Introduction

On a Saturday morning in June 1996, Manchester city centre was ripped apart by the detonation of a bomb, planted in a van on Cross Street by the Provisional IRA. One of the enduring images of the post-explosion devastation was the survival of a Victorian pillar box, almost at the epicentre of the blast. Above the iconic red receptacle was another resilient form, the wavy concrete canopy of Michael House, home to Marks & Spencer, from where the rapid evacuation of the city centre commenced [Figure 5.01].¹ Architects, Cruickshank & Seward (C&S), designed Michael House as a shop and offices for Unicos Property Corporation in the late 1950s. It opened as part of the first wave of post-war central area development in Manchester in 1961 on a site known as Market Place. Market Place was one of several renewal schemes that were realised in central Manchester and similar to many others in Britain and Europe. As its names suggests, this was in the historic centre of commerce and exchange of the city, close to the Cathedral. The area was extensively damaged in the Manchester Blitz of Christmas 1940 and the first new building, Longridge House, was completed to designs by H.S. Fairhurst & Sons in 1959. The remainder of the site took a further fifteen years to construct, aand was completed in 1974.

Bookended by the Blitz and a bombing, the extended post-war narrative of this site, its planning and its architecture, shows how policy affected form and how local government and the private sector negotiated, using drawings and models to interpret legislation. One of the central threads of this book, through each of the chapters, is the shifting balance of regional and national interests. Earlier chapters have looked at schemes where central government played a strong part in the determination of site, mass, form and material. This chapter focuses on the activities of local government and the impact of its successive officers in affecting the architectural outcome of Market Place. It is Manchester’s Arndale Centre that has received more attention from historians, mostly due to its monolithic beige tiled mass standing as a symbol of consumerism.² Market Place, as an earlier development, was built in parts, over a longer period of time and, as such, elaborates more nuanced discourse. Its circumstance reveals some of the debates central to post-war planning – those of conservation, mainstream modernism and urban renewal.

Figure 5.01 Cross Street Manchester, 15 June 1996. The wavy canopy of Marks & Spencer was partially destroyed at the epicenter of the blast. Also visible is the Portland stone cladding.

The IRA bombing was the catalyst for the second wave of twentieth-century renewal in the city centre of Manchester and instituted a number of public–private partnerships that were subsequently categorised as models for the ‘Entrepreneurial City’.³ However, these collaborative arrangements were not unique to the burgeoning economy of the 1990s; similar relations were at play in the post-war renewal of many provincial cities from the late 1950s. In the ‘renewal cities’ of the Midlands, the North and Scotland, the political, cultural and economic conditions were very different to those of the earlier developed ‘recovery cities’. As we have read, in 1960s Manchester, the entire city centre was considered by planners as a three-dimensional totality. The story of Central Station in Chapter 4 explained, in part, the role of local authority planners, their powers in relation to official advice and impacts upon architectural form. Here, we look at the how the physical frameworks proposed by successive officers of Manchester Corporation affected the design of Market Place. To do this will require a step backwards in time to the Manchester Blitz of 1940–41, and the subsequent planning and design eventually published as the City of Manchester Plan in 1945. The period between 1945 and the completion of the Market Place development in 1974 is crucial here, particularly with reference to changing cultures in British architecture and urbanism, that witnessed the full-scale adoption and adaptation of modernist ideas in architecture and city planning for the first time in the UK.

The act of construction forms only a short part of the development process and, as shown in earlier chapters, there are innumerable external forces acting upon the production of architecture. These forces are amplified in complex city centre sites where landowners and stakeholders are multiple and the wider economic and socio-cultural impacts are felt by large numbers of citizens. Such complexity can result in extended periods of consultation and approval that, in turn, have their own impact, as statute and conceptions of what constitutes good urban form shift according to new precedents, experience and theories. In the context of Market Place, there are a number of thresholds or transitions in ideas, policies, governance and personnel that influenced its formal outcomes. Most acute are the relationships between the two major urban plans for Manchester of 1945 and 1967, the influences of one upon the other and the prevailing urban design ideals manifest in each [Figure 5.02]. Ultimately, this chapter addresses the manner in which these plans and their negotiation impacted upon the design of Market Place by C&S.

Locally, the transition of office from City Engineer and Surveyor Rowland Nicholas, to City Planner John Millar was representative of the changing shape of local government and the roles and responsibilities of its officers. Planners became more important than architects in the interpretation of national guidance as the traditional act of civic design gave way to urban planning and urban renewal. Nationally, ideas published in The Concise Townscape (1961) and Traffic in Towns (1963) and the rise of the architectural preservation movement, also influenced discourse around the development of Market Place. Gordon Cullen’s book, The Concise Townscape, captured the transnational rejection of commercial development in the UK, as Kevin Lynch and Jane Jacobs’s works did in the United States.⁴ Cullen’s was an experiential approach based on his own first-hand observations of the ‘serial vision’ of various historic centres. Colin Buchanan’s Traffic in Towns was similarly a warning against the destruction of the social life of cities, but aimed to address rising car ownership through planning, and synthesised many ideas about urban design that were prevalent at the time.⁵ Multi-layered, mixed-use, retail, commercial and leisure centres with basement or multi-storey car parks, served by newly engineered ring roads, typified the development of the renewal cities. The model drew on US precedent, but also on earlier European modernist ideas of zoning. For planners this was a chance to test their training in forging city space by drawing together its functions in a designed assemblage. It also meant negotiating the demands of the private sector investors. For the public this meant new commercial and retail encounters.

Figure 5.02 Extracts from Rowland Nicholas’s plan of 1945 and John Millar’s plan of 1967. The red rectangle picks out the area of the Market Place development. The solid black areas in Millar’s plan indicate the intended areas of pedestrianisation.

Retail architecture in Manchester

Architecture for retailing in Manchester grew from its markets. The open aprons of Smithfield, to the north of the city centre, were covered with iron framed, glass lined structures in the middle of the nineteenth century. They were designed by a number of different architectural practices between 1846 and 1873.⁶ The market halls of Upper and Lower Campfield (Mangall & Littlewood) were constructed along Liverpool Road in the 1880s. Affluence and economic buoyancy in the Victorian era led Manchester property owner John Hope Barton to adopt the Milanese model and to institute the first of a cluster of glazed galleria, the Barton Arcade, at a site on Deansgate (Corbett, Raby & Sawyer, 1871). This grouping of enclosed shopping spaces created a ‘civic complex … replicated in many other British towns’;⁷ the Corporation promoted its expansion across the city centre, but no new arcades were built.

The most significant new shopping experience of the twentieth century arrived following the completion of Kendal Milne’s department store (J.S. Beaumont & Sons) in 1939. The outbreak of war the same year meant that the store was not occupied until after the cessation of conflict.⁸ Thus, the first new retail experience in post-war Manchester was not in a sleek modern shopping centre, but was contained in Kendal Milne, the established well-mannered, late-deco styled institution that had traded in the city since 1836 [Figure 5.03].

Cruickshank & Seward’s scheme for the new Marks & Spencer store in the early 1960s mimicked the Portland stone of Kendal Milne in its white concrete. However, the exuberant cantilevered canopy symbolised a city on the cusp of expansion and the store and office on the corner of Cross Street and St Mary’s Gate, only yards from the Victorian arcades, embodied a new era of mainstream modernism in post-war Britain and encompassed formal ideas invested in the ideological and aesthetic shifts in architecture and urbanism after 1945.

Blitzed

In 1945, the publication of Nicholas’s Plan heralded change in the city and signalled the professions’ transition to modern zoning and modern architecture. Manchester had experienced several bombing raids on the city in 1940–41, the most sustained of which was the Christmas Blitz between 22 and 24 December 1940. This was the catalyst, though not the cause, behind the preparation of a plan to rebuild Manchester. The area around Market Place was significantly damaged [Figure 5.04]. Buildings were pulled down and sites cleared in the wake of the Blitz. Remaining standing amidst the levelled rubble was the Old Wellington Inn, a public house of medieval, half-timbered construction.

Figure 5.03 Exterior of Kendal, Milne & Co.’s department store in Manchester, c.1950.

Figure 5.04 Extract from bomb damage maps to show area around Market Place. The buildings shaded in solid red were completely destroyed.

In Nicholas’s 1945 vision for the city centre there was no place for the piecemeal retention of historic buildings. The Old Wellington was one of many surviving structures eclipsed by the ambitious replanning of the central area. Within the Plan only eight buildings were identified as ‘historic’, including the Cathedral, St Anne’s Church, Rylands Library and the Art Gallery. Other buildings completed in the 1930s would also be retained; the Town Hall Extension, the Central Library, Kendal Milne and the Police Station all appeared in the illustrative plates drawn to accompany the Plan. The Plan did not, however, account for the retention of Alfred Waterhouse’s neo-Gothic Town Hall of 1877! This was destined to be replaced by a modernist building in the manner of Hornsey Town Hall (Reginald Uren, 1933–35), which itself drew on Dudok’s masterpiece at Hilversum (1931) and Östberg’s City Hall in Stockholm (1923).

Nicholas’s plan was a mixture of traditional civic design and modernist zoning, and the new buildings illustrated therein were also mixed in character [Figure 5.05]. Whilst the proposed Town Hall and bus and railway stations were imagined as contemporary, much of the commercial core and other civic buildings illustrated were rendered in a neo-classical style. The dirt and grime of the industrial age was to be cleansed and remnants such as the Old Wellington were viewed as thorns in the side of progress. This particular thorn, however, was deeply embedded in the socio-cultural history of the city, and the preservation of the inn and its neighbour, Sinclair’s Oyster Bar, would ultimately impact upon the form of the development to come.

Figure 5.05 Drawing by J.D.M. Harvey showing the new Town Hall (centre) and the proposed boulevard to connect Albert Square to the Law Courts beyond (see Figure 7.03). In the foreground on the left is the John Rylands Library.

Conservation was only one of the forces acting upon development. The Blitz and subsequent planning presented opportunities for the rationalisation of transportation systems; primary among these was provision for the motor vehicle. The design of highways ‘to ease the flow of traffic’ was first among four ‘clear-cut’ phases of planning that would enable ‘future development’.⁹ Despite the modernist zoning principles attached to the reimagined central area of Manchester, the new city was unable to fully obscure the patterns of the past. As in many other replanned centres, a series of ring roads were proposed that would link the radial routes that had traditionally converged on the core. These rings would ‘relieve the city centre of all through traffic’, ‘clarify its road pattern’ and take ‘the fullest advantage of the scattered damage done by the 1940 air raids’.¹⁰ Highway planning was designed to facilitate the proposed zoning within which landmarks would be established to create ‘focal points’ to afford ‘coherence and architectural balance to the city centre’. Finally, the question of passenger transport would be addressed by improving rail connections.

This fourfold process, of highways design, zoning, focal points and rationalised passenger transportation, was spelled out in an assured manner by Nicholas but was nonetheless recognised as ‘pointing the way to further inquiries’. Although the plan stipulated that ‘none of the proposals [could] be regarded as final’, the proposal for a city centre ring road would nevertheless overshadow and inform a significant amount of development for the following thirty years, including that of Market Place and the Cathedral Area.¹¹

The published plan for the central area of Manchester in 1945, whilst overlooking large portions of the Victorian city now regarded as heritage assets, contained an ambition to create a precinct around the Cathedral [Figure 5.06]. The proposed traffic alignments were designed to remove vehicles from the front of the Cathedral and allow new gardens to be created over a culverted River Irwell. Amongst the highway works was a large roundabout whose situation would take ‘full advantage of the blitz clearance’. As a further indication of the lingering and long-lived ambition of the 1945 Plan, the Cathedral Precinct was envisaged for a second time in 1962 by Rowland Nicholas, in 1964 by John Millar, in 1988 by Fairhurst and again in 1996 by a consortium led by EDAW following the IRA bombing. It is the successive master plans, of 1945, 1962 and 1964 by the local authority that are most relevant here.¹²

Figure 5.06 Extract from central area plan (1945) to show precinct around Cathedral and the Market Place area immediately to the south.

Planning, preservation and public–private partnerships

The illustration of Nicholas’s first plan of 1945 showed a group of three large commercial blocks of between 5 and 8 storeys tall, each with a central atrium. They were imagined in an orthodox orthogonal form and drawn in a manner that did not imply any particular architectural style [Figure 5.07]. Within the central area, the local authority had to work with existing legislation to determine the works that could be sanctioned and attract central funding from sources such as the War Damage Commission. A small Ministry of Town and Country Planning (MTCP) was hived off from the MoW in 1943 and the Town and Country Planning Act (1944) allowed for the development of areas of bomb damage or serious obsolescence. Market Place was one of nine official bomb-damaged areas that Manchester sought to repair and was scheduled as the first area in the city to be redeveloped under the guidance of the 1945 Plan.¹³ Lord Reith famously encouraged towns and cities to ‘plan boldly and comprehensively’ in 1941, but the powers to do so were not vested until revisions in the Town and Country Planning Act (1947).¹⁴ Nonetheless, well-intentioned local authorities were still answerable to their electorate and in 1948 Nicholas’s plans were presented at a public inquiry.

Figure 5.07 Drawing by P.D. Hepworth of the Cathedral Precinct. Above the Cathedral are shown the first illustrations of the new Market Place, a rectangular road junction and a series of orthogonal commercial blocks.

Prior to the preparation of reconstruction plans, the Old Wellington had not been protected. It was during the public inquiry that the first notion of its designation as a Scheduled Ancient Monument was mooted.¹⁵ Such appeals were not limited to the inquiry. In his 1948 Presidential Address to the Royal Manchester Institution titled ‘History and the City Plan’, Liberal Party politician Philip M. Oliver called for the preservation of certain warehouses, merchants’ palaces and ‘little inns’, including the Old Wellington.¹⁶ Manchester City Council’s application for the right to apply a compulsory purchase order to the 7.32-acre site was approved in January 1949. The approval came with the caveat that the Old Wellington should be protected and that any plans for redevelopment that would affect it should be referred to the MoW.¹⁷

With the exception of the Old Wellington Inn, the remaining property in the Market Place area was described as ‘little better than commercial slums’.¹⁸ The practice of building conservation before 1939 was largely focused on the preservation of ancient monuments and the upkeep of property owned by the National Trust.¹⁹ It was not until the 1940s when articles about restoration of historic buildings in urban settings were published in the architectural press – a natural response to the destruction wrought upon towns and cities across Europe. Planning literature on conservation in the English language did not emerge until the 1970s.²⁰ There were two distinct choices for cities when conflict ceased: to reconstruct their historic centres or to design and build completely new districts; most places did a little of both. These approaches captured two popular desires, one for a return to the past and another imbued with progressive optimism following years of war.

In Manchester, despite a lack of regard for the neo-Gothic Town Hall, the modest and ramshackle public house reflected the public’s appreciation of urban heritage and the increased professional focus on building conservation. Nicholas’s initial plans did not account for the inn’s retention, but in July 1950, by a huge majority, the City Council referred the scheme back to the Town Planning Committee. Not a single council member spoke in favour of the plans as proposed and several aldermen questioned the demolition of the ‘irreplaceable’ Wellington Inn and the adjoining oyster bar.²¹ The protection and preservation of these buildings had significant impact on forthcoming proposals and the built scheme.

In January 1953 Nicholas’s department presented revised proposals for the ‘old Market Place’. His team prepared a ‘rough model with moveable blocks’ that was described as ‘diagrammatic, and … subject to alteration to suit the requirements of private developers’.²² It was, however, intended to suggest potential phasing, the broad relationship between site and floor area, building heights and distance apart, much like the later advisory schemes for the CDAs of the city centre. The Corporation lacked the funds to develop Market Place themselves, but were determined to use their powers to improve its feasibility for construction. Several interests on the site had to be addressed and through the assembly process they slowly acquired the necessary land to realise comprehensive development.²³

In legislative terms, there were two major changes to the Town and Country Planning Act that altered the landscape for private developers and accelerated development outside London. The amendments of the 1953 Act lifted the development charge and, in the Act of 1954, building licensing was removed.²⁴ The Conservative administration of the early 1950s was increasingly reluctant to allow ‘completely municipal central area developments’. They viewed the ‘developer friendly system’ created in 1954 as encouraging a speculative, commercial approach, which in turn satisfied a demand for the consumption of previously rationed goods and services.²⁵ The building boom in cities outside London was heralded by the first major development by Arndale at Jarrow in the north-east (1961). Arndale was formed in Bradford in 1950 by Arnold Hagenbach and Sam Chippindale and began by developing small parades of shops in Yorkshire.²⁶ Jarrow was a comprehensive development in cooperation with the local authority, a deal based on the model used in the blitzed recovery cities, where local authorities effectively leased the land to developers to configure with their existing statutorily approved master plans. This approach was relatively efficient in a town or city where wide areas were destroyed but subject to speculative acquisitions in places with less damage and multiple ownerships.²⁷ Manchester fell into the second category and Market Place was assembled through a series of such purchases.

Favourable conditions for development created by changes in legislation and the general economic recovery put local authority planning departments under pressure. They were supposed to direct, negotiate and approve plans that were progressing at an unprecedented rate. Comprehensive developments were managed using the CDA mechanism, which, by the 1950s, ‘had largely superseded the 1944 Act’s redevelopment areas’.²⁸ Using the drawings, models and specifications of the advisory schemes was one way for local authority planners to influence the form and content of a CDA. The other important governing factor in the physical arrangement of proposals was the rationalisation of existing road systems, which often followed medieval patterns. The modernist organisation of space was not enough to undo the radial forces of the medieval market town. The geographic, economic and political orders that had established the morphologies of large British towns and cities were too ingrained to simply dissolve under the applied rules of modernism in planning. Despite the loosening of physical contextual strictures upon the act of design (the loss of the tradition of ‘civic design’)²⁹ the new city was unable to fully obscure the patterns of the past. Ring and radial roads that adopted and adapted existing routes were utilised widely as the proposed solution to the knotted congestion of the market town. Many contemporary accounts by local authority planners referred to the primacy of highways planning and its influence on the design and situation of new development.³⁰ Planning departments were thus trying to negotiate the complex long-term ambitions of highway engineering and a raft of applications for new development.

Shifting styles

As new development accelerated across the renewal cities, highway construction tried to keep pace. Ultimately, many cities only partially realised the extents of their ambitious post-war inner-urban motorway planning: Manchester’s case is explored in the concluding chapter. Their construction was subject to delay due to complex land ownership patterns and funding that depended on public–private partnerships, which also took time to negotiate. Even though a road was as speculative a prospect as a development, the drawings of the proposed position of the city centre road and inner ring road in Manchester were much more precise than the information presented in the planning advisory schemes. The prevalent attitude was that roads had to be engineered first and buildings would follow. In the case of Market Place this meant that several highway designs informed its development and each left an incisive mark.

Figure 5.08 Longridge House, H.S. Fairhurst & Son, 1959. Demolished 1996. View from Corporation Street.

The first new building on the Market Place site was Longridge House (H.S. Fairhurst & Sons, 1959) [Figure 5.08]. Its form and material related to ideas of the immediate post-war period and it appeared out of date when new. It is a useful example with which to consider stylistic architectural shifts (in the UK and in Manchester specifically) and the impact of policy guidance upon form. The eight-storey building was home to the British Engine Insurance Company and was designed in the Festival Style. Westmorland slate was used as a facing material and Portland stone dressed the openings. This was typical of Fairhurst’s post-war approach to design and in contrast to the ‘white’ buildings by Arthur Gibbon for C&S that followed. Gibbon’s buildings were designed for the new city, for the reimagined city of John Millar’s team.

Longridge House belonged to Rowland Nicholas’s city – it was designed and built with the future comprehensive development in mind, but according to road alignments established in the 1945 Plan.³¹ The junctions defined in Manchester in 1945 were like those specified and illustrated in official documents where roads intersected in plan with diagonal lines, not curves – creating ‘square-abouts’ rather than roundabouts [Figure 5.09].³² The footprint of Longridge House’s plan followed the angles of the proposed junction, which mirrored published diagrams. The rest of Market Place was later developed within a revised plan for the city centre road that introduced plazas and high-level walkways to separate pedestrians from traffic. In this way Longridge House offers a view of the palimpsestic ghosts left by unrealised plans and of the awkward nature of urban and architectural design when dealing with decades of development. Its plan was of another age and its material expression similarly dated; the rear of the building failed to integrate with the new levels behind it. Longridge House was anomalous to the rest of Market Place; its completion date at the very end of 1959 offers a neat, if convenient, threshold into Manchester of the 1960s.

Figure 5.09 Extracts from government publications on highways and junction design from the 1940s.

Mainstream modern

The architecture of large-scale development in renewal cities was invariably a form of mainstream modernism. As such its place in architectural history is not assured. Its ubiquitous presence in renewal cities, however, is important in understanding the forces shaping urban landscapes in the 1960s and 1970s. The development of central Manchester and Market Place were typical of the experiences of many British cities after 1959. As Oliver Marriot observed, ‘[f]rom about 1960 there was suddenly a switch of emphasis towards shops and the centres of provincial towns’.³³ There was also a political consensus towards renewal and continuity in central government support for such development.³⁴ Furthermore, regional policy for the dispersal of government offices led to a boom in the commercial sector through the 1960s.³⁵ These forces, combined with the earlier relaxation of building controls, made for an unparalleled expansion and renewal programme in provincial cities, especially the metropolitan centres.

Unlike other cities, where established businesses owned pivotal sites and ‘[t]he supply of land in existing shopping pitches was slowed down by the policy of some of the biggest retailers, notably Marks and Spencer’ – Manchester accommodated Marks & Spencer in the first new speculative retail development of the post-war.³⁶ Unicos Property Corporation developed the site next to Longridge House in partnership with Manchester Corporation. The Corporation provided two levels of basement car parking and Unicos constructed the shops and offices [Figure 5.10]. Work was under way in 1958.³⁷ Discussions between the developer, C&S and the Corporation took place from 1956. Initial, rather sketchy, drawings of the proposed building, showing its podium and tower configuration, were lodged with the office of the City Engineer [Figure 5.11].³⁸ From the plan it can be observed that the original intention was to provide a number of smaller, subdivided retail units and the early iterations of the elevation did not include the distinctive wavy canopy. Nonetheless, the scheme was clearly of the modern idiom and typified the architectural approach applied to the centres of other renewal cities.

When Marks & Spencer opened their new store, it was touted as ‘the big story of 1961’ in their internal newsletter, St Michael News.³⁹ It was certainly the first modern retail building in Manchester [Figure 5.12] and one of the earliest schemes in the UK to assume a podium and tower configuration. In order to articulate the two formal elements of the building the plant equipment was housed in an intermediate floor with a narrowed footprint that visually separated the offices above from the shop beneath. The offices were let to other commercial tenants and accessed from the north in a situation that would eventually be subsumed by the wider development of Market Place.

Figure 5.10 Entrance to the Corporation’s underground car park. In the right foreground are the Old Wellington and Sinclair’s. In the background on the left is Longridge House and on the right Michael House is under construction.

Structurally, the in-situ concrete frame was on a regular grid and was a conventional solution for the time. The ‘lively feature’ of an ‘undulating concrete shell canopy’ was considered both expressive and exciting – it was only 100 mm thick and cantilevered over 2.5 m from the face of the building.⁴⁰ The shell was actually stronger than the equivalent slab canopy and, as it was thinner, was also comparable in terms of cost. The cost of commercial buildings was a severely limiting factor everywhere for architectural design, but was more marked in development outside London where much lower rental returns meant lower budgets for design and construction. In this sense, Gibbon’s concrete specification may be viewed as a response to a constrained budget. Areas of the long street-level facades were clad in white Portland stone. Gibbon chose to match this with a white concrete product known as Snowcrete, a cement product also quarried from Portland, Dorset. White concrete was one of Gibbon’s signatures in his later buildings and was especially well applied in the series of buildings at UMIST.⁴¹ The tower element of the scheme had a lighter appearance than other C&S buildings of a similar scale. This was due to the primary structural columns being set inside the external wall line which permitted the use of narrow external columns, slender window frames and mosaic-faced spandrel panels, which all contributed to an airy appearance. This lightness was further emphasised in its contrast with the monolithic appearance of the stairwell. Much of the design could be considered as contemporary, but little could be described as unique. This was typical of the type of mainstream modern architecture realised in renewal cities and typical of Gibbon’s approach – he was adept at identifying trends and applying them in new configurations to C&S projects.⁴²

Figure 5.11 Early drawings of development for Unicos Property Corporation by Cruickshank & Seward, 1958.

Another typical condition of mainstream development was the growth of the property companies and the rise of private sector investment. Between 1958 and 1962 the value of shares in property companies rose from £103m to over £800m. Companies expanded, more new companies came to the market, more deals in shares took place and huge personal dividends were drawn down as the ‘property boom’ took hold.⁴³ In Market Place this played out over several years as Central and District Properties Ltd (C&D) gained interests in the site by piecemeal acquisitions.⁴⁴ They took over Unicos in 1959 and began to purchase other sites in an attempt at land assembly for comprehensive development. C&S put forward the first proposal for the rest of the site in November 1961.⁴⁵

Figure 5.12 Michael House and Marks & Spencer. To the rear the cranes for the further development of Market Place can be seen. In the foreground are the hoardings around the site of the Arndale Shopping Centre.

Amidst this landscape of expansion and mergers there remains little indication of precisely how Marks & Spencer came to be tenants, nor when C&S became consultant architects for C&D, but the design for the rear of Michael House took account of the development to follow in a way that Longridge House had not: ‘It was envisaged that this building [Michael House] would form the first phase of a larger Scheme [sic] and the western wall was in fact designed to permit a later extension.’⁴⁶ The inflated property companies, in a confluence with planning policy, were in a position to realise these large-scale projects that subsumed existing street patterns and defined new urban topographies.

New topographies

Elevated pedestrian environments, sunken vehicular carriageways, hovering monorails and aerial motorways were the motifs of a generation of architects and planners who sought to redefine our cities. Their popular production in the mainstream press heralded a new age for British inner-urban environments. As, Rowland Nicholas approached retirement age, in November 1961 he provided a report to the Town Planning and Buildings Committee that illustrated his understanding of how far urban design and commercial realities had shifted since his remarkable plan of 1945. He described the integrated nature of traffic, comprehensive development and environment as ‘complex and completely interrelated’.⁴⁷ A number of specific statements reflected the changing planning ideals of the time. Nicholas accepted that his plan, as envisaged in 1945, was no longer an appropriate framework for development and underlined the need for the new style of urban planning that would eventually be delivered under John Millar’s direction. The prospect of comprehensive development and its use in this interrelated landscape was ‘coming to be accepted by developers’ who understood ‘that piecemeal building no longer provide[d] a satisfactory solution’.⁴⁸ The segregation of traffic and pedestrians would be achieved in several ways including the ‘provision of overhead pavements’.

Nicholas also advocated that ‘a plan in three-dimensions’ should be prepared that would aid the selection of sites for comprehensive development and ‘invoke designation procedure in order to bring about satisfactory redevelopment’.⁴⁹ Amongst the proposals as Nicholas made his report were ‘several tentative schemes’ around the Cathedral that were assessed to ensure that they conformed to ‘an ultimate scheme for the area’.⁵⁰ The interrelation of sites allocated for comprehensive development was brought about by policy and popular imagination. Planning policy created the situation for great swathes of cities to be conceived in their totality. The vertical programming of the city was imagined, theorised and illustrated in the early part of the twentieth century but became a voguish reality in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Of course, this context was also exploited by a burgeoning property sector that was effectively underwritten by state sponsorship.

Figure 5.13 Rowland Nicholas’s second scheme for the area around Market Place as published in 1962/63. The ring road can be seen in the foreground and W.S. Hattrell’s scheme for the Corn Exchange sits behind the Cathedral.

Nicholas’s revised advisory scheme for the area around the Cathedral [Figures 5.13 and 5.14], including Market Place was published in 1963.⁵¹ The scheme clearly acknowledged the dramatic shift in the aesthetics of urban design, yet held steadfastly on to the highway plans of 1945. The city centre road still assumed the same route, above the River Irwell (see Chapter 6), but was no longer illustrated as a tree-lined boulevard and any sense of neo-classicism evident in the earlier civic design was erased. Instead, a complex, integrated, multi-level city was imagined where Market Place was linked by wide, habitable, bridges to the Cathedral Area and via a footbridge to the proposed Corn Exchange development, designed by W.S. Hattrell & Partners [Figure 5.15], which itself was intended to connect back to proposals for the Market Street Area (later Arndale).⁵² Not only were the individual developments conceived comprehensively, here was the integrated planning for huge parts of the centre where public and private sector collaborated in its design. In the accompanying illustrations cars were shown cruising, unimpeded by other traffic, past the landscaped cathedral gardens whilst pedestrians relaxed in cafes and perambulated amongst linked plazas, free from noise and pollution. In this revision, the city centre road became exclusively for motor vehicles and the pedestrian city found a new datum, a tabula rasa, from which to emerge.

Figure 5.14 Accompanying sketches, by David Gosling, to Nicholas’s 1962/63 Scheme. Longridge House and Michael House can be seen centre left and beneath are three proposed towers on the Market Place site. A new pedestrian plaza and a series of linked pedestrian spaces are clearly visible. This style of drawing references Cullen’s Townscape showing a sequence of enclosed squares, connecting passageways and landmarks as a means of orientation. Simultaneously, the drawing of the ring road illustrates the trend that was endorsed by Buchanan for the separation of pedestrians and traffic.

Figure 5.15 Proposals for the demolition and replacement of Manchester’s Corn Exchange, W.S. Hattrell & Partners, 1962. This scheme was never built.

At Market Place, this new datum was defined by negotiation and its definition was tied into the anticipated development of a much wider area. As with all of the CDAs in Manchester, the definition and development of Market Place was produced by the public and private sector in tandem. In this sense, it is worth considering the various advisory schemes as tools with which to influence discussions between agents of each. Nicholas’s 1963 scheme may have been a response to that tabled by developers in 1961. Each of the successive schemes by the local authority had their influence on the eventual shape of the development and one defining feature of Nicholas’s 1963 plans was the pedestrian plaza in the middle of the Market Place area, known as Shambles Square. This square was one new datum from where pedestrian connections would spring to the rest of the city – a bridge across Deansgate and another proposed above the path of the ring road aligned with Cannon Street, as well as the connection to the first floor of the existing Marks & Spencer store. The lateral and vertical position of the square became increasingly fixed during the proceeding revisions and refinements of the planning for the area. Beneath the level of the newly defined pedestrian environment new roads were designed to service the core of the city, much as outlined in Traffic in Towns. Above the precincts a series of towers were proposed, their projected height curtailed so as not to compete with the modest scale of the Cathedral.⁵³ This feature, of vertical containment, persisted through later revisions, though the alignment and form of the towers was also subject to discussion. Other mediations determined form too; the most contentious, and ultimately dramatic, negotiation was over the protection of the Old Wellington Inn.

Preservation

The means used to ensure the survival of the Old Wellington Inn and the adjoining Sinclair’s Oyster Bar were as spectacular as any of the sweeping modernist visions superimposed on the city. Publicly valued, but viewed by the developers as an obstruction to progress, their preservation was tied to the desire for comprehensive multi-level development. They were famously ‘lifted’ to meet the new datum of Shambles Square, but not before the idea of moving them was explored, or the possibility of leaving them in a trench had been examined!⁵⁴ Eventually it was considered feasible to raise the buildings on concrete stilts so that they would sit at the height of the new Shambles Square [Figure 5.16].

The Old Wellington was afforded statutory protection in the late 1940s, almost as a reaction to the first post-war proposals for the site. The act of securing the protection highlighted some of the perversities of regional government and a lack of coordination between ministries. In February 1947, as Manchester prepared the first of its Declaratory Orders for reconstruction, the Regional Director of the MoW was asked for his opinion on the proposals. The MoW requested additional copies of the documentation from the local authority and subsequently returned no comment on the proposals. In the background, and without further consultation, the MoW pursued the statutory protection of the inn as a Scheduled Ancient Monument.⁵⁵ The actions of the MoW only came to the attention of the Regional Controller of the MTCP via Manchester’s Town Clerk. He was informed in May 1948 that the solicitors acting on behalf of the owners of the inn had received notice from the MoW of their intent to include the building on a revised schedule.⁵⁶ The regional offices of the ministries were acting independently from one another and without local communications, and the matter was escalated, with some embarrassment, to central government to resolve. The view from Whitehall was that the protection of the Old Wellington Inn did not prejudice the status of the Declaratory Order as the plans for redevelopment were speculative and did not ‘commit either the Planning Authority or the Minister to the particular layout’.⁵⁷ Despite this assertion, the protection of the buildings inevitably led to their preservation and certainly impacted upon the eventual form of Market Place.

Figure 5.16 The Shambles being lifted up. The Old Wellington Inn (left) and Sinclair’s Oyster Bar (right) elevated on concrete stilts during the construction process to meet the new datum established as part of the city centre stratification and separation of cars and pedestrians.

Subsequent to the designation of the Old Wellington Inn as a Scheduled Ancient Monument, the development of Market Place stalled for a long time. Without private developers the local authority could do little as most of their resources were tied up in building new homes and schools in suburban areas. Even when C&S presented their first proposals in 1961, it was a further nine years until construction commenced.⁵⁸ During this time there were more versions of a master plan for Market Place, drawn and modelled as ‘Advisory Schemes’ within the CDA mechanisms and finally ratified in the Development Map (1967) and its approval in 1968. Within this series of plans, another set of formal characteristics emerged and were eventually built into the development. Meetings between the local authority and C&S, acting on behalf of the developer, were ongoing and undoubtedly the work of the planning department was influenced by these discussions. Nonetheless, during the protracted planning and legal phase, the local authority had their own objectives – the negotiations were not one-sided and did not necessarily kowtow to the demands of the private sector.

Negotiated design

The design of Market Place was subject to negotiation between the developer and the local authority through their respective agents. In the mid-century the legislative conditions for these negotiations gave the local authority planner considerable influence in the determination of form. The timeline of decision making over the form of the Market Place development and how decisions were communicated in published and archived drawings and models follows an imprecise path. The manner in which successive planning schemes were illustrated varied according to the audience and the purpose of the information. That which is legible from surviving records demonstrates the relationship between architect and planner in their negotiation of policy, finance and space. A series of reports from the mid-1960s captured the work of the planning department, which was engaged with planning huge swathes of the inner city as well as the central area [Figure 5.17].⁵⁹

Among the reports are photographs of a series of models that were used to illustrate and communicate three-dimensional proposals prepared by the architect-planners under the direction of John Millar. Different models were used for different purposes, study models were used to develop ideas within the department [Figure 5.20], but one huge model of the city centre was on permanent display in the foyer of the planning department in the Town Hall [Figure 1.02]. This model was used as a tool for public discussion and information and was revised to become a formal exhibit on the occasion of the publication of the City Centre Map 1967.⁶⁰ ‘The city centre map concept sprang from the work of the Planning Advisory Group (PAG) set up by the government to look at the future of development planning and reporting in 1965.’⁶¹ The major effect it had on the work of the planning department in Manchester was the combining of approaches to planning advocated in the existing statute and the new advice. The PAG recommended ‘a lively and vivid style of presentation’ which ‘could include sketches and photographs, including photographs of design models’ that ‘should be in a form suitable for publication’.⁶² As referred to in the preceding chapters, Millar’s department combined these recommendations with the existing machinery of the CDA and produced a number of three-dimensional advisory schemes that described the approach for almost the entire city centre. The drawings and models produced in the period between 1962 and 1967 are used here to show their interrelation, their use as a planning tool, and to illustrate their influence on the eventual form of Market Place.

Figure 5.17 Extract from Map 9 showing ‘Comprehensive Planning Proposals’ for the central area. The red shows zones intended as pedestrianised and the buildings drawn with shadows are those proposed as new within the defined CDA boundaries.

Figure 5.18 Advisory Scheme drawing. The Old Wellington Inn and Sinclair’s are shown in red. Whilst rudimentary, this drawing from the Planning Department shows the interconnected nature of the vision for the central area. Buildings and bridges physically link developments flanking Market Place.

The advisory schemes for the comprehensive development areas were not routinely archived and surviving original documents are rare. None have survived in Manchester, but copies of the Market Place plans are held in Ministry files at the National Archives. One of the most striking features of the drawings [Figures 5.18 and 5.19] is the large numeric notation that indicated the desired levels (feet above sea level) for each part of the development. This suggests that the interconnected and new elevated layer of the city was important to the planners and that the connection of these levels across the city centre was as a matter for local authority guidance. In describing the context for his plan John Millar made direct reference to Manchester’s comprehensive development and the advice contained in the Buchanan Report:

Figure 5.19 Advisory Scheme drawing. The connected nature of the sites to the north, east and west is shown here as high-level bridges at 135m, 140m and 130m above sea level. The apparent title of the drawing is ‘130 140’ and indicates the concerns of the planner and the vertical separation of the city.

The desires to solve traffic congestion and to renew a huge portion of the central area were inextricably linked. Highways planning defined routes through the historic grain of the city and potential alignments created as many urban design problems as they solved. Whilst roads could flank and define edges for development, they could also sever sites and leave difficult plots for construction. The legislative control afforded to local authorities in pursuit of massive renewal programmes meant that cities could be conceived of as a whole so this paradox was not problematic in itself. The nationally instituted Acts gave local authorities the power and autonomy to design comprehensively in this way. The rebuilding of entire centres, combined with a plan for a ring road was the de facto solution to renewal in many British cities and mimicked, if not mirrored, advice outlined in exemplar maps that accompanied official planning documents [Figure 5.21].⁶⁴

Figure 5.20 Advisory Scheme model. The Old Wellington Inn can be seen in red, with a public space carved in the centre of the scheme. Above the Inn is the proposed staggered form of the commercial block, rising towards the Cathedral. In the background is shown the anticipated development of the Corn Exchange site and a cranked, linear block connecting to the proposed Arndale Centre.

Figure 5.21 Urban Structure Map. This is the standard example provided by the Planning Advisory Group in their publication The Future of Development Plans. In this drawing the ideas of zoning and ring and radial road structure are clearly evident.

It is difficult to judge from archival sources precisely who were the biggest sponsors of the comprehensive redevelopment of Manchester’s central area – the planners or the politicians. The planners acted with professionalism and proficiency. They believed in the virtue of their publicly held office and felt they had a responsibility to improve the built environment.⁶⁵ Local politicians supported development and ensured that the local authority were active partners in major schemes. During the development of the Arndale shopping centre, the City Treasurer proposed a short-term loan to the developer to sustain the programme when their major financial supporter, Prudential, was cautious about the risk.⁶⁶ This was an innovative approach that demonstrated two aspects of development: first was the faith invested in public–private partnerships – the assured powers of the CDA and CPO legislation gave the local authority a confidence that impacted positively upon procurement. Second was the need to underwrite private finance to ensure that development occurred. Negotiations for the development of Market Place were protracted, as the officers of the city council sought solutions for a larger swathe of city than that which C&D owned.⁶⁷ This was not just due the difficulties of land assembly; it was also down to the local authority wishing to fulfil their ambitions of comprehensive renewal. One site in particular, a narrow strip between Deansgate and the River Irwell effectively isolated by the proposed highway alignment, was not commercially attractive, but would likely remain undeveloped if it were not absorbed into the contract for Market Place – it became Phase II of the construction programme, a hotel. Other property firms owned ransom sites within the CDA boundary. These companies ultimately sold their interests to C&D, which was the catalyst for a viable partnership deal with the Corporation, and the site between Cross Street and the River Irwell was designed in totality [Figure 5.22] and delivered in two phases.⁶⁸

Figure 5.22 Artist’s impression of Market Place development. To the right are the earlier Longridge House and Michael House. In the centre, the staggered block that mimics the form proposed in the Advisory Scheme can be seen as well as the adjacent public space. To the left of the image is the hotel block that was Phase II of the development.

The architectural form and mass of Market Place was significantly affected by negotiation – negotiation between the local authority and the developer, negotiation between the highways planning and the need for reconstruction, negotiation between heritage campaigners and central government, all of which was mediated using drawings and models as tools with which to inform decisions. The preservation of the Old Wellington Inn and its effect on determining levels for pavements and squares was one such negotiation, referred to by the Inspector of Ancient Buildings as ‘virtually obligatory’, something of a fait accompli.⁶⁹ This suggests ratification elsewhere within the protracted discussions of the planners, planning committee, councillors and developers that were ably visualised by the architects. The organisation and massing of the commercial blocks and open space was also largely determined by the successive schemes prepared by the local authority as they aimed to reconcile ‘existing legislation and [the] new style thinking’ of the PAG.⁷⁰ The determination of the local authority to ensure that the entire area they wished to be developed was included in the contract was demonstrable of the power invested locally to broker such deals.

It may appear here that the role of the architect in the design of the scheme is deliberately diminished – it is not the intent. The following section addresses the work of Cruickshank & Seward and their contribution. However, in the commercial sector, budget is invariably the master and is informed by investment costs and rental returns over a specified period of time. Thus, the physical conditions defined by political and planning negotiations were powerful and valuable parameters within which the architect operated – a formal mediation, or a discourse mediated by form. The architect had to mediate between the area required by the developer to realise a return on their investment and the area defined by planners in the advisory plans for the CDA. It is the role of the architect in this mediation, a role that no other professional can assume, that is skilful and cannot be underplayed when considered in scenarios like these.

The capacity to synthesise written information, imposed master plans, the demands of a client and the input of consultation into a design and then the realisation of a built scheme is a very particular skill. Cruickshank & Seward spent twelve years involved in negotiations about the form and mass of Market Place. Their drawings and models were informed, and were in conversation with those of the local authority. This act of negotiation is itself one part of the design of Market Place. This is not architecture as art, but design in practice. This manifold situation where the politics, economics, culture and heritage of urban space are played out is typical of the mainstream modern architecture of renewal cities.

The architecture of renewal

Cruickshank & Seward (C&S) began designing the area around Market Place in 1958. Construction commenced on the main phase of development in autumn 1970.⁷¹ In the intervening twelve years C&S were retained as consultant architects and often acted as mediators between policy and form in the production of schemes that satisfied both their developer clients and the demands of the local authority. The western side of their first building, Michael House (M&S), was designed deliberately to be able to meet the wider development of Market Place that would abut its facade. This suggests a desire on the part of the architect to formally define this component of city as a multi-layered and mode separated landscape before the planning officers promoted such ideas. At Michael House all of the servicing and parking provision was subterranean, which established the pattern for the rest of the development.

Who proposed this is unknown, but there was either consensus or foresight on the part of the architect at this stage and the remaining scheme was informed by this initial striation [Figure 5.23]. Whereas certain formal conditions, like the retention of the pubs and the elevated connections, were apparently over-determined by external control, the material, colour and more detailed treatment of the scheme is not recorded as of concern in surviving archival records. The extended urban piece eventually realised to the designs of Arthur Gibbon’s team was predominantly white, predominantly concrete and particular in the strong horizontal projection of its fenestration and floor plates. The architecture may not have been at the cutting edge of design or technology, but the architectural language was cohesive and markedly of the office of C&S. It was also decisively mainstream modernism. It is this characteristic that may have led to the apparent lack of interest by the local authority in its overall appearance – it was modern, new and emblematic of a future that would be an alternative to the grime of Victorian Manchester [Figure 5.24]. It is its position in the mainstream that means that this and schemes like it are rarely considered in architectural history, but do feature in urban histories. The mainstream modern architectural development in this instance is inseparable from the development of the conservation movement, the period of urban renewal and the influence of planners and developers. As such, it helps to narrate the relationships between urban, planning and architectural histories.

Many things influenced architects’ attitudes to developers, but the profession generally had low regard for the new breed of capitalists who made significant sums, often without developing at all. Lord Esher’s inaugural address as President of the RIBA supposed that ‘the only technical men they [the developers] employed at the evaluation stage were real-estate surveyors; the architect was not hired until the decision had been taken to go ahead, and of course it happened that by then the whole project was an architectural nonsense or a piece of vandalism’.⁷² As with all generalisations, specific instances often counter popularly held views. C&S were involved with C&D from the earliest days of their interests in Market Place. The Royal Fine Arts Commission reviewed the scheme and the consultant architects to the Cathedral, Wilson & Womersley, also had their say.⁷³ Neither objected to C&S’s proposals. This form of consultation did not guarantee design quality, but demonstrated the widely held consensus, or acceptance, about the physical form of renewal.

Figure 5.23 Section BB, extract from C&S drawing no. 1655/133 rev. A. This section cuts north–south from Cateaton Street to St Mary’s Gate and shows the extensive subterranean area, the raised pubs (centre) and the retail block. In the background, in elevation, are the outline of Michael House and the staggered floorplates of the easternmost commercial block.

Figure 5.24 View eastwards along St Mary’s Gate from Deansgate, 1980. The strong horizontal banding and the set back upper floor and extended canopy were typical motifs in Cruickshank & Seward’s commercial work. In the background are Michael House and the buff-coloured tiles of the Arndale Centre and tower.

In the post-war commercial work by C&S the distinction between the projects directed by different partners became blurred. The commercial sector, whilst apparently booming in renewal cities in the mid-1960s, was subject to much tighter budgetary limits and left less room for architectural expression. Thus, architectural devices developed in other projects were deployed in this and other less well financed schemes and effectively became motifs common to many C&S projects – strong horizontal emphasis, volumetric expression of roof-mounted plant, expressive stair cores, recessed uppermost floors and oversailing roofs – there was definitely a language to the firm’s work. In the renewal cities, large-scale development funded by inward investment was actually an opportunity for architects in the private sector, not a necessarily the threat as supposed by Esher.

The white buildings of C&S were not all designed by Arthur Gibbon, but it was Gibbon who introduced and propagated the bright, new additions to the city in the post-war period. The most significant civic and commercial schemes built in 1930s Manchester often used white Portland stone. In 1946 Manchester became the first place in Britain to institute a ‘clean air’ policy that was enforced in the central area from 1952.⁷⁴ The city was at its ‘maximum blackness’ around 1945–60 as crystallised, soot-laden facades met the pitch black of tarmacadam.⁷⁵ Where Owen Williams produced the vitreous black glazed facade of the Daily Express Building (1939) as both response and resistance to the environmental conditions, the white buildings by C&S of the post-war period were similar. Elizabeth House (1971) [Figure 5.25] on the edge of St Peter’s Square was supposed to be clad in Portland stone to address the Central Library opposite, but was eventually finished in white concrete owing to budgetary limitations.⁷⁶ The white buildings at UMIST and the National Computing Centre, discussed in earlier chapters, were deliberately designed to capture the ‘White Heat’ of technology.

Figure 5.25 Elizabeth House, St Peter’s Square. Cruickshank & Seward, 1971.

There was something of the marketing man in Gibbon and, as well as being a capable designer, he was acutely aware of the need for identity, and the patronage that would follow. Gibbon commissioned high contrast black and white images of C&S buildings, produced by established architectural photographer Sam Lambert and oversaw the production of the practice’s marketing material. In interviews with former principals, I have speculated that Gibbon’s use of white was intended simply to stand out, both from his rivals and from the blackened mid-century city. Those who knew him did not challenge my assumption.⁷⁷

Figure 5.26 Master plan, October 1966. Drawn by Mark Edge. Whilst certain areas of hard landscaped areas remain unspecified on this drawing, the final form of the completed scheme assumed a plan very similar to that laid out above. Longridge House appears as a remnant of Nicholas-era planning and not integrated into the later scheme.

Gibbon established the white palette in the Portland stone and concrete of Michael House and continued it through Market Place itself and onwards to the new hotel on Deansgate [Figure 5.26]. The extended sequence of raised precincts was a safe environment and well patronised. It was also a new type of urban space. Spaces of this type existed across the UK and Europe and were products of capitalism and socialism. Here the capitalist mode of production met with the social ideals of modern architecture and planning taught in UK schools. The forms of the heroic egalitarian imagined cities of the early modernists were combined with the driving forces of mobility and consumption and made places and spaces that were particular to urban renewal in the 1960s. This was ‘Buchananism’. I do not deploy this metonym lightly and I am not the first to do so – a commentator for The Guardian professed that, ‘what is new about Buchanan (the name is sure to establish itself as a shorthand symbol for a whole philosophy) is that it gives shape and a cutting-edge to ideas that are already, albeit vaguely, in the air’⁷⁸ This ‘shape’ was the existing consensus between thinkers, planners, architects, engineers, policy makers and developers concerning ring roads, vertical separation and comprehensive renewal and it determined a very particular type of space in certain British cities. It is tempting to attempt to define this as some form of renewal style, a type of municipal modernism, but the incidents of such are varied in the UK and I have gone to great lengths to explain why style is a less useful way of considering the production of mainstream modern architecture. Yet, to use mainstream modernism as a lens can help to disclose a typo-morphology of the renewal city, its commonalities and its temporal frame.

Market Place exhibited characteristics that were common to other similar schemes: vertical separation was one. Others were sequences of passageways and pedestrian squares (which were often poorly engineered versions of Cullen’s ‘serial vision’);⁷⁹ bridges that crossed roads in which the pedestrian had been engineered out, often dual carriageways with no pavement; escalators, travelators and ramps to seamlessly connect the new levels of the city; subterranean areas; and point and slab blocks rising from podiums. The bridge across Deansgate, with a ramp with a parade of shops on one side and escalators on the other, was how the future had been drawn [Figure 5.27]. Michael House was successfully integrated into the wider development and eventually linked via a further bridge over Corporation Street to the Arndale Centre [Figure 5.28]. However, the certainty with which the planners viewed the total renewal of the centre when they specified certain routes ‘to be used only until the alternative pedestrian system at upper level is constructed’ was fading.⁸⁰ Without a fluid connection to the north and with exclusively vehicular environments at grade, the development felt as if it had turned its back on the Cathedral and the new Shambles Square, instead of being integrated, was isolated.

Retrospectively we can view these as the forlorn spaces that many became during their decline [Figure 5.29]. However, these engineered environments were products of mensurable design inputs aimed to meet the ambitions of policy and the public. John Millar’s words echo just this:

Figure 5.27 Artist’s impression by Peter Sainsbury of Phase II of Market Place development. The strong horizontal bands of windows are set against the diagonal of the ramp as it rises to meet the pedestrian footbridge over Deansgate.

Figure 5.28 Footbridge connecting St Michael House to the Arndale Centre. It was destroyed in the 1996 IRA bombing and replaced by a new bridge designed by Stephen Hodder.

Figure 5.29 Shambles Square in 1983. The half-timbered facades of the Old Wellington Inn and Sinclair’s Oyster Bar sit rather incongruously against the stained white concrete of Market Place.

Regardless of the eventual state of Market Place and its disappearance following the IRA action of 1996, this narrative has shown the strong hand of local authority planners in their negotiation with architects in the service of developers. My aim is not to vindicate or to vilify any party, but to show the range of varying contexts for development – here, Whitehall had little interest in urban form, but policy still determined aspects of it. The drawn-out and piecemeal approach to what was eventually labelled as ‘comprehensive development’ has shown the impact of successive master plan proposals on the shape and form of this part of one city.

Similar places and spaces across Britain were created in these encounters between the policies, plans and production of renewal and, like Market Place, were often encumbered by the realities of total visions only partially realised. In this sense, Market Place has offered a more typical view of the complexities of urban renewal in a period of unbridled expansion where statute struggled to keep pace with the influx of capital to provincial cities. The retail development that followed in Manchester, namely the Arndale Centre, was decisively more monolithic, literally and metaphorically, as it was realised in its totality and was much less compromising as a piece of urban design [Figure 5.30]. Despite its assertive presence, though, the Arndale still had to acquiesce to the demands of highway engineers and the plans for the ring road made an incisive cut through its beige mass. In the final chapter, the role of highway planning in influencing the shape of the city draws a ring around the central area development and ties this exploration back to the wider ideas of regional development with which we began.

Figure 5.30 The Arndale Centre, Wilson & Womersley, 1977.