page_title: Manchester Arndale
section_title: Pre-1971 streets and buildings
hierarchical_section_title: Manchester Arndale / History / Pre-1971 streets and buildings
caption_attribution_description: English: Withy Grove, Manchester 1n 1967. All these buildings have been demolished. The Arndale Centre is here now.
context_page_description: Manchester Arndale is a large shopping centre in Manchester, England. It was constructed in phases between 1972 and 1979, at a cost of £100 million. Manchester Arndale is the largest of the chain of Arndale Centres built across the UK in the 1960s and 1970s. It was redeveloped after the 1996 Manchester bombing.
  The centre has a retail floorspace of just under 1,400,000 sq ft, making it Europe's third largest city-centre shopping mall. It is one of the largest shopping centres in the UK, with 41 million visitors annually, ahead of the Trafford Centre, which attracts 35 million.
context_section_description: The area was a patchwork of mostly Victorian buildings on a 17th and 18th century layout of streets, alleys, and courts. A map used for the 1961 meeting of the British Association shows shops fronting Market Street and Cross Street, with warehousing or office buildings behind.
  Neither Stewart's The Stones of Manchester (1956) nor Sharp et al.'s survey Manchester Buildings (1966) describe the area or any buildings in particular. Stewart is generally strong on Victorian architecture, and none of its 60 "principal buildings" were within the redevelopment area. Sharp et al. covered older and new buildings; of the many described over fifty are in the city centre but none were in the cleared area. Pevsner, writing in 1969 when clearance was imminent, found nothing of note.  H. W. D. Sculthorpe, the town clerk, described the buildings as obsolescent in evidence to the public enquiry.  Shop Property predicted in 1971 that as "new buildings replace the existing dilapidated ones" the city centre would lose its Coronation Street image, and become "very attractive" to retailers.  The Guardian, which had offices in Cross Street, wrote in 1976 that Market Street had been "depressing and decaying" for 30 years.
  Later descriptions are more complimentary. Spring (in 1979) wrote of "monstrosities that have ousted the city's grand heritage of nineteenth century commercial and industrial architecture—if the recently completed mammoth and distinctly lavatorial Arndale Centre is anything to go by".  Hamilton (in 2001) wrote that the area reflected Manchester's wealth and leadership in the middle of the 19th century, with buildings designed by leading UK architects.  Moran (in 2006) called it a "maze of characterful streets".
  In the early 1960s, the area had several establishments that made Manchester, in Lee's description, a rival to Hamburg as the "fun city of Europe". Unlicensed coffee bars where people listened to live and recorded music and which did not serve alcohol were effectively outside police control. A 1965 police report by plain-clothes cadets known as the "mod squad" described them as unsanitary, dimly-lit drug dens, run by "men of colour", where young men were fleeced of their money and young women trapped into prostitution. The Manchester Corporation Act 1965 was passed after the report and closed most of them. The Cinephone Cinema was the first in Manchester to show 'continental' X-rated films, mostly erotica. Second-hand bookstalls and what Lee described as "Manchester's very own Carnaby Street" had opened by the early 1970s. The Seven Stars on Withy Grove was one of Manchester's oldest pubs, with a licence dating back to 1356; Redford claimed it to be "oldest licensed house in Great Britain", though this was probably not the case.
caption: Withy Grove, looking west in 1967 before redevelopment
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