One critic called it 'the longest lavatory wall in Europe'. But did the Arndale Centre save city-centre shopping?

Plus, how the future of the high street could look a lot like the pre-1970s past

By David Rudlin

When doing your last-minute Christmas shopping today, spare a thought for the slice of city centre we’ve lost in the name of retail: once upon a time, the quarter bounded by Market Street, Withy Grove, Corporation Street and High Street was home to a collection of clubs and bars that some called the Magic Village in the heart of Manchester (which was also the name of one of the clubs based there). According to the Manchester Evening News, bands like the Rolling Stones, the Kinks and the Beatles would play in this “psychedelic enclave” in unlicenced bars and clubs where the strongest thing you could buy (legitimately) was coffee. This would all eventually be razed to the ground, and in its place would rise its aesthetic opposite: a beige retail megalith you’ll know as the Arndale Centre. Shopping would be prioritised over leisure: buying brands over watching bands.

What’s hard to imagine from today’s perspective is just how radical the Arndale Centre must have seemed at the time. When it was opened in stages between 1976 and 1979, it was Europe’s largest city centre mall. It was a million square foot, mixed-use building with 210 shops, 200 market stalls and a multi-storey car park. It reputedly even had an underground station ready to serve the Picc-Vic railway line that was planned to run between the two stations, although I have never been able to verify that this was actually built.

The Arndale managed to be both an anomaly — it was far more ambitious than any other shopping centre being built in the North at the time — and consistent with the national picture. In Alistair Kefford’s The Life and Death of the Shopping City, the former UoM history lecturer details the unstoppable rise of retail chains (as opposed to individual traders) in post-war Britain. He explains how in the 50s, there were a few retail chains in Britain boasting over a hundred stores, whereas by 1970, “multiple retailers had captured something like 40 per cent of the total retail trade.” He describes individual shops being gradually replaced from the 60s onwards by different types of “holistically planned” shopping centres. The Arndale Centre would be one of their number. And it’s easy to see the practical argument for it — the retail chains that gained ground in the 60s and 70s like Topshop wanted big units, high ceilings, lots of space. They didn’t fit easily into old buildings.

The first rendition of the Arndale Centre. Photo credit: David Dixon.

Still, whether new meant better was up for debate. The people of Manchester were less impressed with the ‘radical’ new building, describing its blank external walls as “bile yellow”, “vomit-coloured” and in the words of the Guardian’s political columnist Norman Shrapnel “the longest lavatory wall in Europe”. It featured extensively in the book The Rape of Britain in which authors Colin Amery and Dan Cruickshank argued that Britain’s cities were being destroyed by modern development — of which Manchester’s Arndale Centre was the most egregious example, having replaced historic buildings and a diversity of different club and bar fronts with one uniform (and ugly) building.

So how did the Arndale come to be? In the 60s, the council were growing worried about Manchester’s position as a retail hub. The city surveyor wrote in 1962: “Manchester [is] crystallised in its Victorian setting...A new look for the city has been long overdue...Its unsightly areas of mixed industrial, commercial and residential development need to be systematically unravelled and redeveloped on comprehensive lines. Only in this way can a city assume its proper place as a regional centre.” (A translation for non-urban planners: regional centre here is a term for “major shopping centre”).

They were also presumably looking askance at Stockport, which was building its own ultra-modern shopping hub: the Merseyway Centre, which opened in 1965. In 1961, Manchester’s retail centre had been almost four times larger than Stockport but by 1971, after the Merseyway Centre had opened, it would be less than three times bigger. Something needed to be done and this city’s response was to develop plans for the huge new shopping mall that would become the Arndale Centre. There’s certainly a sense of faint desperation in the planning department’s justification (quoted in Kefford’s book) as to why such drastic change was required to bring in the Arndale Centre. They argued “the traditional shopping centre…is seriously in need of renewal and the poor quality of most of the existing buildings means that comprehensive redevelopment with severe ‘surgical’ treatment, rather than improved or piecemeal development, is necessary.”

This anxiety about the city centre’s appeal for shoppers is particularly interesting when you venture even further back into local history. After all, the first department store in the city to have electric lighting, lifts, escalators and plate glass display windows (with moving images!) wasn’t in the city centre at all. Paulden’s department store was built on Stretford Road in Hulme in 1879. Records from the Greater Manchester County Records Office quoted online suggest it was also the first place in the country to sell Danish pastries! Between the wars the company was acquired by Debenhams and the store in Hulme traded until 1957. Even then it didn’t close for lack of trade, but due to a Guinness World Record-level run of bad luck. The store had just undergone a major refurbishment but, on the Sunday before it was to reopen, it burned down and a week later a double decker bus crashed into it and fell into the basement. You couldn’t make it up. Instead of rebuilding, Debenhams would build a new Paulden’s store in the former Rylands Warehouse on Piccadilly Gardens.

The view along Corporation Street with the Arndale on the left. Photo: David Dixon.

In the 60s, Manchester’s two main shopping streets were Market Street and Oldham Street. It was on the latter that you would find C&As and the Affleck and Brown Department Store (that was also bought) by Debenhams. It is this store after which Afflecks Palace is named, although the store was actually in the neighbouring Smithfield Building.

The retail centre of gravity would eventually shift northwards — in part due to the appeal of the posh department store Kendal, Milne and Faulkner (later known just as Kendals and now part of House of Fraser), which anchored itself on Deansgate. This would be bolstered by Marks and Spencers opening a large store at the bottom of Market Street, meaning the corner of Oldham Street and Market Street was no longer the heart of the city’s retailing, but the edge. The department stores on Oldham Street closed and the Woolworth on Piccadilly burnt down in a tragic fire in 1979, explaining why the council were so keen on redeveloping the northern side of Market Street.

Of course, back then, it wasn’t all shops in this area. The Magic Village mentioned in the introduction to this piece occupied the alleyways and courts north of Market Street. By the late 1960s the council had used an act of parliament to close down the bars and buy up the land and building. An opportunity to expand even further presented itself when the Manchester Guardian vacated its offices on the Southern side of Market Street (where Boots now stands). This opened up the prospect of the new shopping centre bridging over the street.

The job of building the new shopping centre was given to the Arndale Property Trust. The Yorkshire-based company had been established after the war by a baker, Arnold Hagenbach, and a former civil servant and estate agent, Sam Chippendale — both of whom hailed from Otley. Their business’s name was a neat combination of ‘Arnold’ and ‘Chippendale’. Chippendale was the front man: a blunt, plain-spoken Yorkshire man who could persuade sceptical Northern councillors that the future lay in tearing down their town centres and putting up something a bit more modern. According to Kefford’s account, they took inspiration for their malls from North America — Arndale’s directors would be sent to the United States and Canada in the 50s to meet with architects who specialised in shopping centres. Their first development had been the Arndale Centre in Jarrow (all of their schemes were called Arndale Centres, although many have since been re-named). They ended up building 24 shopping centres mostly in the North of England, but including the Wandsworth Arndale in London.

The contemporary Arndale Centre. Photo: Jack Dulhanty/The Mill.

The Manchester scheme would have been their biggest but, by the time the public enquiry opened in 1968, the Arndale Property Trust had been bought by Town and City Properties. The scheme for the Manchester Arndale was designed by Wilson and Womersley Architects (who also designed the Crescents in Hulme) and, to their credit, they did point out the weakness of their brief, which specified no natural light and limited frontages except on Market Street: done this way, it would produce a very introverted building. Presumably no response was forthcoming. Construction started in 1972 and the centre was fully open by 1979.

Then in 1996, the IRA detonated a bomb on Corporation Street injuring 220 people but miraculously killing no one. It was a tragedy, true, but in terms of urban planning, arguably it was a stroke of good luck. The damage to the Arndale Centre meant the hated ‘bile coloured tiles’ were largely blasted away and led to it being fully refurbished and massively improved around the same time its biggest competition, the Trafford Centre, opened its doors. Unlike its earlier incarnation, the redeveloped Arndale Centre offered more glass, more windows, and more variety in architecture. It looked better integrated into the street outside, rather than standing like a blank wall.

The legacy of the Arndale today is open to debate. I imagine most of us would have loved to see what the Magic Village would have become: the Northern Quarter on LSD? But there is also a case to be made that the Arndale saved Manchester’s shopping.

An Office for Fair Trading Report in 2011 into the purchase of the Trafford Centre by Intu (they also owned a share in the Arndale Centre) found that 75% of the Trafford Centre retailers were also present in the Arndale Centre and those that had opened stores in the former didn’t seem to have lost takings in their city centre store. The report concluded that Manchester City Centre had survived the opening of the Trafford Centre. This was not inevitable — see the example of Sheffield, which never managed to build an in-town shopping centre and, as a result, was devastated commercially when the Meadowhall Shopping Centre opened on the edge of the city.

Photo: Daniel Harvey Gonzalez/In Pictures via Getty Images.

It may be a monster that obliterated one of the most interesting quarters of the city, but the Arndale Centre is also a saviour, at least of the city’s retail standing. Still, there’s an irony at play here. Over the past few years, I worked together with authors Vicky Payne and Lucy Montague on the book High Street: How Our Town Centres Can Bounce Back From The Retail Crisis, which delves into the crisis in the high street which started in 2017.

The conclusion we reached was that it wasn’t the high street which was the problem at all, but big retail. Brands like Debenhams and Arcadia (who are behind shops like Topshop and Burtons) have collapsed in the face of online shopping and changing habits and the sort of shops the Arndale caters for are in long-term decline. The future of healthy town and city centres? Sadly, it’s about exactly the sort of thing the quarter demolished to make way for the Arndale Centre offered: culture, leisure, independent businesses and the ability to offer something completely authentic and unique. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the Magic Village gets its revenge yet: maybe one day the Arndale will be razed to the ground, and a new set of clubs, bars and independent traders will take its place.