Vast new city centre development

It's hard not to like big schemes - 'grands projets' as our cross-Channel cousins call them. The heroic concept is always fun to debate. It's like being a kid again drawing a fantasy city or map, planning out things where you as the omnipotent overlord would like them to go.

The Mayfield scheme is a 'grand projet'.

This envisages the re-working of a small-town sized 20 acre area of Manchester into a base for a Whitehall of the North with 5,000 civil servants. It comes packaged with popularist appeal in the form of a new public park by the banks of the presently tyre-encumbered River Medlock.

It also comes with a handy quote from Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City Council. He's said: "Manchester is a city where organisations from all sectors want to invest, as these ambitious plans clearly demonstrate. As well as creating new jobs for the city, we would also see an area of the city centre regenerated in a lasting and dramatic way.”

Most people will probably be asking where Mayfield is? Well this beautifully monikered area – imagine all the hawthorn (called may) that would have adorned the meadows here pre-industrialisation – lies between the main line to London from Picc Station and the Mancunian Way.

It's defined by three lines drawn in the Manchester sand. A northern one of railway buildings, viaducts and arches some up to 60ft high, a southern one of the Mancunian Way and a central one of the River Medlock.

In the new scheme the river, for 180 years reduced to a mucky substitute sewer, will reassert itself. Along the northern banks set back from the an adjacent park will be the so-called 'Civil Service Campus'. At present these look like a series of bad multi-storey carparks but they are only notional structures. The masterplan has been drawn up by Bennetts Associates, they will have to be worked into actual buildings by architects later in the process – Drivas Jonas, the property consultants managing the project, say that should be before 2014.

South of the river are more notional blocks which will be privately developed.

Confidential took a walk through Mayfield to see what it was like now. It's an entertaining dump at the moment, with a filthy litter strewn river crawling between broken buildings which include the old city morgue. It puts you in mind of the peripheral city centre zones circa 1985. People complain about the rash of apartment building over the last 15 years but Jeez it looks better than this tip.

The only grandeur is provided by the stunning railway architecture. Temperance Street – what a cracking name for such an austere thoroughfare – is best: no houses, no offices, just a canyon of brick between viaducts. A real element of drama here comes where the river rages under the intercity rail bridge.

The major building casualty will be Mayfield Station. This was finished in 1910 by the London and North Western Railway and built alongside Manchester London Road station (later Piccadilly) to handle an increased number of trains and passengers. The site was converted into a parcels depot in 1970, but closed in 1986 when Parcelforce of Royal Mail decided the future lay in road haulage not rail. It gained a loose fame in the nineties, in the closing scenes of Prime Suspect 5 when Helen Mirren failed to take her clothes off while getting her hands on a nasty drug-dealer.

The Star and Garter pub in an armpit of Mayfield Station on Fairfield Street will survive. The Grade II listed building, home to Smiths and Morissey nights, provides, with its chequerboard gables, the only architectural charm on the whole 20 acre site. The pub dates from 1877 and is in the Queen Anne style (click here for more about the latter).

If all this goes ahead - and that's dependent on a new Conservative government continuing a policy of moving more than 20,000 jobs out of London - here's a suggestion. Let's get a big Civil Service department up here, not the Ministry of Community Niceness and Tiddly-winks or some such.

Let's get the Treasury up here, after all it was the big northern cities who subsidised with their industry the growth of Imperial London in the nineteenth century. It would be apt given all the industry that formerly occupied Mayfield such as two dyeworks, a massive printworks and a cotton mill, if the Treasury put their brass where there's our muck.