Super Slow Way seeks to commission a landscape-focussed multi-disciplinary design team to develop series of thematic landscape strategies and area studies, that explore and demonstrate how to unlock the potential of the Leeds & Liverpool Canal corridor in East Lancashire.
The Pennine Lancashire Linear Park is an exciting, pioneering, and deliverable vision and programme of change conceived for a 23-mile (37-kilometre) section of the Leeds & Liverpool Canal corridor. This is a project that seeks to marry physical improvements to landscape, infrastructure, and buildings through expansive programmes of environmental, cultural, leisure, educational and economic activity.
A 2021 feasibility study and economic impact assessment, “Lancashire Linear Park: Unlocking the Potential of the Leeds & Liverpool Canal: The Case for Change” sets out the vision for the Linear Park. The study has helped to recently secure funding from the UK Community Renewal Fund to allow the project to be developed to the next stage. Three strands of activity will be developed in parallel: ‘Green Book’ business cases for four sites along the canal corridor, landscape strategies for the canal (this commission) and a series of prototyping projects.
Completed in 1816, this waterway, the original ‘super highway’ of the Industrial Revolution, that once transformed Pennine Lancashire can today breathe new life and deliver transformational change to the area. It provides the backbone for a new Linear Park which aims to reveal and repurpose this great 19th century infrastructure, harnessing the same pioneering local energy to create new employment, educational, cultural, recreational, environmental, transport and tourism potential.
The Pennine Lancashire Linear Park pilot project is funded by the UK Government via the UK Community Renewal Fund.
Appendices:
ii. The Pennine Lancashire Linear Park – Supporting Material: Maps by Publica (2021)
iii. Leeds and Liverpool Canal Corridor Study East Lancashire by The Canal & River Trust (2003)
iv. Lancashire Enterprise Partnership’s Cultural Investment Strategy (2020)
v. Burnley Green Infrastructure Strategy and Study
vi. Burnley Town Centre and Canalside Masterplan
ix. Pennine Lancashire Linear Park Landscape Strategies – Maps Publica
