A century later it was known as Cottonopolis the mighty Lancashire city that produced
A century later it was known as Cottonopolis, the mighty Lancashire city that produced cotton by the mile and became connected to the world’s principal trade routes via its famous ship canal. This was the high point of an era that saw Manchester wax fat (except the common people) and witnessed the building of its wayward and magnificent Gothic Revival civic monuments. It is an opportunity that under normal circumstances it would be nigh impossible to get. “The emotional will is there,” says Terry Thomas, managing director of the Co-operative Bank, whose headquarters survived the blast “Manchester’s sense of civic pride has been bolstered. And there is a huge opportunity to start again, to open the city and let it breathe. In the end, building something better is the only way to defeat the IRA.”. Manchester was little more than a village in 1750.
Tomorrow he uses the Government’s pounds 150,000 to launch an international architecture competition to redesign the city centre. “Back home, Clinton would have been on the first plane.”Bernstein maintains a diplomatic silence on that score He is looking ahead. But this is the Manchester bomb – it has taken the heart out of the three top shopping centres in the city.”"It shocked me beyond belief that your Prime Minister didn’t come. Nor did a top member of the Royal Family,” says Josephine Abady, the American director who was rehearsing The Philadelphia Story for the Royal Exchange when the lorryload of IRA fertiliser exploded.
“Imagine what would have been the response had this been in London,” said another. People talked about “the Canary Wharf bomb” or “the Bishopsgate bomb”, says Howard Bernstein, now named as chief executive of the task force to rebuild the city “Those were just parts of a city. We could spend pounds 21m on that elevation alone,” he said pointing to the shattered Arndale gable, 60 feet high and once covered in tiles that earned it the local nickname of the Giant’s Urinal.There is more than a touch of north-south divide in all this. They had had a bomb-blast expert from the Ministry of Defence there a few days before.
The impact of explosives on modern concrete structures is unpredictable and often invisible. The tensions evident were those between the engineers – those for the insurers wanting to minimise the bill, those for the council wanting to maximise public safety, those for the developer who didn’t mind so long as the decision was reached quickly and those for the contractor needing to ensure the chosen option chosen brought least risk to emergency workers.”Either way,” said one, acidly, “the Government’s pounds 21m won’t go very far. Is the bridge between two sections of the Arndale safe? They discuss tests that could be performed “Even if we did them all could we still be sure?” asked one. One side is not due to reopen until next month at the earliest; the other, thanks to a sale at C&A, did better business the day it reopened than on the Saturday before Christmas.Outside, a group of engineers were meeting in a Portakabin to discuss the next phase. The magnificent curved frontage of the Corn Exchange does not reveal the extent of the structural damage there; it may have to be pulled down. Meanwhile, the owners of the boutiques and stalls inside are not allowed to retrieve their stock and are denied the means to make a living.Many were not insured.
“It would have cost me pounds 1,000,” said Mark Williams, owner of the Fruit Salad unit in the Arndale So he must bear the cost himself. “I lost pounds 1,920 worth of stock plus I will still have to pay pounds 750 for the month’s rent on my van and scales I had just started to make a living from it This will knock me back a bit.”But Williams was fortunate. He had three weeks idle – apart from being called in to clear his rotting stock (“it stank, but you should have caught the stench from the fish market”) But others are still out of business. Helplines set in the Manchester Evening News reveal the range and the depth of the problems. There are lines offering advice on accommodation, data recovery, debt counselling, pay and national insurance, for businesses at odds with their banks, and for stress.Prospects for the Corn Exchange traders are particularly bleak “It seems so arbitrary,” one said So it is. Part of the Arndale Centre reopened a fortnight after the bomb but a hoarding blocked off one end.
