The decline of Pomona Island in central Manchester – from bustling dockland to worn-out wasteland – has created a rare oasis that deserves to become an Eden Project for the north

The River Irwell acts as the boundary between Salford and Manchester, and Pomona Island is the grassy limbo that buffers that waterway; it’s the tapering slice of land that makes way for the river, allowing it to graze the Bridgewater canal before both waterways abruptly branch off in opposing directions. Pomona is the worn-out fold in a map, and Pomona is imperceptible to everybody except those who obsess over it. I am one of the obsessed.

While some see Pomona as isolated and nefarious, the people who love the lost island of Manchester recognise that isolation as a paradise. Once a bustling dockland and now a wasteland, Pomona, as small as it is, manages to straddle the three boroughs of Salford, Trafford and (to a lesser extent) Manchester. These edgelands of the city are the alternative countryside. So why then is the sight of another human here as fleeting as that of a skylark?

Although to a pedestrian the island is almost completely isolated, with only one dedicated footbridge, it takes just minutes to reach Pomona on foot from Manchester’s city centre, and yet it seems worlds away from anywhere. There’s a brackish, almost sand-dune quality to the hulks of upturned land, formed by the uprooting of mature trees by current landowners Peel Holdings. Over these old roots, new saplings have laid down their own. Moss and lichen carpet the corners of cracked paving along the periphery of the site, and all around Pomona is a defiant hive of life that has thrived on the urban decay that came before.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Flora at its wildest has free rein on the island, despite and perhaps because of efforts to prevent it being listed as of ecological importance

On a summer’s afternoon, the scrubland hums and buzzes with the sounds of insects: crickets and grasshoppers hidden within plain sight, bees flitting between one cerise crown of buddleia to another, fish in their hundreds flirting close to the surface of the Irwell – their gleaming backs in the dark expanse below like stars in the night. Birds swoop across the open fields from canal to river, stopping on the partially rotten lampposts, where berries reach out invitingly on spiny limbs.

The waterways here are a wildlife corridor that welcomes families of lapwing, skylark, dunnock and bullfinch, and it’s not hard to see why birdwatchers cherish the space. Only, it’s not this natural beauty that sparks a flame in me: it’s the disparity between wilderness and urbanity. Running through the scrub is a geometry of the kind that belongs only to a city – the manmade canal, the railway, that brick-forged spine of industrial Manchester.

To counter that, there’s the river and the life that has made a home on the scars of commerce. Swathes of meadowsweet, yellow wart and bee orchids settle in around a burnt-out motorcycle. A man sunbathes among a bed of bindweed and its gramophone flowers. Behind him, in the belly of the railway bridge, lies a cluster of used needles and sleeping bags. The land here is as romantic and free as it is dystopian and sour.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Known originally as Cornbrook Strawberry Gardens, the island was soon renamed after Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit trees

Historically, the site has never been quite so desolate as it is today. During the industrial revolution, when Manchester was an impenetrable soup of chimneys and smog, the land was home to botanical gardens and to the Royal Pomona Palace. Known originally as Cornbrook Strawberry Gardens, it was soon renamed after Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit trees. The glory of the palace and gardens was relatively short-lived. In the 1880s, the site was almost entirely surrounded by factories, and in the summer of 1887 a nearby chemicals factory exploded, damaging the palace considerably. Had it been timed differently the palace might have been repaired, but as the scramble for land became frenetic, the gardens closed.

The sprawling brownfield site was then, in various guises, the home of industry, most recently as the bustling docklands of Salford that served the Manchester ship canal. It’s the fallout of these industrial uses that have allowed the land to be preserved thus far: it is contaminated enough that the proposed waterfront of speculative skyscrapers from Manchester to Liverpool must bide its time.

Pomona has been dug over several times in recent years in a vain and disingenuous attempt to purge it of rare plant life, and so prevent it from being listed as an area of ecological importance. Yet it is because of this turmoil that discovering a piece of the past is so effortless. The soil glitters with the blueish hue of pottery, or of tiles branded by a long-forgotten factory; each ceramic fossil is the legacy of an explosion over a hundred years ago.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Graffiti adorns the structures of Pomona, which were built long ago when the island was home to thriving docks

Despite the trauma to Pomona’s scrubland, it has continued to thrive as a green space. Indeed the measures taken to clear the site may have created an even more diverse landscape, with plant species that grow only from the sites of fires and clearance, or dormant seeds awoken by the churning of the land.

It’s this unplanned transience, and the knowledge that Pomona is finite, that makes the place so special. But thinking ahead to the abortive building developments planned for the island, I can’t shake the memory of its botanical gardens. It would be nice to see Pomona revisit its past and become an Eden Project for the north. But then I suppose I’d have to share my oasis with other people.