Thornton Square

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Thornton Square is an often overlooked destination situated in a mainly residential area of Macclesfield, Cheshire, UK. Constructed in the 1960s the square is the only area of the town directly influenced and inspired by the ‘Second Chicago School’ [1] of architecture and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Evident on two sides of the square are examples of commercial buildings where overt historicist references in building design are eliminated and the concentration is on their neutral forms, stripped of ornament and suggestive of a machine technology. The design of the major buildings of Thornton Square borrows, on a reduced scale, directly from some of those of the Illinois Institute of Technology campus, as reconstituted during the 1940s.

More recently, in 2002, the square came to national media prominence as a result of ‘The Thornton Square Affair’ – an eighteen month police operation leading to the issuing of some of the earliest multiple ASBO (anti-social behaviour orders) in respect of five youths accused of being verbally abusive and threatening, stealing from shops, behaving drunkenly and public micturition. The case was subsequently used by a number of UK police forces, including Cumbria and London Metropolitan, as a training case-study and an example of how to run similar operations. Macclesfield Express

The name of the square was taken from the subtitle of the 1944 film Gaslight aka The Murder in Thornton Square, a definitive psychological suspense thriller from director George Cukor. This gothic, noirish melodrama, from the studios of MGM, was nominated for a total of seven Academy Awards with two wins: Best Actress (Ingrid Bergman), and Best B/W Art Direction.