It's all in the changes .......

Just how many changes do you clock over 55 years in one city?

New and old, Exchange Square, 2024

It is of course a silly question because all places undergo some change and for most of us those changes can be quite imperceptible and do rely on a good memory.

That said the lazy will just resort to one of those then and now books but that is cheating, and anyway most such publications report on a series of transformations across a century and more.

Added to which they take just one place and show one change, when the fun is to remember the series of instalments which have nibbled away at somewhere you have come to know..

Corn Exchange & Triangle, 2024

So yesterday I was in Exchange Square, reflecting on a time before the metro tram, before the Urbis building and indeed before both the Arndale and the square itself.

Looking across the square down towards the river it is very difficult to conjure up that this had once been a place of narrow streets, half closed courts and large numbers of warehouses, and commercial properties which vied with offices, restaurants and pubs.  

Here could be found Blue Boar Court, Bulls Head Yard, Cock Pit Hill and Sun Entry some of which narrowed to twisty entries which disappeared into buildings before reappearing on a new street.

Many of the properties were destroyed during the bombing raids of the last world war, and so while the courts and streets were still there many of the buildings had gone.

The transformation was piecemeal during the redevelopment from the 1960s and again after the 1996 IRA bomb.

Piccadilly Plaza, 2024

And in the same way there will be all too many who remember the slow demise of the old Piccadilly Gardens.  

During the 1950s into the 60s it was a favourite place of office workers, shoppers and kids who sat on the benches in the sunken area, took into the municipal floral displays and just watched the city get on with things.

The later reincarnation of the open space has had few friends but at least that concrete wall has come down.

And on another positive note, it has also opened the statue of Queen Victoria, although I am less convinced about the fast-food encampment further along the square.

Standing beside Her Majesty I was struck by the view of the old Piccadilly Hotel with its restaurant in the air.

Changes from Piccadilly Gardens, 2024

Back in 1969 when I arrived in Manchester the hotel with its neighbouring tower and the striking Chinese style-roof of Bernard House struck me as the epitome of the modern when set against all the Victorian and Edwardian buildings which just said old.

I might say shouted the future which chimed with all that was exciting about the 1960s.

But then I was just 19, and yet to become a fan of the Town Hall or all those soot covered relics of the 19th and early 20th century.

Happily, 55 years on I have matured and have come to see that those very buildings were expressions of Manchester’s confidence at over half a century of innovation built on cotton and engineering, and best summed up constructing the first passenger railway and then that equally daring enterprise which was the ship canal.

A bit of a hotel, 2024

But that isn’t to gloss over the dark side of rapid urbanization characterised by mean streets, closed courts where the sun rarely penetrated to lighten the substandard housing, or the lack of sanitation and the absence of clean drinking water.

What was once ... the new, 2024

All of which can be found in history books, and which some would argue were replicated again by the rush to develop new social housing in the 1960s and 70s based on the high-rise towers and deck access properties.

Many of those have now vanished or been modified leaving places like Hulme to have gone through its first housing boom in the 19th century, its second in the decades of the next century and yet a new transformation in the 1980s and 90s.

Which brings us back to where we started with 55 years of change.

Location; Manchester

Bridgewater Hall, 2024

Pictures; of the city, 2024, from the collection of Andrew Simpson