Two pictures …. a memory …… and a lost landscape

 Memories fade and eventually are lost and so these two images of Manchester on August 1st, 1957, are a powerful reminder of what the city was once like.

Two for one, a panorama of destruction, 1957

Both pictures were taken from the old BBC Building in Piccadilly and look out across the Gardens towards the Town Hall and the business sector.

Looking towards Portland Street, 1957

I would arrive just twelve years later, and Manchester had already shed many of those temporary car parks which were former bomb sites, replacing them with new builds of concrete and glass.

And while I was born and grew up in London, I can remember similar scenes.  

As kids we played on bomb sites and occasionally came across lost treasures pulled from the ground. 

Those open spaces would soon be home to cars and later still towering blocks of offices.

All of which makes me think my generation will be the last to remember that time when the last war transformed our cities and towns leaving acres of prime development sites.

But also, had created those gaps between houses where a single bomb had obliterated a home. In some cases, giant timbers were still in place shoring up the properties on either side, or the remaining houses had been given a skim of cement.

And so back to the two pictures.  

Piccadilly Gardens, the bus terminus and the future  hotel site, 1957

It is fascinating now to view the sheer scale of the devastation in just one part of the City and likewise what appears to be the random nature of the bombing, and what survived.

I won’t be alone in seeing pictures published in the early 1970s of the bits of Back Piccadilly ablaze from end to end which back in 1940 the censors deemed likely to undermine morale.

Now some I know will focus on the soot clad surviving buildings or wax lyrically about the former Piccadilly Gardens which is OK but detracts from pondering on the scale of the war damage, and the relative speed of the rebuild.  Added to which there is that very personal elephant in the room which for me is that simple observation that if you can remember such scenes, you are indeed very old.

Ah well such is the dichotomy from being a baby boomer with one foot in the late 1940s and early 1950s and the exciting and changing times of the decade to come.

Location; Piccadilly Gardens, Manchester, 1959

Pictures; Piccadilly from the BBC Building, August 1st, 1957, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass