How Manchester is Working With Water
Future Tides Film Series on Flood Resilience
Last updated: May 26, 2026 Manchester, United Kingdom
It’s the second of three films drawn from European cities reinventing themselves in the face of climate change, by innovative city makers.
The film convenes four of the names reshaping Manchester’s relationship to water: Kathy Oldham, Chief Resilience Officer at the Greater Manchester Combined Authority; Eleanor Walker, Project Development Manager at the local community-forest NGO City of Trees; Amy Wright of Groundwork Greater Manchester, working with the community at the West Gorton Sponge Park; and Duncan Paybody, Director of Landscape at Studio Egret West, designer of Mayfield Park.
In Manchester, the series traces a system of nature-based flood resilience efforts that runs from the Pennine moors — where leaky dams, sphagnum moss, and replanted trees hold back rainwater at source, down into the city center, where new parks have been engineered to double as stormwater infrastructure, and a long-buried river now runs above ground again.
Resilience is everybody’s business, because everybody has a part to play. Kathy Oldham Chief Resilience Officer, Greater Manchester Combined Authority
“We cannot achieve the best outcomes working by ourselves. It’s a lot of people working together to say, how do we design and manage our infrastructure in a way that not only supports the ambitions of the city, but thinks about resilience as we do it.”
The film series ties directly to themes established at the foundation’s 2025 Forum in Venice, which brought architects, engineers, urban planners, climate scientists, and policymakers together to address one of the era’s most urgent challenges: how to build and support flood-resilient cities and communities. You can read more insights from the event through the foundation’s Forum Digest report (link below).
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