Manchester has never, through any period of its history, been inclined to stand still for long.

So it was that when the rebuilt city centre was unveiled to the media several years after the IRA bomb in 1996 , council chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein had already moved on.

“I can remember on the day we reopened the city centre I was being interviewed by Jon Snow and he said ‘it’s all finished now’,” he recalls.

“And I said: ‘If this is going to be successful, it will never be finished’.”

Despite the fact many of those pushing Manchester forwards today are the very same who started the rebuild in 1996 - and had sewn the seeds even before that - they refuse to look back over their shoulders, declaring it is time to ‘move on’.

There is a lack of interest, bordering on impatience, when you ask either Sir Howard or council leader Sir Richard Leese to recollect or commemorate what happened 20 years ago.

MORE Follow the events of the day as they unfolded, on our 'live blog' of June 15, 1996

What matters to them is what happens next.

All those involved in the regeneration of the city centre in 2016, whether or not they were around in 1996, agree on one thing: its boundaries are there to be pushed.

The city centre is getting bigger . Fifty times more people live there than when the bomb went off. Its edges are creeping persistently outwards - and that isn’t by accident.

“The city centre almost finished at Cannon Street in 1996,” points out Sir Howard.

“Now Noma has taken it north, eastwards we have the development around the Etihad campus and the Ancoats and New Islington corridor, south we have seen First Street and how that links up with the corridor around the universities.” To the west, the new St John’s Quarter is of ‘vital significance’, he says.

“You can start to see a very clear overriding strategy, which is gaining momentum.”

Watch: CCTV footage shows the dramatic build-up and the aftermath of the 1996 bomb

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Ian Simpson designed the image in which the area around Cannon Street was rebuilt, and he agrees.

Now in the midst of multiple new projects - including the huge 64-storey skyscraper planned on brownfield land near First Street - he refers to the ‘donut’ strategy of colouring in the bits around the city centre’s edges. What is happening now is the logical continuation of the big bang approach sparked by the IRA’s literal big bang.

The successful 'Hat Box' development in New Islington

“Because we have got the heart of the city right in terms of rebuilding and reconstruction, we are in a much stronger position for the city to grow concentrically, to pick up all the sites in the donut around the city centre that have surface car parks on or derelict buildings,” he says.

“The next 20 years will be about that.”

It will also, both he and Bernstein believe, be about making it an truly international city that can compete on its own terms.

Mapped: The 32 developments that will change the face of Manchester forever

The 32 developments that will change the face of Manchester mapped
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For property expert David Thame, who has been writing about Manchester city centre throughout its rebirth, many of the futuristic ideas once considered completely out there, such as building office blocks around Victoria station , are only now being realised.

“The city centre is going out - in all directions. This is a monster now. It will continue to do so and it’s long overdue,” he says.

“Plans I remember being mooted in the early 90s that were regarded as fanciful in the extreme - hilarious - are now happening.”

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It is true that in the last year or so - since confidence has visibly returned since the 2007 crash - planning applications for patches of lands around the peripheries of the city centre have flooded in.

On Great Ancoats Street, Owen Street at the end of Deansgate, further up Rochdale Road and on land around the Manchester Arena, developers have spotted opportunities - heavily prodded by the council - and are running with them.

Watch: Take a virtual drive around Manchester in the late 80s and early 90s

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Simpson, Bernstein and Leese all agree that families must now be attracted into the city centre, stressing it must become a place to live rather than just to eat, get drunk and shop. Green space will be needed, as will GPs and schools - a challenge Sir Howard admits was ‘unheard of 10 or 15 years ago’.

After all the future of the city centre is as much, if not more, about people as it is about property.

Consequently the issue for many is now whether everyone in Manchester, never mind Greater Manchester, gets to reap the benefits of the new boom.

Despite the waves of public and private sector investment levered into the city during the 90s and early 2000s, certain social problems have barely shifted: child poverty remains high in many parts of the city, while skills there remain perilously low.

Howard Bernstein says it is important for Manchester to be in control of its own housing policy

Sir Howard says a key next step will be getting devolution over building social housing, something the council has little control over. The city centre’s growth must be ‘inclusive and progressive’, he adds.

Yet as the second boom kicks off in earnest, there are fears those cranes will benefit not the many, but the few.

In the past year Manchester council has adopted an unofficial policy of agreeing massive development after massive development in its heart, without any affordable homes, a move some - including members of the Labour administration - have warned will create a rich ghetto in London’s image .

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Meanwhile a new generation of developers is coming through, conscious Manchester must not now repeat the capital’s mistakes.

Tim Heatley, of developers Capital and Centric, was still at school when the bomb went off. Now the 36-year-old is part of the next wave of visionaries, having recently masterminded the new Kampus district near the gay village.

“As Manchester’s population soars, land and space is becoming squeezed along with rents and values,” he admits.

How the Kampus development could look

“This may become an issue for social mobility over the next 20 years, as we’ve seen in London.

“The benefit we have got is we have the foresight of knowing it’s a potential issue and we have the ability to plan for it now, because it’s really very important that we have provision for all different types of income brackets to live in the city centre.

"The other thing is it’s not just about space that’s cheap, but how we make it liveable and great quality.”

At the moment Manchester isn’t unaffordable, he believes, but adds: “You can see it and feel it - we are going to have another 20 years of a boom. In London some of the big organisations have started to provide living accommodation in their offices and it’s a bit grim. It’s a solution, but we don’t want to end up where they are.”

The election of a regional mayor next year, while not directly in charge of Manchester’s own planning processes, is likely to be key in shaping what happens next.

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Already all three Labour hopefuls all placing affordable housing firmly on their radar, pushing it up the agenda within the region’s combined authority.

Meanwhile although the Ian Simpsons, Sir Howard Bernsteins and Sir Richard Leeses are still in the city’s driving seat now, that won’t be the case for too much longer. As the old guard make way for the new, instability could be the price paid in order for the next generation to come through.

And in a city still idolised - even romanticised - for the musical boom of the 1980s and 1990s, that next wave includes cultural life as much as it does politicians, planners and architects.

What fertilised organically from poverty, boredom, anger and derelict spaces then is now being artificially stimulated on a grand scale, the new Factory project planned in the planned ‘creative quarter’ of St John’s being the obvious example.

That has led some, such as former Hacienda DJ Dave Haslam, to warn the city’s culture must continue to come from its streets - it can’t be built by the establishment.

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The industrial buildings that bore the gay village, Northern Quarter and the Hacienda - the Hulme Crescents that bred a musical revolution - are no longer vacant.

So a new Manchester generation is seeking its own nooks and crannies, pushing the cultural and physical boundaries of the city centre still further.

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Nick Arnaoutis and his business partner Jobie Donnachie are among the pioneers - setting up a new nightclub and cultural space in the disused Downtex Mill in Strangeways last year, an area even less colonised than the Northern Quarter 20 years ago .

Nick believes these new underground spaces on the peripheries, in keeping as they are with the tradition of Manchester’s edgy cultural spirit, are the future.

DownTex Mill, home of Hidden nightclub

“Going off the response we’ve had about what we want to create, I really think this is going to be the next big thing,” says Nick, 31.

“What was in our minds was Berlin. I think in the next 12 months it will be looking like a thriving community.”

That can still sit side by side with purpose-built areas such as St John’s, he says, adding: “All of a sudden it feels like the council have just said ‘let’s just back everything creative’.”

No matter who you speak to there is still agreement on one thing: we do - and we must carry on doing - things differently here. That means not being London, or feeling the need to compete with it.

Peter Hook is making plans to mark the 30th anniversary of the Hacienda first opening in Manchester - with a "last rave" in the car park at the Hacienda Apartments on Whitworth Street West where the club formerly stood
Peter Hook at the Hacienda apartments

Although Greater Manchester is starting to knit itself together from the city centre outwards, particularly with the expansion of the tram network, it doesn’t need to ape the capital, says David Thame.

“Let’s come up with something better than London,” he adds.

“In the 19th Century they used to say ‘what Manchester does today London will do tomorrow’.

“Well let’s show them how it’s done.”