When the IRA wiped out a large part of Manchester city centre in June 1996, thoughts quickly turned to what would replace it.
But what we see now – in Exchange Square, Cathedral Gardens and New Cathedral Street – was only one of the plans for the city centre’s future.
A total of five architects submitted their designs to the Manchester Millenium taskforce, which had been set up to carry out the rebuild, in the months that followed the blast.
So while it would be Ian Simpson’s designs that ultimately got chosen, the city could very easily have panned out very differently.
Here are some of the ideas that never got built.
A river park
In Building Design Partnership's plan the River Irwell and cathedral would be a central focus, with two existing bridges replaced by one pedestrian river-crossing, linking a Cathedral Green right down to the water. The Ramada Hotel would be redeveloped
Architects Building Design Partnership – and others – envisaged a big city park stretching right down to the water.
So had then-Prime Minister John Major, who – during a visit after the bomb – suggested the council make far more of the river running through its heart.
The model above shows how BDP imagined stretching the parkland out and down to the Irwell, building a new bridge and closing off Victoria Street to form open public space.
Although it wasn’t part of the winning entry, the taskforce liked the idea so much they merged it into the winning plan.
Civil engineer Martin Stockley, who spearheaded EDAW’s winning design with Ian Simpson, says he believes it just drifted rather than actually officially being ditched.
In order to actually make the area attractive – to give people a reason to go down there – would have required considerable private sector investment, and he doesn’t think anybody ever found a way to make it stack up commercially.
Halliday Meecham Architects, with Richard Reid Associates, proposed a major upgrade of the Arndale Centre, coupled with a new retail village replacing the Shambles. There would be a new city square, a Cathedral Close and a boulevard to Deansgate
“I think it’s quite interesting that it hasn’t happened. It was quite difficult to achieve – that was the problem with it,” he says.
“There’s just no reason to go down there unless you spend a lot of money on it.”
Competitors E Llewellyn-Davies and Michael Hyde, as well as Halliday Meecham, also built a river-side piazza into their designs.
In the end Victoria Street did get closed off to traffic, albeit not until well into the 21st century. Plans to fully pave and complete the area around it are finally due to go before the council’s executive later this month.
But the result will not be a full-blown river plan envisaged 20 years ago.
A huge park running through the whole city centre
E Llewelyn-Davies and Michael Hyde and Associated aimed to transform the cathedral area with a new piazza leading down to the river and extending to the Salford side of the water. This scheme would have also seen a series of urban parks and squares
One architect went one better than the river park – and proposed a corridor of urban parkland running from the Irwell all the way through to Piccadilly, filling what is today Exchange Square, along with replacing much of the Arndale, with green piazzas.
A consortium of designers including E Llewelyn-Davies, Michael Hyde Associates and JMP Consultants wanted a whole series of city parks and squares created across the city centre.
It was an idea that doubtless would be popular with many residents today, as the issue of open green space in the city centre becomes more and more of a focus in the midst of a 21st Century housing boom.
On the model above, drawn from the Salford end of the city, you can see a corridor of green spaces – often in the middle of large courtyards and squares – linking out in an easterly direction.
Trees would also have been added to Cross Street in order to create a leafy boulevard in a vision that promised to be a ‘high quality and safe environment for pedestrians and cyclists’.
Giant steel and turquoise palm trees
An artist's impression of the design for Exchange Square, featuring real palm trees
When architect Martha Schwartz originally won the competition to design the new Exchange Square, it was to be full of real palm trees.
That plan quickly went awry.
Two years later the M.E.N. was reporting a pretty major hitch – palm trees wouldn’t survive in the dreary Mancunian weather.
Despite an ‘international search’, not one species could be found that could weather the northern skies.
Instead there was a new plan: make palm trees out of stainless steel.
That was met with rather less enthusiasm, however.
Manchester Civic Society said in 1998 that such a plan ‘made the mind boggle’, adding: “When the design with palm trees came out, we thought it might be fun. But the disadvantage of having imported North American trees has come home to roost.
... and the fake replacement that never was
“If it isn’t possible to use palm trees, the answer is to use species that will survive, and not fakes.”
Nevertheless the idea persisted for some time afterwards. In 1999 it was still being mooted – but by this point the steel palm trees had, in some kind of Trafford Centre-meets-Venice Beach scenario, become turquoise.
It didn’t happen though.
According to city centre spokesman Pat Karney, who sat on the Millenium taskforce, the idea never got as far as the planning committee in the end.
“It just died a death,” he said.
Archway bars under Deansgate
This was part of BDP’s river park idea – but for similar reasons, didn’t come off.
The plan would have seen bars and restaurants opened up in the arches underneath Deansgate by the river, along similar lines to those on Whitworth Street West or Deansgate Locks.
It was generally contingent on the opening up of the Irwell, however, and Martin Stockley – who had also worked on the Deansgate Locks plans – says that like the idea of a river park, it didn’t really stack up.
“The Irwell is this deep gorge, an old beast of an industrial river and that’s what’s gorgeous about it. But it’s not like the canal, where you can touch the water,” he says.
“Everybody knows that if you walk to the Irwell you have to look down.
“Everybody, anywhere in the world, wants to sit facing south with a beer in their hand facing the water – but nobody actually wants to sit down a hole facing more or less north, especially not in Manchester.”
A ‘circle’ line
A model of the Manchester First submission
All those who submitted bids to the competition were clear that public transport must be central to the rebuild.
What initially happened in the end was the low-cost option envisaged in Ian Simpson’s plan: a new free ‘Metro’ shuttle bus connecting Victoria with Piccadilly, which is there to this day.
Meanwhile Manchester First envisaged a new bus station next to Victoria – bearing in mind that there was a general view among all submissions that the dingy old bus station on Cannon Street should never be reopened.
Citibuses would then shuttle people around the city centre.
Although they didn’t win the bid, Cannon Street would indeed end up being replaced with a new bus hub – Shudehill interchange.
But possibly the most expensive and ambitious idea came from BDP and Halliday Meecham, who both suggested a new Metrolink ‘circle line’ should be created around the city centre.
The model of EDAW's winning design. At the time the Manchester Evening News said: "EDAW's scheme incorporates an expanded shopping core with a pedestrianised shopping street linking St Ann's Square, the cathedral and the Corn Exchange. It sees Withy Grove as a leisure complex with a cinema, gardens, theatre, arts and refreshment centres"
Neither of them won and that idea was parked.
But twenty years later, their suggestion is actually – finally – coming off.
BDP’s plan had suggested running a tram down Corporation Street, Cross Street and into Albert Square.
That is more or less what is now due for completion by next summer under the guise of the Second City Crossing.
It may have lost out in 1996, but that was a plan that never actually went away.
