Shopping
It probably didn’t feel like it at the time, but the IRA bomb which went off in central Manchester in 1996 created a great opportunity to redevelop the retail heart of Manchester around Exchange Square and Market Street into England’s most lucrative shopping real estate outside London, now christened the Millennium Quarter.
From the wreckage of the Corn Exchange came The Triangle, a 21st century shopping mall hidden behind the face of the original building, boasting high quality chain stores such as Jigsaw Kitchen, Muji, Jerry’s Home Store and Mikey Jewellery, and is home to Terence Conran’s first non-London venture, the Zinc Bar and Grill.
The accent of recent retail development in the Millennium Quarter has been on the upmarket end of the trade, a reflection of the growing commercial success of Manchester in recent years. Harvey Nichols arrived in 2002, the same year that Selfridges opened its second Manchester store in Exchange Square.
The rebirth of Manchester’s central shopping district will soon be complete as the 1970s Arndale Centre is in the throes of a £150m redevelopment which will see part of it demolished and rebuilt and the hideous yellow ceramic tiles that clad its exterior removed. The centre is home to a number of department stores and the full range of High Street names are represented.
The most prestigious shops – designer names such as DKNY, Armani, Boss, Vidal Sassoon and Westwood – meanwhile are to be found around St Ann’s Square, off Deansgate, King Street and in the Victorian Barton Arcade.
More recent developments try to combine upmarket retail, leisure and entertainment facilities under one roof, and one of the most recent examples is the Great Northern, a brand new shopping and leisure complex housed within a Grade II listed Victorian railway warehouse near Deansgate Locks containing designer shops, a cinema, restaurants, bars, a Lotus car dealership and Virgin’s first ‘Active Pure Fitness’ centre or, in other words, a gym.
Manchester is also fairly unusual in that its ‘out of town’ shopping emporium is actually within the city limits, at Trafford Park to the south-west of the city. As well as all the usual multiples that you would expect to find at a major US-style mall, the Trafford Centre is also the location of Selfridges’ first store outside London, which opened in with the centre in 1998, and the 300-acre site includes a covered market, an enormous food court and a 20-screen cinema.
If all this rampant consumerism gets too much, an alternative shopping experience is available at Affleck’s Palace – Manchester’s answer to Camden Market – which describes itself as an “independent enterprise for the independent entrepreneur” selling everything from body jewellery to Japanese kitsch accessories to pagan lifestyle supplies as well as more conventional records, T-shirts and second-hand clothes.
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