How big is 2900 acres?
Adlington New Town is proposed to cover 2,900 acres of of green countryside and farmland. It’s hard to comprehend how big that is. Watch this video to get an idea.
The site covers the original Adlington Hall Estate plus additional surrounding land that has been acquired. It will also impact farmland owned by the farmers.
2,900 acres is larger the built footprint of nearby Macclesfield, (2,500 acres) and larger than Bollington and Prestbury combined (1,000 acres);
This map shows the area of the proposal, the red lines are the proposed “principal roads” of the new town.
Impact on the Landscape
Because the land borders the Peak District National Park, the development would effectively remove the countryside buffer between Manchester and the Peaks. Instead of transitioning from urban areas to open fields and then upland moorland, the landscape would move directly from “built” to “moorland”, diminishing the area’s rural character.
With parts of the site sitting at around 500 ft elevation, the visual impact would be significant, altering views of the hills from key Manchester vantage points. The scale of the development would also merge Stockport and Macclesfield, erasing the distinct separation between the two.
Scale and Population
A development of 14,000 to 20,000 homes would create a new population of roughly 32,000 to 58,000 people—comparable to the size of Macclesfield (approx. 54,000 residents).
