can save us! and Pride is a protest! with a Trans Rights are Human Rights sticker stuck to my face, and then be able to walk into Cash Converters to buy an electric guitar, if the community didn’t agree with change.
I believe it’s incredibly important that we all get involved in the local communities we inhabit. After all, what affects us, probably also affects our neighbours too. We need to work together to build a better Wythenshawe. One that represents all of us, and all the people who live here.
What can be done?
Here’s my favourite ideas for what we could do to improve the area:
Adopt-a-Verge scheme - where locals could sign up to maintain a grass verge near their homes. They’ll protect their own grass verge and maybe plant some flowers on them. There’s loads of these verges, and they all look exactly the same.
Invite local artists to paint the buildings. That way, we can have something cool and unique instead of solid colour after solid colour like in every other gentrification attempt.

Use the Wythenshawe Forum better. I think this is a strength of Civic, and it allows for a GP, a pharmacy, a shop and a swimming pool amongst other facilities. The library almost feels completely disconnected from the rest of the Forum, and the interior badly needs modernising.
It would also be an opportunity to update the library into the 2020s, providing education opportunities and, you guessed it, an employment hub. Why not just use the existing library for that?
Give kids something to do that doesn’t involve paying money and isn’t just a park. I think the biggest problem in Wythenshawe right now is anti-social behaviour because there’s nothing for kids to do. It’s important to have more community centres. The Forum is currently filling that role for the most part, but beyond the Forum, I rarely see any community centres where kids can go.
Why not a skate park? There’s so many kids on bikes that are an absolute menace because they don’t have anywhere to go and you notice them as you try and dodge them out of the way as you get off the tram to go to Asda. A skate park would be a solution to get these bored kids off the streets and towards developing their motor skills instead.Build a proper cinema as opposed to a Culture Hub. Maybe that’s what the Barclays building should be used for. I think that an independent-run cinema would truly provide something new in the area, and bring in an informed audience of culturally educated tourists into the area. There is currently an effort in the tower blocks to try and start a cinema, but this is clearly too small and I think giving them a proper venue would really help Wythenshawe as a premiere arts destination.
Public murals and on-the-street art exhibitions. When the makers’ market is not running, in the midweek there could be a pop-up rolling arts exhibition! This could be used to show off local makers, local artists, and local people that make Wythenshawe possible.
If you are going to build so many apartments, please at least include a playground. It’s important to give kids in cities stimulation, as the modern environment doesn’t provide that for them.
These are my thoughts on the Wythenshawe Town Centre, that is, Civic’s regeneration. I think the project should go back to the drawing board and consult the community again about what they actually would like, this time with some fresh ideas, rather than using the same stock solution as everywhere else in Manchester.
Work with local people, not against them. Doing so will make them proud of where they live and in turn they’ll look after it.
Civic pride is more important than ever in this uncertain world.
Corrections (05/08/2025 12:56): The Makers’ Market is actually on Saturday not Sunday.