Nine years on from the gala concert that brought it all home, we look back at one of the most ambitious community music projects ever staged in the North of England, and the 93 stops that inspired it.
On the evening of 9 July 2017, audiences filed into The Bridgewater Hall on Lower Mosley Street for a concert unlike any other in the venue’s history. The music they were about to hear had not been written by established composers commissioned quietly in their studios, nor rehearsed discreetly in professional practice rooms. It had been born on tram platforms and in community centres, in school halls and local pubs, in the everyday spaces that stitch Greater Manchester together. It had been made by more than 1,200 people – pensioners and schoolchildren, poets and brass players, bedroom producers and amateur choirs – from every corner of the city region. And it had taken the shape of something precise and ambitious: ninety-three new pieces of music, one for every stop on the Metrolink network.
The project was called Tram Tracks, and nine years on it remains one of the most quietly extraordinary cultural undertakings Greater Manchester has ever produced.
Two Birthdays, One Big Idea
The story of Tram Tracks begins with a double coincidence. In 2017, Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) was preparing to mark the silver jubilee of the Metrolink network, twenty-five years since Her Majesty the Queen officially opened the system during a ceremony at St Peter’s Square on 6 April 1992. Meanwhile, The Bridgewater Hall was approaching its own twenty-first birthday, having opened its doors on 11 September 1996.
Two institutions, two milestones, one shared city. It was, in retrospect, an obvious invitation to collaborate. What was less obvious, and what distinguishes Tram Tracks from the standard programme of anniversary events, was the form the collaboration took.
Rather than organising a prestige performance or commissioning a single celebratory work, TfGM and The Bridgewater Hall asked a more open-ended question: what would it sound like if every community on the Metrolink network was given its own voice? The answer was ninety-three pieces of music, song and spoken word, one for each of the stops that made up the network at its moment of maturity in early 2017, when the completion of the Second City Crossing brought the total to exactly that number.
Creative Director Sarah Atter led the project, coordinating a vast network of community songwriters, composers, arts organisations, education providers and musicians from across Greater Manchester. The ambition was not to produce something slickly professional, but something genuinely representative; a musical portrait of the city as it actually was, not as anyone imagined it to be.
The Network as Muse: All 93 Stops
By 2017, the Metrolink network had grown dramatically from its origins. What had begun in 1992 as a modest line between Altrincham and Bury via the city centre – twenty-six trams, twenty-six stops – had expanded across seven lines spanning nearly sixty-two miles. The network now reached into every corner of the conurbation, and Tram Tracks set out to honour every single one of those communities.
The Altrincham Line, the spine of the original network, sent its music from the affluent suburb of Altrincham up through the leafy corridors of Navigation Road, Timperley, Brooklands, Sale, Dane Road and Stretford, crossing over at Old Trafford and Trafford Bar before arriving at the interchange at Cornbrook.
The Bury Line, the other founding limb of the network, traced a very different geography northward: from the market town of Bury through Radcliffe, Whitefield, Besses o’ th’ Barn, Prestwich, Heaton Park, Bowker Vale, Crumpsall, Abraham Moss and Queens Road before reaching Victoria, the great northern terminus at the heart of the city.
The city centre stops – Victoria, Shudehill, Market Street, Piccadilly Gardens, Piccadilly, St Peter’s Square, Deansgate-Castlefield and Exchange Square – formed the beating hub through which all lines passed and all music converged. These were the places where Greater Manchester came together daily, and they were at the centre of Tram Tracks too.
The Eccles Line traced the canal-fed industrial heritage of Salford westward from the city: Cornbrook, Pomona, Exchange Quay, Salford Quays, Anchorage, Harbour City, and the stop that had become the symbol of Salford’s twenty-first century reinvention – MediaCityUK – before continuing through Langworthy, Weaste and out to its terminus at Eccles.
The Airport Line, one of the newer additions to the network, opened in 2014 and pushed south-west from the city across the suburban landscape of Wythenshawe, through Baguley, Benchill, Crossacres, Peel Hall, Robinsons, Shadowmoss, Roundthorn and Wythenshawe Town Centre, all the way to Manchester Airport itself, a terminus that represented not just the edge of the tram network but the gateway to the world beyond Greater Manchester.
The South Manchester Line – or the East Didsbury branch – had opened in May 2013 and headed south through St Werburgh’s Road, Chorlton, Didsbury Village, Burton Road and out to the terminus at East Didsbury. The music of Chorlton and Didsbury – relatively prosperous, broadly liberal, with a particular talent for independent coffee shops and grassroots gig venues – would have its own sonic character here.
The East Manchester Line to Ashton-under-Lyne cut a path through the communities east of the city: Piccadilly to Velopark along the new Velodrome corridor, then Holt Town, Etihad Campus (the home of Manchester City Football Club, where music and crowd noise have always been intertwined), New Islington, Ancoats, Central Park, Clayton Hall, Edge Lane, Droylsden, Audenshaw and Ashton Moss before arriving at the Tameside terminus of Ashton-under-Lyne. Nearby stops Ashton West and Ashton Moss carried the music of communities that had lived through the area’s industrial rise and decline.
The Oldham and Rochdale Line was perhaps the most storied of all. Converted from a former heavy railway that had once carried cotton workers across the Pennine foothills, it reached north-east through Collyhurst into a string of communities whose identities had been shaped by textile mills, civic pride and a fierce local distinctiveness: Newton Heath and Moston, Failsworth, Hollinwood, South Chadderton, Freehold, Oldham Mumps, Oldham Central, Oldham King Street, Derker, Shaw and Crompton, Newhey, Milnrow, Kingsway Business Park, New Moston, and then into Rochdale proper – Rochdale Railway Station and Rochdale Town Centre – at its northern terminus. This was the spine of a post-industrial landscape whose communities had much to say and, through Tram Tracks, finally had a stage on which to say it.
Every one of these ninety-three stops, from the urban buzz of Piccadilly Gardens to the wind-swept platforms of Rochdale Town Centre, received its own piece of music. No community was treated as peripheral. No stop was considered too small or too ordinary to deserve its own sound.
Into the City: Pop-Up Performances Across the Network
The project did not confine itself to the concert hall. In the weeks and months leading up to the gala, Tram Tracks spilled out across the network itself, transforming the mundane architecture of daily commuting into something unexpected and alive.
Platforms and concourses briefly became performance spaces. Passengers waiting for trams at Piccadilly Gardens or Shudehill might suddenly find themselves surrounded by a choir. Commuters at Victoria might hear a spoken-word performance drifting across the concourse. The everyday journeys that hundreds of thousands of Greater Manchester residents make without thinking were transformed, if only for a moment, into something to pay attention to.
On 17 July 2017, following the gala concerts, all ninety-three tracks were released freely online for the public to listen to, transforming the project from a live spectacle into a permanent archive. Any passenger, at any time, could call up the piece written for their stop and hear their community reflected back at them in sound: a gift to the city that costs nothing to receive and keeps giving.
The full playlist remains available to this day on YouTube.
9 July 2017: The Night the Network Came Home
The gala concert on 9 July 2017 brought all of this back to Lower Mosley Street, as The Bridgewater Hall welcomed the sounds of a city it had spent months helping to make.
What the audience experienced was not simply a concert. It was a kind of homecoming: the sound of ninety-three communities, gathered from across the breadth of Greater Manchester, returning to the venue that had helped bring them into being. More than 1,200 participants had contributed to the project. Across community groups, schools, youth organisations, local businesses and partner arts organisations, the project had reached into parts of the city that a conventional concert venue rarely touches.
The Bridgewater Hall’s own statement captured the spirit of what had been achieved:
“Tram Tracks has been a wonderful and engaging project; to have 1,200 people from a wide array of community groups all coming together to create 93 pieces of bespoke music is something truly special”.
Why It Still Matters
Nine years on, Tram Tracks stands as a vivid example of what publicly funded cultural institutions can achieve when they abandon the safety of their own walls. The Bridgewater Hall is one of the finest concert halls in Europe, a building whose acoustic engineering and artistic programming place it among the premier music venues on any continent. And yet its most enduring community project was not the result of excellence on stage but of openness beyond it; a willingness to go out into Derker and Droylsden, into Eccles and East Didsbury, into Newton Heath and Navigation Road, and ask the people there what music sounded like on their streets.
The Metrolink network, meanwhile, had grown from those original twenty-six stops into an organism of ninety-three. It has grown further since: the Trafford Park Line, approved in 2016 and opened in March 2020, added six new stops and pushed the total to ninety-nine. The city is still expanding, still reaching outward, still knitting communities together with its yellow trams.
But in 2017, for one project and one gala night, it was the music that did the knitting. From Altrincham to Bury. From the Airport to Ashton-under-Lyne. From Eccles to East Didsbury. Every stop, every community, every voice, all of them arriving, eventually, at Lower Mosley Street.
All 93 Tram Tracks pieces are available to stream for free on The Bridgewater Hall Learning and Participation’s YouTube channel.
