Awards ceremony and venue
The Healthy City Design 2026 Awards Dinner takes place in the Evolution Suite at Old Trafford, home of Manchester United Football Club and the heart of one of the UK’s most ambitious regeneration programmes.
Celebrating Excellence at the Heart of Trafford’s Transformation
Date: Tuesday 20 October
Time: 18.30–22.00
Venue: Old Trafford Football Stadium, Manchester United FC
Ticket price: £150 + VAT
Join friends and colleagues from the Congress for the Healthy City Design Awards Dinner and Ceremony, hosted at Old Trafford Football Stadium, the home of Manchester United FC.
With plans for a new 100,000-seat stadium and the transformation of the surrounding Trafford Wharfside district, alongside the landmark Therme Manchester wellbeing resort, the area is becoming a powerful example of how sport, health, culture and placemaking can drive healthier, more inclusive communities.
It provides a fitting setting to celebrate the projects and people shaping healthier cities as Healthy City Design marks its tenth anniversary. Following a sumptuous dinner, awards will be presented in eight categories that span the micro, meso and
macro levels of city design and planning. The evening will conclude with the award of the Rachel Cooper Design Champion Award, celebrating an individual who has championed the principles of healthy and sustainable city design and planning over their career.
Speaking at last year's Congress, on a video about the Old Trafford redevelopment, world-renowned architect Lord Norman Foster said: “As you move away from the stadium, it’s not a fortress surrounded by a sea of cars. It’s open and contained by an umbrella, which harvests solar energy and rainwater but is protective and encloses arguably the largest public space in the world.”
The stadium is to be built in five years – half the time it usually takes to build such a structure. “How do we do that?” asked Lord Foster. “By prefabrication. By using the network of Manchester’s ship canal, bringing it back to a new life, shipping in components – 160 of them, Meccano-like. And then we rebuild the Old Trafford station. That becomes the pivot, the processional way to the stadium – welcoming and at the heart of a new sports-led neighbourhood.”
