We think we are familiar with Manchester’s skyline and city centre landmarks. But what about the alternative Manchester that might have been?

During the 1960s a vision of Manchester was being drawn up by property developers and town hall planners that only existed in architects drawings and consultant’s reports and was never realized in concrete and steel.

Manchester was booming and vast swaths of the city centre were scheduled for redevelopment for entertainment, shopping, education, office complexes and transportation. But as with many master plans, only portions of what was designed were actually built.

“The scale of development was overwhelming, almost the entire city centre was re planned”, says curator Richard Brook, Principal Lecturer at Manchester School of Architecture, noting that “six comprehensive development areas allowed developers to forget the piecemeal approach of the past, and to think big!”

In this exhibition, for the first time, visitors will be able to encounter the ‘unmade city’ – the master plans as they were intended to be. With guidance from the curators, five teams of Masters students from the Manchester School of Architecture have drawn from detailed maps, plans, sketches and archival sources to design and build 3D models of parts of the city that can be navigated using game controllers.