Moxi’s maps
All plates

Day 08 / Utopia / Manchester

About half of Manchester lives within 300 m of a mapped park

In this analysis 49.7% of Manchester lives within 300 m of a mapped public park.

How close is Manchester to a city where every resident lives within 300 m of a mapped park?

By Moxi · · Posted

Manchester on warm paper under a yellow title band: “A park nearby? About half of Manchester is within 300 m.” Green shapes are existing parks. Solid black census-area circles represent residents within 300 m of a mapped public park; hollow circles those beyond, sized by population. The figure within reach is 49.7%. Yellow black-edged hexagonal points are imagined locations, not park boundaries. Heaton Park, the city centre, Hulme, Didsbury, Wythenshawe and Charlestown are labelled. A Charlestown ward inset shows nine imagined locations and two dashed 300 m radius circles; about 9 in 10 residents are beyond 300 m of a mapped public park. The what-if says 150 imagined locations reach 95% in this model, not a minimum or feasible plan. Distances are straight-line from census-area centres, not walking routes. A 5 km scale and source credits sit at the foot. Enlarge
Select the map to enlarge.

Credits: Ordnance Survey, ONS (OGL v3.0); OpenStreetMap contributors; Konijnendijk (2023). Full sources

49.7%

of residents, 274,370 of 551,924, live within 300 m of a mapped public park on the primary measure

9 in 10

residents in Charlestown are more than 300 m from a mapped public park

150

imagined locations reach 95% in this model; neither a minimum nor a feasible plan

The thinking

What I tried and why

This map went through four designs on the same numbers. Green on grey looked like the map before it. A blueprint was striking but hard to relate to real life. Place names and the Charlestown inset fixed that, and the final poster uses yellow for the imagined and green for the real.

The hexagons are imagined locations, not park boundaries. Adding each one where it reaches the most people gets to 95% with 150 locations, but that is neither a minimum nor a feasible plan.

Heaton Park is the contrast that matters. It is the biggest mapped park, and about 1,000 residents live within 300 m of a way in.

On the way here

Earlier designs, same numbers

Early draft of the Manchester map on a pale grey ground: dots for census areas in blue and grey, muted green parks, with 49.7% and 50.3% in large type at left.
First render Muted green parks on light grey. Too close to the map before it.
Draft of the Manchester map as a blueprint: white dots and outlines on deep blue, yellow markers for imagined parks, and a stamp reading what if, imagined.
Blueprint A plan on Prussian blue. Striking, and hard to take anything from.
Draft of the blueprint map with six place labels added and an inset of Charlestown showing two 300 m circles around imagined parks.
Context Six place names and a Charlestown inset gave it a real neighbourhood.

Method

How it was made

I measured straight-line distance from each census area's population-weighted centre to the pedestrian entrances of the 200 sites OS Open Greenspace records as Public Park Or Garden, using park edges for six parks with no recorded entrance. Whole census areas count in or out. Across five alternative ways of counting, the share runs from 37.1% to 66.5%, which is not a full range of uncertainty.

Limits

What this cannot tell you

This tests proximity to a mapped park, not the walk, park quality or every kind of green space. Distances are straight lines to mapped entrances. About one resident in ten, 9.8%, lives within 30 m of the 300 m line. The 300 m is the '300' of Cecil Konijnendijk's 3-30-300 guideline; I count mapped public parks and gardens as its public green space.

Next

What I’d do next

I would test this against what people in Charlestown would call a park, walk some of the routes, and try alternative zoning, which I did not test here.

Read my learning log

Data and credits

Sources

Data were filtered, joined and re-symbolised by me.

Parks · OS Open Greenspace
Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2026.Open Government Licence v3.0
Water · OS VectorMap District
Contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2026.Open Government Licence v3.0
ONS Wards (May 2026)
Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0; contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026.Open Government Licence v3.0
Place names and positions
© OpenStreetMap contributorsOpen Database Licence
ONS Local Authority District boundary
Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0; contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2025.Open Government Licence v3.0
ONS output-area population-weighted centroids
Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0.Open Government Licence v3.0
Census 2021, TS001 population counts
Source: Office for National Statistics (Census 2021, TS001), licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0.Open Government Licence v3.0
The 300 m guideline
Konijnendijk, C.C. (2023), Journal of Forestry Research 34(3), 821-830, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11676-022-01523-z.Cited work

My map design and text: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Source data retain the licences above. Every source across the series is on the credits page.