Oakley Gardens

Welcome to Oakley Gardens

Asset Type

Residential Housing

Quantum

53 homes

Status

Pre-planning

188 Wilmslow Road, Fallowfield

Sat on the well-connected Wilmslow Road, and bordered on two sides by the Shakespeare Garden and Platt Fields Park, Oakley Gardens is waiting to be transformed into a new neighbourhood.

With the Oakley villa at its heart, we are preparing to sensitively approach the site that brings it back to life, and gives people a chance to call this place home.

A place to call home

Our vision for Oakley Gardens is to build a new neighbourhood with Oakley Villa at its heart.

This vibrant part of Fallowfield is ideal for families, professionals, university graduates, and everyone in between, and we want to help those who long to stay in the area find the perfect home to suit their lifestyles.

Our Proposals

We are taking a housing-led approach to this site on Wilmslow Road. View our plans, how we are handling the site, and what this means to the community, as well as further context about the area.

View our proposals

Site Story

Dive into the local site story

Our revels now are ended… well, maybe not quite yet.

You came to study in Manchester for the night life; Warehouse Project, Academy, Didsbury Dozen, Bongo’s Bingo. You stayed because the life is good. You work in SciTech, finance, healthcare, or cyber-security. You like shopping at the Asian supermarkets, kimchi and dosa, and hopping on the bus when Manchester weather gets the better of your cycling gear. You’ve stayed in touch with mates from your year. Fallowfield is close to your heart, and close to all of the above.Welcome to the Forest of Arden, William Shakespeare’s idyllic escape from the flashy claustrophobic court in his play “As You Like it”. It is a place of considerate and friendly community, where incomers can live a better life. Welcome to Oakley Gardens, Fallowfield, where you can run your morning circuit in Platt Fields, stretch, shower, and settle into your home office before the sun has even reached Deansgate Square.

The Shakespeare Garden Platt Fields is one of only two such in Britain. It contains all the 175 plants and trees mentioned by the Bard in his plays and poems. There is woodland, topiary, herb garden, mushroom bank, meadow, boarder, and beehives. Laid out in 1922, it had been neglected by the end of the century, until a friends group got stuck-in in 2014, and the Shakespeare Garden blossomed again and reopened in summer 2025.

Where the bee sucks

Rusholme, Fallowfield Brow, Ladybarn; there’s the memory of meadow, lane, and furrow in these placenames, that Appleby Lodge and Thorne House don’t dispel. This adjacent pair of residential developments from the 1930s and 1960s respectively, across the Wilmslow Road and north of Oakley Gardens, are benchmarks in style and modernity. Appleby Lodge is Grade II listed, and its architect, Peter Cummings (he also designed the Apollo cinema in Ardwick) moved in on completion. Sir John Barbirolli, the conductor of the Hallé Orchestra was a neighbour.

The horseshoe of 100 apartments, brick-built in three stories in the Art Deco style is gorgeous to this day. Steve Coogan and Alex “Hurricane” Higgins lived here for a while, but not (they might both be thankful) at the same time. The layout and landscaping of Thorne House, its neighbour to the south, are exemplary mid-century design, and both apartment developments add considerable, though discreet, gloss to Wilmslow Road. The Fallowfield Forest of Arden can shelter laid back town-centre-types, wanting to escape the hubbub.

Education and schools are big in this corner of the forest. Much of it is independent, and of the highest quality. Manchester Grammar School, Manchester High School for Girls and Withington Girls’ School feed into a mix that adds to the student atmosphere, giving Fallowfield the distinct demographic that defines the young, zestful city that Manchester has become. If this is the utopian Forest of Arden, young people are its inhabiting spirit.

As You Like It

This is an ancient forest. Running past the doors of Oakley Gardens and clearly visible in this corner of Platt Fields is the Nico Ditch, a prehistoric earthwork stretching six miles from Ashton-under-Lyne to Stretford. It was dug sometime, and incrementally, between the 5th and 11th centuries, probably marking territories. Parts of it, including the stretch through Platt Fields are a Scheduled Ancient Monument, putting the Nico Ditch on a par with Stonehenge and Conwy Castle. Past and present are not in conflict here, as they are not in Shakespeare’s plays. You might not know much more about William Shakespeare than “Upstart Crow” or “Shakespeare in Love”, and you may care even less. But the restored Shakespeare Garden in Platt Fields, neighbouring Oakley Gardens represents the modern world in exceptional ways. It is community-led, cross-generational, multi-cultural, and powerfully argued.

There’s a mural painted on the end gable of a terrace on Albion Road, opposite the entrance to Platt Fields that is closest to the Shakespeare Garden.

The mural (by artist Ethan Lemon) is a portrait of Rosa Grindon, autodidact, Shakespeare scholar and lecturer, horticulturist, and suffragette. The painting is vivid purple, white, and green, the colours of the suffragette flag. Rosa Grindon brought the Shakespeare Garden into being by sheer strength of will. She shares her spirit with the volunteers who have restored her creation. You came to Manchester for the night life. You stayed because you found your Forest of Arden

Oakley Gardens, Fallowfield

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