Inner-city Manchester districts such as Ancoats and Castlefield, with their brooding factories-cum-nightclubs and canal-side warehouse apartments, are seen to be examples of the buildings on which Manchester’s industrial history rests.

But a few miles southwest of the city centre, spread over five square miles of former deer park and woodland, is another vital element in the city’s story of industrial grandeur.

Trafford Park was built on land purchased from one of the region’s oldest and most noble families, the De Traffords. In the mid-19th century, the contrast of this stretch of meadow and “beautifully-timbered deer park” with the smoke-spouting chimneys and poverty-stricken streets of central Manchester would have been stark. The advancement of the steam engine, aided by a wet climate that suited the production of textile goods, principally cotton, had put Manchester – aka “Cottonopolis” – at the vanguard of the industrial revolution.

Towards the end of the 19th century, to avoid the taxing grasp of Liverpool’s dock and railway companies, the Manchester Ship Canal was constructed along the northern limit of then still-untouched Trafford Park. This 36-metre wide waterway would permit seafaring boats a direct route to the heart of Cottonopolis, effectively opening a sea port more than 30 miles inland.



Next door to Trafford Park, the famous sporting arenas of Old Trafford. Photograph: Alamy

But as the steam from ships arriving from across the globe plumed over their country estate, the De Trafford family’s dismay at the encroaching industrialisation grew – and the sale of their land became inevitable. Lack of funding put paid to any dreams of purchasing Trafford Park for civic leisure use, and on 24 June 1896, the entire estate was bought by the London-based financier Ernest Terah Hooley for £360,000. In so doing, he created the world’s first industrial estate.



Hooley’s personal financial troubles impeded the project, however, and within a year he had given up his role as chair of Trafford Park Estates Ltd. He would spend the rest of his life oscillating between bankruptcy and prison.



After Hooley’s departure, the remainder of the park’s board decided to move away from the focus on the rubber and cycle trades, and encourage diversity in the goods being manufactured on their estate. In contrast to textile-dominated central Manchester, Trafford Park’s formative years embraced steel foundries, biscuit factories, oil works – and cars.



In 1911, Ford opened its first factory outside of United States, in Trafford Park. The company’s innovative production-line method was introduced at roughly the same time there as in Detroit, and by 1920, 26,000 cars were being produced each year at Trafford Park, with all parts also locally manufactured.

At its peak, the estate boasted the largest private railway system in the UK; in the 1930s, nearly 2.5m tonnes of freight was transported through it each year – equating to 3% of all UK freight. Production was almost entirely turned over to war materials at the end of that decade, marking Trafford Park as one of the UK’s most formidable centres of the second world war effort. Employment figures for the estate surged, reaching 75,000.

Prime minister Harold Wilson addresses a crowd of workers at Trafford Park in Manchester in 1970. Photograph: Press Association Images

The end of the war marked the beginning of the long, painful decline of industry across the north of England. Large-scale redundancies, economic recession and the much-reduced usage of the Manchester Ship Canal meant that, by the mid-1980s, Trafford Park had virtually come to a standstill. An urgent response was required, and in 1987 the Trafford Park Urban Development Corporation was formed to turn around the fortunes of the once booming, now silent, industrial park.

Backed by central government finance, the site was demolished and replaced with modern office and industrial spaces. Coupled with a push to entice private investment, the employment numbers have been driven back up to a current level of around 35,000. As part of the devolution package which included the creation of a mayor for Greater Manchester, funding was secured for a new Metrolink tramline through Trafford Park, due for completion by 2020.

One of the main reasons for its surge in popularity has been the benefits of the physical proximity to other businesses that Trafford Park offers its occupants. “There is real face-to-face opportunity in Trafford Park,” says Gavin Payne, managing director of Manchester Printers. The variety of industries in close proximity means “we see a lot of loyalty between the people here, which has had a really positive effect,” Payne adds.

The international trade facilitated by the Manchester Ship Canal has been replaced by a regional hub of medium to large businesses like Nuttall Packaging and HSS Hire, complemented by international companies such as Ricoman LED, which sells lighting manufactured in China and soon hopes to move production to the estate too.

“There aren’t a lot of international companies, I think the new Airport City will be the hub for that,” says Liang Gao, who leads British operations for the company.



The few remnants of Trafford Park’s heyday are the unused rail tracks scattered between iron corrugated warehouse units. Certainly, it can no longer be claimed that “what Manchester does today, the rest of the world follows tomorrow” – as the 19th-century Conservative prime minister Benjamin Disraeli famously suggested. Yet the Trafford Park industrial estate – still Europe’s largest – is an enduring symbol of Manchester’s reign as the brains and guts of the industrial revolution.