They succeeded on their second attempt: in 1992 a series of IRA bombs timed to catch mid-week Christmas shoppers left 65 people injured and damaged Deansgate office blocks, but left the city essentially unharmed.
From the terrorists’ point of view, it was a botched job. But the Manchester bomb of 15 June 1996 caused chaos. More than 200 people were injured – but none killed – and what was Marks & Spencer, along with everything else at the junction of Cross Street and Corporation Street, became a pile of rubble. Some 200,000 sq ft of shops and 300,000 sq ft of offices were destroyed. A red post box survived.
In the weeks after the bomb, speculation focused on the Arndale Centre. Had the 20-storey Arndale Tower been destabilised by the explosion? Would the entire shopping centre – thanks to its yellow tiled façade, known as the largest urinal in Europe – have to be demolished? Structural engineers eventually gave the Arndale a clean bill of health.
Today the 1.6m sq ft Arndale – extended and refurbished thanks to the opportunities the bomb created – is trading more successfully than ever for owners intu and M&G Real Estate.
But in some respects, the bomb changed everything. Until 1996 the focus of city centre regeneration efforts had, at the behest of the Central Manchester Development Corporation, been on the southern fringe around Whitworth Street and Castlefield. The explosion’s shock waves forced attention back onto the core.
Meanwhile, the effort to rebuild the city centre meant daily co-operation between the Town Hall and Downing Street. Sharing with No 10 became a habit in Manchester – and No 10 learned to trust the city. Preparations for the 2002 Commonwealth Games deepened the Manchester-Whitehall relationship. Today this 20-year-old partnership is at the root of the DevoManc revolution about to deliver billions of pounds of public spending, and real political power, to the city’s new elected mayor.
And there’s more. The urgent rebuilding effort ended decades of suspicion between the business community and the Labour-run city council. Post bomb, following a lead from the property and retail sectors, council and business formed a bond that is still at the root of Manchester’s success.
Peter Gallagher, then a director at Dunlop Heywood, today at Colliers International, says: “The bomb taught all sides – Town Hall, Whitehall, local business – how to behave and get on with each other. That post-bomb change of attitude made Manchester different to any other city.”
Manchester City Council prefers not to talk about the bomb. Leader Sir Richard Leese and chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein say it is time for Manchester to move on, adding: “While some regeneration plans were further accelerated in the aftermath of the bomb, it is a myth that the IRA bomb somehow kick-started the regeneration of the city.”
Most in the property business don’t quite agree. True, Manchester was benefiting from regional consolidation and sporadic regeneration efforts before 1996 – but 1996 marked a watershed. Rupert Barron, in 1996 new to the city as head of office agency at Chesterton, is now a partner at WHR. He remembers the Sunday morning briefing at the Town Hall in the immediate aftermath of the Saturday bomb.
“There was a plan even then,” he says. “The bomb accelerated regeneration. What might have taken years was prioritised because everyone wanted and needed it to happen.”
In three hectic years Exchange Square was created, the Corn Exchange rebuilt, the old Shambles Square demolished and a new shopping street created by M&G Real Estate as part of the £1.2bn refurbishment. Simultaneously, a city centre population of just 76 – yes, 76 – began to rise as apartments appeared. Today it is approaching 25,000.
Londoners – and Brummies, and Scousers – have often found Manchester an unsettling place. And sometimes it can be. But it has, and has always had, frightening amounts of energy. Step off the train at Piccadilly today and you can feel it crackle in the uniquely humid air. Twenty years ago Manchester suffered a trauma that it promptly, and typically, turned into a blessing.
“Yes, it was a fantastic opportunity,” says Ken Bishop, now development consultant at JLL but in 1996 head of office agency at DTZ. “A fantastic opportunity that the council grasped with both hands. It has been the stepping stone to lots of other schemes we’re seeing today. Hermes/Co-op’s £800m NOMA scheme, Tristram/Ask’s speculative Greengate office schemes… the bomb’s aftershock is still continuing.”
