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. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.