Community Streets
Creating vibrant and healthy communities
Greater Manchester is striving to be a true cycling and walking city-region. Together we want to connect every area and community in Greater Manchester, making it easy and safe for people to travel on foot, by bike, by scooter or wheelchair and improve the places where we live, making more attractive spaces to chat, relax and play.
To do this we want to support Greater Manchester residents in helping create safe, attractive spaces, starting right outside our front doors. Community Streets are usually organised by neighbours in their own streets. They help to open up streets for children to play and bring residents together to create more vibrant and healthy communities.
Community Streets are led by you!
With a resident and community focus, Community Streets are a way to turn your street into a safe and vibrant space for everyone to come together, take ownership of the street and make it a pleasant place to be – be it for play, places to sit and relax or to socialise with friends and neighbours.
A host of cities worldwide including New York, Paris, Madrid, and Edinburgh host regular Community Streets ranging from temporary play streets to one-off events, festivals, and street parties, using the events to temporarily reconfigure streets so that they work for people first.
The benefits of Community Streets to local communities can be powerful enough to inspire permanent reconfiguration of streets so that they prioritise the movement of people over the movement of motor vehicles. This is often known as creating ‘filtered’ or ‘Active’ Neighbourhoods’ (also known as low traffic neighbourhoods)
Open your street!
Closing your street to traffic for the day means it's open for you - for play, fun and relaxation with friends and neighbours.
Trafford Resident, Nicola (hosted Open Street, Oct 2019)“It was a tremendous success. The best part was when we shut the road, the children just played old fashioned proper games - they were brill! What a great sense of community we have created. Thanks again."
Downloadable resources
There are lots of resources available for residents and community groups who are interested in hosting their own Community Street.
10 step toolkit
This guidance will help you work out what steps you need to take to hold a Community Streets event in your community.
Poster templates
Posters that can be used to promote and advertise your events.
Measuring success
Collecting some simple data can help you understand how it went and what impact the event had on your street.
Thanks to 'Playing Out'
The growing movement of Play Streets and the introduction of play street policies around the UK is largely down to the dedication, hard work and support of Playing Out. Much of the toolkit has been adapted from the fantastic and super-helpful Playing Out manual.
Playing Out is a not-for-profit organisation supporting a growing parent-led movement to reclaim children’s freedom to play out and use the streets and spaces where they live, for their health, happiness, and sense of belonging in their communities.
Ready Set Ride
British Cycling has joined forces with Playing Out to empower people to take back control of their streets and creates spaces for people to connect, socialise and play. What better time to teach the kids how to ride a bike, than when the street is safe and open to people?
British Cycling have produced a simple learn to ride programme to help you teach your kids how to ride a bike, from aged 18 months upwards. The Ready Set Ride programme has loads of free, quick, and easy games to make learning to ride fun!
