A new creative brand and campaign aiming to reshape how people experience central Manchester has been launched by the Mayfield Partnership.
Create Mayfield reframes 25 acres of the city centre as a “live canvas for experimentation,” opening up a wide range of physical and digital spaces to artists, designers and creatives.
The brand has been developed in collaboration with New Agency and the Mayfield Partnership – which includes Manchester City Council, Transport for Greater Manchester, Platform4 and regeneration specialist Landsec.
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According to the Mayfield Partnership, Create Mayfield represents a large creative transformation in Manchester city centre, with a focus on using design as a foundational tool rather than a finishing layer.
Manchester’s identity has traditionally leaned on industrial textures and red brick aesthetics, but the new brand takes a different approach. In materials shared with Prolific North, the Mayfield Partnership said the identity introduces a “polished, layered, almost hyper-saturated visual toolkit that is intentionally ‘shiny’ and futuristic,” designed to reflect a more forward-looking vision of the city.
The campaign will extend beyond branding into the physical environment. Create Mayfield will guide people from Piccadilly Station to the Mayfield site through a continuous visual thread of billboards and hoardings, acting as both wayfinding and storytelling.
The wider ambition is to open up the area as a platform for creative experimentation, spanning walls, archways, heritage buildings, green space, event space and digital channels.
The partnership said this will allow creatives to “test ideas, scale experiments and make work that would be impossible anywhere else.”
The initiative has launched alongside its first major commission from Manchester artist Piicasa, aka Callum Simmons. His 300-metre artwork, Watch the Future Load in Real Time, wraps the entire boundary of Mayfield Park and is described as the largest piece he has created to date, and believed to be the longest continuous hand-drawn, hand-sprayed artwork of its kind in the UK.
A website and social channels have also gone live, with applications now open for a funding programme that will support artists, makers, storytellers and innovators to contribute to the evolving space.
The Mayfield Partnership added that the project demonstrates how branding can operate at city scale: “a rare example of a regeneration project where design isn’t the final layer but the starting point, setting the tone for an entire neighbourhood and the artists who will help define it.”
