Unique pictures of Manchester after the bombing, ......... July 1996

I am in Manchester in the July of 1996 just a few weeks after the Manchester bomb which been left by the Provisional IRA in a van on Corporation Street. 

Now the story of the bomb attack and the subsequent rebuilding of this part of the city are readily available as are the dramatic pictures of the explosion and immediate aftermath.

Less often shown are photographs of the subsequent few weeks when people went to look at the damage.  

My eldest son and I must have been down there at the same time as Andy Robertson took these pictures, and it was odd how we both recollected the same feelings and above all remembered the response of other people who came, looked in silence and moved off.

And then there are the anecdotal stories like that of a friend who had to go into the damaged Mark and Spencer’s to assess the damage. 

She recalled “the great shards of glass embedded in the floor” and that “all the cash tills were open with the money just sitting there.” But above it was the overpowering smell of rotting food in freezers which had slowly started decomposing once the power had been cut.

What I find fascinating about Andy’s pictures is not only that they record that period between the bomb and the reconstruction but that they make me realize just how quickly I have forgotten what the city looked like.

And in some ways photographs of more recent times are more disorientating than those old monochrome images of the early 20^th century. 

I guess it is because with many of the old ones they are so different that you really are looking at a different place.  

But those taken over twenty years ago are almost like today and so you look at them thinking that you will see the present but are side tracked with the odd detail that confuses you.

So looking down towards the Cathedral there is much that superficially is the same including the MEN which had opened the year before.

But to our left the car park and which had once been a bus station is now an open area with fountains.  And the concrete walkway where Andy stood to take the picture has also gone, severing the overhead link with the buildings on the other side of Deansgate.  It was a bridge I remember was seldom used.

Equally fascinating is his photograph of Cateaton Street which ran from the junction of Deansgate and Victoria Street up to Hanging Ditch.  

The buildings look familiar but some have undergone new ownership, no buses now run along the road, and it terminates in Shambles Square and Exchange Square and the pub complex.  

Behind and shrouded in sheets is the old Corn Exchange which had become a centre for odd and quirky little shops.  These were forced out to the Northern Quarter after the renovation of the building and its transformation into the Triangle.

And more from Andy’s pictures later.

Pictures; courtesy of Andy Robertson