Church of St Michael and All Angels, Northenden

After the end of the First World War, Manchester faced a housing crisis, with large numbers of poor people living in slum conditions. The council looked at buying land south of the River Mersey, but the cost of land near Wythenshawe meant that the scheme was almost abandoned. However, Sir Ernest and Shena Simon, who were social reformers from nearby Didsbury, stepped in and bought Wythenshawe Hall and 250 acre of parkland in 1926. They donated it to the council, which significantly reduced the cost of buying the rest of the land needed for housing. Shena Simon then worked with Richard Barry Parker to develop the area as a garden city in the early 1930s, and also worked with the first new…

The plan of the church is a star, comprising two inter-locked squares. The roof is flat with a cross in the centre. The windows illuminate the baptistry to the south and the children's corner to the north. The points of the star that align with the cardinal points of the compass have large clerestory windows in both sides of the triangle. The interior of the building is "raw but spatially subtle". It has an "ingenious plan with lofty columns supporting [a] flat ribbed roof". The plans show the long-held tradition that Cachemaille-Day intended to place the altar in the centre of the building to be incorrect.