Innovation in a backwater: The Harpurhey Resettlement Team and the mental health services of North Manchester, 1982–1987

This paper explores the circumstances around the setting up of the Harpurhey Resettlement Team, an innovative project which, in the late 1980s, resettled around 20 long-stay patients from Springfield Hospital in North Manchester into ordinary tenancies within the same neighbourhood. It argues that Springfield's position as a marginalised and neglected institution produced the conditions for such innovation; while the particular and unexpected convergence of national policies, local structures and institutional politics created space for a process of change which, in both form and outcome, could not have occurred in the more regulated psychiatric environments elsewhere in Manchester.