When Manchester’s Arndale Centre was completed in 1979 its massive scale and lurid skin of yellow tiles earned it the nickname The Giant’s Urinal. For a building with such a presence, and such a reputation, the Arndale has nonetheless managed to keep two remarkable secrets from Manchester’s shoppers.
First up is one of the only remaining pieces of the city’s never-realised underground railway, the Picc-Vic line. 9 metres under the floor of the Arndale, just below Topshop, is a void that would have become a station on Manchester’s 2.3 mile-long underground link between Piccadilly and Victoria stations. This mysterious space underneath the Arndale is destined to remain just that: the Picc-Vic project was shelved in 1977, after ten years’ planning, when central government pulled the funding.
The second of the Arndale’s secrets sits on the roof – or at least it did until 2003. When the shopping centre was built, alongside thousands of square feet of retail space 60 rooftop flats were created in the form of Cromford Courts. At a time when the city centre population of Manchester was close to zero, and decades before the explosion of new builds and warehouse conversions, Cromford Courts was a unique living space with balconies, communal gardens and unparalleled views of the city, right in the middle of Manchester above the bustle of the shoppers and the roar of the buses. From street level on Withy Grove the journey to your front door was equally unique, via a helter-skelter staircase up the side of a multistory car park. Cromford Courts survived the 1996 IRA bomb which tore through the Arndale, but was eventually swept away seven years later when Cannon Street was redeveloped.
Map © Crown Copyright and Landmark Information Group Limited (2012). All rights reserved. Made available by the superb Digimap service, run by EDINA at the University of Edinburgh. Picc-Vic image courtesy of the Infra_MANC exhibition at the Cube Gallery.